The Opinion Pages Notes From a Mass Exodus
I’VE
recently returned from the Middle East and East Africa, where I visited
a number of refugee camps — car parks of humanity. I went as an
activist and as a European. Because Europeans have come to realize —
quite painfully in the past year or two — that the mass exodus from
collapsed countries like Syria is not just a Middle Eastern or African
problem, it’s a European problem. It’s an American one, too. It affects
us all.
My countryman Peter Sutherland, a senior United Nations
official for international migration, has made clear that we’re living
through the worst crisis of forced displacement since World War II. In
2010, some 10,000 people worldwide fled their homes every day, on
average. Which sounds like a lot — until you consider that four years
later, that number had quadrupled. And when people are driven out of
their homes by violence, poverty and instability, they take themselves
and their despair elsewhere. And “elsewhere” can be anywhere.
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