The American Refugee Crisis

comfy couch you used to relax on while watching Netflix. Netflix. You almost tear up thinking about it. You can't remember the last time you relaxed, the last beer you sipped, the last good meal you enjoyed. A cold wind blows across the line, and you feel it most acutely in the bit of shrapnel that's been buried in your shoulder for the last several months. Every twinge of pain it brings you is rather ironically or reminder of how lucky you are to have gotten out alive. There's been very

little news from home since you fled. The little bit you've received during snippets of time when you've had both power and electricity has been dire. Most of your friends have gone dark. You try not to think about what that means for them. It's taken three long, hungry, unshowered weeks for you to reach the border. Your body is at the edge of its endurance. For the last several days, you've felt perpetually on the edge of collapse. But now with the border in sight, you've been filled with a

peculiar new energy. You made it. You're going to survive. You watches a van rolls up from the Canadian side of the hastily thrown up border barricades. A film crew steps out, a reporter begins chatting to some of the

people who've already made it through. You can't hear what they say, but you can guess the questions well enough, and makes you think back to times years ago when you lazily flipped through ch V channels and caught footage from some mainstream news station of a journalist talking to Syrian refugees. You doubt you watch the story for more than a few minutes. Now you wonder about all those people where they are now, how many of them are

still alive. The line moves slowly, but cheerly, and in time you're just a couple of people away from the border guards. In front of you is a family of five. The mother clutches the family Bible, holding on to it as if for dear life. The father has a crucifix hung around his neck. You think relatively little of this. You grew up in America, after all, but the border guards seemed to pick them out a suspicious Several of them crowd around the family, hands wearily on holstered guns.

As you watch, their bags are unceremoniously emptied out and searched, layers of clothing stripped off of even their bodies. You're confused for a bit. The other families passing through hadn't been subjected to that kind of treatment. And then you think back to a few days ago, hanging out in that bus station in Montana, the last time you'd been able to charge up your phone and find some WiFi.

There'd been a terrible shooting in Vancouver. Half a dozen Christian dominionists, terrorists from America had smuggled guns up, probably from somewhere in Washington. They'd hit up a concert venue, killing dozens dozens of people. For a moment, you're ashamed that it took you so long to remember that attack, you realize that it didn't really stand out to you

at the time. Your last few months have been filled with violence so much more extreme and indiscriminate that the news of this tragedy just sort of rolled over you like morning fog. It didn't even stick in your head. You notice now, though, that the Canadian soldiers and border guards manning this crossing look conspicuously less friendly than you'd expected.

Friendly is, of course the first word that comes to mind when you think about Canadians, but these men and women seem anxious, jittery, and perhaps even a little bit angry. After a long search, the family ahead of you was walked through the border crossing. Border patrol men follow them in, and they're led to a separate waiting area from the other refugees. The lion moves up. You step forward, that much closer to safety. You look up at one of the guards. He glares back at you, and once again

you feel less certain about the future. What stereotypically is an American. I've spent a lot of time traveling, and I've made friends from all around the world, most notably Israel, Serbia, Germany, France, England, and Iraq, So I hope you'll forgive my arrogance and starting with my own opinions on stereotypes about Americans before we get into a little bit of research. We Americans are first and foremost seen as a loud people. Most

foreigners I know have emphasized that about US. Americans have a reputation for being fun to great party goers, were seen as passionate and of course fat. That's definitely another stereotype. And we are obviously seen as a heavily armed people. When I first started traveling and people would find out that I came from Texas, many of them would ask if I owned guns, which I did and do. I can remember one particularly poignant conversation I had with the

Venezuelan man and a hostel in Belfast, Ireland. It was three or four days after the Sandy Hook shooting in late two thousand and twelve. Now, Venezuela has and had plenty of problems with violence and a nightmarishly high murder rate, but I'll always remember the confusion in this guy's voice when he said to me, but nobody shoots up a school. Nobody does that. So maybe add that to the list of stereotypes about Americans. An awful lot of us are

willing to shoot up schools. I found a fun CBS News article how Americans look to the rest of the world, and I figured some of those anecdotes would be good to pat out my own experience in the matter. I want to read to one from an actor in Toronto and another from a retired banker in Copenhagen. Quote. The first word that comes to mind when I hear the word America is arrogance. They are big and loud, and they are in charge of everything. And the next capitalism,

