It’s true, but as cold hearted as it is, they didn’t have to let them in. Poland sure decided to pick and choose. The Greeks are not having it either.

One day there will be a massive wave of climate refugees rushing out of the uninhabitable zone and there will be US soldiers in the border guard towers with flamethrowers. The US will welcome immigrants when it suits them and roast them when it doesn’t.

As I am in Berlin right now I’ll remind us it wouldn’t be the first time people on top of a wall had kill on sight orders.

> One day there will be a massive wave of climate refugees rushing out of the uninhabitable zone

Are you talking about Canada?

Sorry to break it to you, but by the end of the century Canada will be the bread basket of America. Go quietly and pretend like it was your idea and you may even get statehood.

Are you saying canada will be uninhabitable, or people will be going to canada?

No, the US was not causing massive Syrian refugee flows to Europe by bombing Syria.

Which countries? I imagine they were already churning out refugees. Syria, for example.

US intervention turned Syria from a relatively quick civil war (to be won by Assad and his Russian pals) to a conflict of interminable duration. Elements of the fight against Assad were connected to groups arising from the chaos in Iraq, in the wake of the US invasion (remember ISIS?) complicating matters and surely leading to even more suffering for non-combatants. IIRC the bulk of the refugee waves came after the initial clashes, when US aid and air cover let the resistance dig in for the long-term rather than getting quickly crushed by government forces and their allies. Somewhat later, the ISIS mess made it all even worse.

Whether all this was in some sense worth it for mysterious realpolitik greater-good reasons—I dunno. Looks pretty bad on its own, anyway. Not enough help to win—but just enough to keep the fight going forever. Doesn't make much sense to me unless the point was to accomplish exactly that (to disrupt Russian and/or Iranian interests in the area without pushing too hard? To keep Syria too distracted to mess with Israel? Destabilize Syria so it can't interfere with Iraq's fledgeling state? I have no idea what the real motivation is or was, but it sure as hell doesn't seem to have been "help the Syrian people"—if it was, we've screwed that up pretty badly)

US didn't want to be involved in the Syrian conflict at all in the beginning. It were its European allies, in particular France, that were pushing to intervene and fight the Assad regime.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-the-united-states-has...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-un-idUKBRE87...

Interesting, thanks for the context.

This is just plain wrong. The millions of refugees came from Syria. The US was hardly bombing Syria at all, it just bombed Libya. Actually it was mostly EU countries, in particular France, that pushed for fighting the Assad regime at the time. The Obama government didn't even want to be involved at first.

> The US was hardly bombing Syria at all, it just bombed Libya.

I was mostly thinking of Syria and Daesh, and had forgotten about Libya. A non-insignificant chunk of refugees headed to Europe transit through Libya - which didn't use to be the case before Gaddafi was deposed.

Relevant:

https://www.businessinsider.com/qaddafi-warns-france-if-i-go...

I think you got things backwards. France wanted to bomb libya (as well as the UK) whils the US was a reluctant partner.

The US went for Syria/Assad leading the intervention and whilst France picked up it's involvement against ISIL & the like particularly after the Paris attacks it wasn't as big on it as Libya.

France was also eager to bomb Libya, that's true. But the US really didn't want to intervene in Syria at first.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-the-united-states-has...