Our responsibility

The civil war in Syria began during the Arab Spring of 2011, when many countries in the region experienced transitions of power out of the hands of dictators. Four short years later, the population of Syria has decreased from 22.4 million people in 2012 to an estimated population of 10.6 million in 2015, according to CountryMeters.com. Entire cities lay vacant—ghost towns of their former selves.

The European continent is experiencing the largest influx of refugees since the end of WWII. Over four million refugees are in Turkey where men, women and children sit in a legal limbo. Despite many having high education and developed labor skills, Turkish regulations prevent them from working legally. Thus, many turn to the more viable option—Europe.

Media outlets have referred to this ongoing phenomenon as a “migrant crisis”, which is inaccurate and insulting. Migrants are peoples who choose to leave their homelands in search of better opportunities, like the founders of America. Refugees are people fleeing persecution. When Bashar Al-Assad is committing war crimes, using chemical weapons on his own people, they might have more compelling reasons to leave than the desire for more pocket change.

Migrants can easily be turned around and sent home. Refugees have rights. Denying them asylum and sending them home has potentially deadly consequences. This is why referring to the crisis as what it is, a refugee crisis, not a migrant crisis, is an incredibly important distinction to make.

For the past two years, a human tsunami of small boats has been washing onto the southern shores of Greece and Italy. International law states that once you have a refugee at your border, you have legal obligations to protect and help them.

Thousands of people have paid smugglers fortunes to take this risky journey. Many hundreds have drowned, including the 3-year-old boy who washed up on a Turkish beach, making international headlines. His father returned to Syria to bury his son, and refused an offer to resettle in another country, saying that all that was precious (his family) had been lost.

It is easy for larger numbers to feel cold and distant, because it is easy to detach them from the hundreds of thousands of lives, faces and stories they represent, like those of this man’s, who’s life was ruined by the risks he was forced to take, echo this sentiment. We can not lose sight of that.

Makeshift boats are not common by chance. They are the only option for almost every immigrant who is barred from working, hungry and unemployed in Turkey or Lebanon. And the European Union knows this. They benefit from it being such a dangerous journey. They legally have to protect anyone who requests asylum, and if it is safe and easy to enter, there would be many more. The risk and danger involved is swept aside, despite legal obligations to help these people. We are all human, and knowing that children drown at the perceived benefit of keeping borders safe is sickening.

The Syrian civil war and refugee crisis are not Syrian-exclusive issues. They are global ones. Nothing can hope to be resolved until action is taken, and the problem must be stopped at the root. We must work towards ending the turmoil in Syria, but until then, we must focus on our legal and ethical obligations to refugees.

It is easy to think that we have to take care of “our” people before we take care of foreigners when it comes to situations like these, but we must take a step back and realize that we are one people. When the oppressed die, it is we who have the power, who are to blame.