money rules everything. Overweight people, Donald Trump elections shootings. Now. One thing that's interesting to me about this article is that while positive opinions did outnumber negative ones, people fromation, is generally considered culturally closer to the United States were more likely to refer to US as arrogant or violent. Here's a representative opinion on Americans from a twenty six year old in New Delhi. Has a very liberal culture,

great people in a country that drives innovation. Another interviewee from the Philippines said America welcomes all different races. That's what she believed about us. It's interesting food for thought. At least, why am I talking about all this? What does it have to do with the Second American Civil War? Well, what are some stereotypes you know about iraqis Afghan people, Syrians? We don't wars mean refugees. It is one commonality that

literally every conflict in modern history shares. If there is shooting in American cities, if there are bombings in the hills and on the highways, there will be people who flee. Many of them will become internally displaced within the country, fleeing bombed out neighborhoods and unsafe chunks of the country ahead of growing militias and insurgent groups. Now, you probably don't know much about Syria in two thousand ten, the year before the Arab Spring. That's fine. Until pretty recently,

I didn't either. That year, Syria was one of the fastest growing, lower middle income countries in the world. It was host to a huge amount of tourism and agriculture, decent industry, healthcare and college were free. It had a dictator, Bashar al Assad, but he was widely seen as at least a mild reformer. Things seemed to be slowly opening up when I was eighteen. In my first year of college, I took two semesters of Arabic from a Syrian professor

named Yasser. Yaser hailed from Aleppo, and he was deeply proud of his city. He taught us about how it gave birth to the alphabet. He spoke lovingly and at length about its beauty, about the wonderful food. He introduced me to Arabic coffee and thoroughly convinced me that Syrian were better at brewing the drink than anyone else on this planet. I've traveled through a decent chunk of the Middle East now, and I still believe that the war began in two thousand eleven, five years after my classes

with Yasar. By two thousand fifteen, more than three million Syrians had fled the fighting for neighboring countries like Lebanon, which is considered by me and only me, to be serious. Canada two thousand fifteen was the first year my journalism intersected with the Syrians civil war. A few days after my trip to report on the war in Ukraine, I

found myself crossing the Hungarian Serbian border on foot. One million Syrian refugees made it over to Europe that year, and the bulk of them traveled on foot from Greece up through the Balkans and into Western Europe. We spent a couple of days on the refugee trail, watching endless, unbroken lines of refugees trudged closer and closer to their ultimate goal, usually Germany or somewhere in Scandinavia. A huge number of these people spoke English. They were just normal people,

like anyone you'd meet on the street. Many of them had smart phones, which they used to show me pictures of Bashar al Assad's war crimes. Some of them were young men, fresh college graduates, who saw no future in their home country and hoped Europe could use their skills in medicine, engineering, or whatever. Other young men were fleeing the draft issued by the government. I met one man who had been a pilot for the Syrian Air Force. He'd grown tired of bombing his countrymen. I don't think

I've ever met a man with older eyes. I wrote an article about the things these refugees told me for Crack to the Side I worked for at the time. Been Shapiro of The Daily Wire wrote an article too. His article was titled the Left keeps saying all Syrian refugees are Western friendly, they should learn to read. The crux of his argument was that Syrian refugees were not compatible with Western society since only seventy of them were totally negative on isis quote from Ben So what does

this all mean. It means that the evidenceless picture all of all Syrian refugees is Western friendly doesn't hold water. But don't look for the media or the international left to pay attention to such facts. After all, these are the same people who keep stating, without evidence that only a tiny minority of Muslims hold extreme views. When fact conflicts with pretty fiction, the left chooses its own pretty fictions every time, which just means that more Westerners will die.

And this brings me back to the point I started this episode with, what are the rest of the world stereotypes about Americans? And how will those stereotypes evolve after several years of escalating violence in surgeon attacks and terrorist murder.

