It Could Happen Here - The American Refugee Crisis

Episode Date: May 22, 2019

Wars mean refugees. And when Americans find themselves fleeing for the safety of other nations, they may be shocked at the reception they face. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You stand in line. Ahead of you,

dozens of other ragged figures stretch up to the horizon in the looming edifice of the Canadian border station. You're cold, of course, but so is everyone. You all shiver together. The sound of chattering teeth is louder than the few muffled conversations you

hear around you. Almost no one is in any mood to talk. Everything you own is stuffed into your backpack. Fleetingly, you think about your old TV, your gaming consoles, the 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, a 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 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 watch as 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. It makes you think back to times, years ago, when you lazily flipped through TV channels and caught footage from some mainstream news station of a journalist talking to Syrian refugees. You doubt you watched 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 surely, 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 onto 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 seem to pick them out as suspicious. Several of them crowd around the family, hands warily 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 Wi-Fi. There'd been a terrible shooting in Vancouver. Half a dozen Christian Dominionist terrorists from America had smuggled guns up, probably from somewhere in Washington. They'd hit up a concert venue, killing dozens and 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 is 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 line 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 in 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 too, great party goers. We're seen as passionate and 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 a Venezuelan man in a hostel in Belfast, Ireland.

It was three or four days after the Sandy Hook shooting, in late 2012. 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 pad out my own experience in the matter. I want to read two, 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 from nations 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 26-year-old in New Delhi. Has a very liberal culture, great people, and 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. Good 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 fight, we don't riot, even when the walls outside our door. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnal, Tales from the Sh the shadows presented by iheart and sonora an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of latin america from ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted latin america since the beginning of time listen to nocturnal tales from the shadows. As part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, 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 2010, 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 18, in my first year of college, I took two semesters of Arabic from a Syrian professor named Yasser. Yasser 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 Syrians 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 2011, five years after my classes with Yasser. By 2015, more than 3 million Syrians had fled the fighting for neighboring countries like Lebanon, which is considered, by me and only me, to be Syria's Canada. 2015 was the first year my journalism intersected with the Syrian 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 days on the refugee trail, watching endless unbroken lines of refugees trudge 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. 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 smartphones, 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'd 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. Ben 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. Ben 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 73% of them were totally negative on ISIS. Quote from Ben, So what does this all mean? It means that the evidenceless picture of all Syrian refugees as 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's stereotypes about Americans? And how will those stereotypes evolve after several years of escalating violence, insurgent 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 2014, the forces of the Islamic State captured Mosul, 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 Sunni dominionist movements. They framed themselves as resistance against both the growing secular aspects of Iraqi society and their long-standing religious nemeses, the Shia. In Portland and in Dallas, in Cleveland and Northern California, I have seen angry, heavily armed men preach their desire for a Christian-dominated United States. The crosses tattooed on their arms and sewn onto their body armor were just as prominent as their 3% 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 pogroms against LGBT Americans. If you remember, Omar Mateen's ISIS-credited mass shooting at a gay nightclub 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 2015, a handful of ISIS commandos carried out a brutal attack on Paris, killing more than 130 people, most of whom were concert glowers at the Bataclan Theater.

According to ISIS, the attack was retaliation for French airstrikes in 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 airstrikes on the United States. We have nukes, for one

thing, and that's really the only thing that matters when it comes to discouraging airstrikes. 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 in 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 2015 were judged by the actions of a handful of terrorists, most of whom were not even from Syria or Afghanistan. By 2015, after four years of civil war, nearly 5 million Syrians had been forced to flee their homeland. Syria's pre-war population was just 23 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 80 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 IDP was used for the folks who'd fled from the fighting in Mosul and other areas captured by ISIS. Most IDPs 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 fight, we don't riot, even when the war's outside our door.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 in modern America. We, as a culture, sort of suck ass at taking care of our needy in good times. A government prosecuting a brutal internecine 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 in 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 in 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 patience 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 94. 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 39-year-old from Toronto.

He said, What identifies an American? Loudness. All of the Trump stuff in the U.S. 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 terrorist bombings from eco-fascist cadres, after right-wing militias and leftist guerrillas shoot up whole neighborhoods. How long will it take that guy, and millions of Canadians like him, to go from Americans are loud and kind of annoying to 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 180 million cats and dogs living in the United States. Their numbers are actually close to even. Cats outnumber dogs by around 5 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 raining hellfire down around you. But most of you would leave them. I know that because I know the citizens of Avdivka, Ukraine, loved their cats and dogs as well as you do.

But when the Russian-backed separatists started pounding the town with 155-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, as the town of Avdivka 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 Avdiivka, 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 2015, 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 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 2013, 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 Araha, one of the most important battlegrounds of the three-year-old Syrian civil war. Jamal was a farmer in his mid-50s 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 kitty cats left behind by their owners. Quote, the felines are everywhere, sneaking into rebel bunkers to meow at officers conferring over radios, rolling in the sun-baked dirt between mounds of rubble, lounging under

trees 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 Idlib. When his forces occupied the mountain village, they found almost no people but countless hungry kitties. The rebels in Araha survive on canned tuna, sardines, and processed meat, and now so do the cats. As I write this episode, Russian and Syrian warplanes are currently pounding Idlib, 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. I'm Robert Evans, and I'm just exhausted from reading all of that. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can find this show on Twitter at HappenHerePod. And you can find this show online at ItCouldHappenHerePod.com. Our music, as always, is from Four Fists. You should probably keep your lights on for

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Brass. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the Flames of Rife, an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.