There's nothing new about refugees. My own parents count themselves among the 15 million ethnic Germans who fled Eastern Europe towards the end of the WWll.
We are constantly reminded by our media that the current wave of migrants/refugees represent the largest population movement since those dark days.
Why? And why now?
Why? Once people are sufficiently desperate, they will risk everything in an attempt to improve their lot and that of their children. Over the past generation we in the virtuous West have done our very utmost to destroy the quality of life in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria. We have largely succeeded.
While the citizens of those countries have had their quality of life destroyed, technology has simultaneously allowed them to view daily a vastly overblown cornucopia of Western propaganda that relentlessly trumpets the fact that here in the Nations of Virtue the streets are indeed paved with gold. When you've already lost everything but your life, why not risk that in a desperate attempt to make it to The Promised Land?
Hundreds of thousands are seeing the logic in that.
For the Africans the back-story is only slightly different. For the most part they haven't been recently dispossessed by our subterfuges about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction or that despicable ruse of empire, the fatuous "responsibility to protect" doctrine, or R2P.
Instead, they've been dispossessed by the last several hundred years of colonialism, including the neo-colonialism of the supposed "post-colonial" era. They too, thanks to the ubiquity of modern technology, are inundated with Hollywoodesque representations of life in the West. As long as they see heaven in the West and we keep making their worlds hell, those refugee-migrants will keep on coming.
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