Once insurgents start bombing highways, shooting cops and assassinating politicians, once separatists start fighting against the government and whole cities are beyond the reach of the law, Once the Second American Civil War really gets going, the violence will not stay contained to our shores. In June of two thousand fourteen, the forces of the Islamic State captured Mosel, the second largest city in Iraq. Isis is generally portrayed in Western media as having sort of come out of nowhere, but

that is not the truth. In Iraq, it evolved out of long standing hardline, sunny dominionist movements. They framed themselves as resistance against both the growing secular aspects of Iraqi society and their long standing religious nimessies. The Shia in Portland and in Dallas. In Cleveland and northern California, I have seen angry, heavily armed men preached their desire for

a Christian dominated United States. The crosses tattooed on their arms and sewn on to their body armor were just as prominent as their three percent tattoos and Confederate flags. Right now, an American traveling abroad might face uncomfortable questions about Donald Trump. Imagine what an American fleeing from Texas might face as he tried to enter the EU or Canada in the wake of a series of brutal Christian

nationalist pograms against LGBT Americans. If you remember, Omar Matinees ISIS credited mass shooting at a gay night club was used as justification by the Trump campaign for why Syrian refugees should not be accepted into the United States. A few months after my time on the refugee trail, in November of two thousand fifteen, a handful of ISIS commandos carried out a brutal attack on Paris, killing more than a hundred and thirty people, most of whom were concert

glowers at the Bottaklan Theater. According to ISIS, the attack was retaliation for French air strikes and Syria and Iraq. Now, as imaginative as I can be, I have a hard time seeing France or Canada or any other country carrying out air strikes on the United States. We have nukes, for one thing, and that's really the only thing that matters when it comes to discouraging air strikes. But I can imagine other countries providing financial aid to the struggling

federal government as it battles to maintain control. I can imagine them sending in peacekeepers and humanitarian aid to try and save gay people and people of color and areas threatened by white nationalist or dominionist violence. And I can imagine Christian terrorists striking back at them with attacks similar

to the ones launched by ISIS. And if that happens, millions of American refugees might find themselves judged by the actions of a few of their most violent countrymen, just as the Syrian and Afghan refugees I met in two thousand fifteen were judged by the actions of a handful of terrorists, most of whom were not even from Syria or Afghanistan. By two thousand fifteen, after four years of civil war, nearly five million Syrians had been forced to

flee their homeland. Syria's pre war population was just twenty three million. If our imagined second American Civil War grew to anything approaching that kind of intensity and a proportionate number of Americans were forced to flee the fighting, we could see as many as eighty million of our countrymen and women made refugees. Now, most of these people would stay within the bounds of the United States, becoming internally

displaced persons. In Iraq, the acronym I d P was used for the folks who had fled from the fighting and Mosle and other areas captured by ISIS. Most I d p s were herded into vast, tense cities, living in canvas and provided for by the UN Humanitarian Crisis Relief Organization and eating food provided by the Qatari Red Crescent. They brought what they could carry and nothing more. We don't In the event of a second American civil war, the government would do its best to take care of

millions of displaced citizens. But in the midst of a war and a failing economy, I do not think these camps would be overwhelmingly pleasant places. My mind is drawn to the treatment of the homeless and modern America, we as a culture sort of suck assid taking care of our needy in good times. A government prosecuting a brutal internesting war probably wouldn't win any awards for cleanest, best

fed refugee camps. Stories of these miserable places would spread as millions of other Americans watched anxiously and considered whether or not they ought to flee themselves. Increasing numbers of US would seek shelter in Canada or northern Mexico. The rich would flee first, of course, probably to Europe. They would have the resources to pay their way into visas

and replant their lives and cities like Berlin. The first wave of vulnerable refugees, Activists, people of color, gay and trans individuals would also probably have a relatively simple time earning refugee visas and places like Europe. But as the number of fleeing Americans increased from thousands to tens and hundreds of thousands, and eventually to millions, the world's patients with US would wear out. Stories of terrorist attacks by

American extremists would color world opinion of US. Canada is the world's seventh most peaceful society, Iceland is the world's most peaceful society. Most European nations are fairly high on that list. The United States, however, is currently number ninety four. We will not rise higher during a second American Civil war. One of the people interviewed in that CBS article about world stereotypes of Americans was a thirty nine year old

from Toronto. He said, what identifies an America in loudness? All of the Trump stuff in the US has been depressing. You would like to think people are smarter than that, but definitely surprising and depressing to see how much support

he has and how much support his ideas have. Imagine how this guy's opinion of us would harden after stories of gay people being gunned down or burned alive by Christian nationalists, after terrorists bombings from eco fascist cadres, after right wing militias and leftist guerrillas shoot up home neighborhoods. How long will it take that guy and millions of Canadians like him to go from Americans are loud and

kind of annoying too. We need to shut down all American immigration until we figure out what's going on now. That might have been a good note to end this episode on, but the unofficial motto of this show is it can always get darker, and it's about to because human beings will not be the only people displaced by the Second American Civil War. There are currently roughly one hundred and eighty million cats and dogs living in the

