The migrant crisis from the Middle East and North Africa demands our urgent attention. The United States has a long history of response to humanitarian disasters and this should be no exception. Our immediate role should be to support our regional allies who are on the front lines through public and private assistance to the international organizations who are best poised to administer aid.
In terms of settling the migrants, if the ultimate goal is to return them to their homes, which I believe it should be, it doesn’t make sense from a logistical or a security standpoint to move large numbers of them to far-off countries like the United States.
Ultimately, we need to address the cause of this crisis or we will just have more and more migrants displaced.
Bad actors like Turkey’s Erdogan and Russia’s Putin, both of whom have contributed tangentially to this crisis, announced this week that the West is to blame. This is disingenuous at best. The blame should be laid squarely at the door of the vicious, radical Islamism that is tearing communities apart from Libya to Syria and Iraq, creating the terrible circumstances that are causing the migrants to flee their homes. The failure of the United States has been an unwillingness to name and confront this threat.
The regime in Tehran and their proxies may be Shiite and ISIS and its affiliates Sunni, but they are the cause of this problem. They are branches of the same poisonous tree – radical Islamism. Until we recognize the threat from this savage, twisted totalitarian ideology and develop a coherent strategy to combat it we will at best be putting a Band-Aid onto a life-threatening wound.