United States. Their numbers are actually close to eve and cats out numbered dogs by around five million or so. Both species are capable of surviving on their own, or at least certain members of both species are, but they seem to vastly prefer life with human beings to life without. If you're listening to this, the odds are pretty good that you have a pet, a cat or a dog, or both, or possibly several of both, and you certainly

love them as much as they love you. Right now, it may be impossible for you to imagine abandoning them. Perhaps you would try to take them with you as the mortars started falling on your neighborhood, as the death squads broke through to your street, as the government helicopters began reigning hell fire down around you, But most of you would leave them. I know that, because I know the citizens of Abdifka, Ukraine, loved their cats and dogs

as well as you do. But when the Russian backed separatists started pounding the town with a hundred and fifty five millimeter howitzer shells and grad rockets, the ones who could leave, the young and the moneyed left, and many of them left their beloved pets behind. There was simply no other option. War does not stop for your sentiments, and so has the town of ev Dievka, emptied of

human beings, it filled with abandoned animals. Cats and dogs hid at first in the abandoned homes of their masters, but once it got too cold, they began to congregate around the heating pipes that ran from building to building, providing the central heating necessary in Ukraine's unbelievably harsh winters.

The junction boxes, where several of these pipes met, were particularly popular, and the remaining denizens of Abdivka, mostly older people, started setting out food and building small shelters for the abandoned animals. It was not lost on me when I visited in two thousand fifteen that while human beings murdered each other a mile away, cats and dogs had learned to get along and share the same home and food.

One optimistic thing I can tell you is that for all the violence and of bloodshed a second American Civil War would bring, I suspect there would be numerous figures on every side, leaders of right and left wing militias alike, who would take time out from the fighting to care for abandoned animals. In two thousand thirteen, I read a fantastic article on the conflict journalism website war is Boring about a Syrian rebel commander named Jamal. I'm going to

quote from that now. He commands rebel forces in the ruins of an ancient mountaintop village in northern Syria. He daily dodges bombs and rockets from regime warplanes and silent, invisible bullets from enemy sharpshooters. He leads his men in battle unarmed, equipped only with a walkie talkie for issuing orders. He also rescues abandoned cats, hundreds of them hiding out in the ruins of Adaha, one of the most important

battlegrounds of the three year old Syrian Civil War. Jamal was a farmer in his mid fifties when the war started. He was just a normal man with a love of animals who found himself thrust into vicious fighting. And when he wasn't fighting, he fed and cared for countless kittie

cats left behind by their owners. Quote. The felines are everywhere, sleeping into rebel bunkers, to mew at officers conferring over radios, rolling in the sun baked dirt between mounds of rubble, lounging under tree sheared of their branches by gunfire and artillery. An accurate count is impossible, but during our day long visit in early October, we saw scores of them in just one small section of the village. Jamal loves cats.

Who doesn't, he says. Indeed, his family, his wife, two sons, and two daughters have two cats of their own at their home in southern Isleb. When his forces occupied the mountain village, they found almost no people but countless hungry kitties. The rebels in Araja survive on cantuna, sardines and processed meat, and now so do the cats. As I write this episode, Russian and Syrian war planes are currently pounding id Lib

Jamal's home with indiscriminate bombs from above. Jamal is almost certainly dead now, along with most of the courageous men and women who dared to defy Bashar al Assad. But we will see his like again if a second civil war comes to this land and forces hundreds of thousands of men and women to fight a war they never thought would come. All friends, you can can you get me home? Can you tell the two with so much

friends a fence? Perhaps the birds? That is pretty intensive because it wants I'm Robert Evans and I'm just exhausted from reading all of that. You can find me on Twitter at I right, Okay, you can find this show on Twitter at happen here Pod, and you can find the show online at it could happen here pod dot com. Our music, as always, is from four Fists