The Ungrateful Refugee

by Dina Nayeri

UNHCR data show 68 million displaced people in the world. Of these, 40 million are internally displaced, 25 million are refugees, and 3 million are asylum seekers. But, these numbers don’t specify that most refugees go to neighboring countries. Only a few million try for Europe, and yet, everyone thinks that Syria and Afghanistan and Iraq are emptying into the West. In 2017, the twenty-eight European Union countries had 650,000 first-time asylum seekers. That’s 1,270 per million people in the population, or one refugee per thousand natives. Europe turned away more than half of those. The other half became EU refugees—adding one refugee per roughly two thousand in population for that year. Put another way, you’d need to go to four massive weddings or two graduations or a small concert to encounter a single new refugee. That is not a deluge. Looking down from high above, an honest image isn’t a flood or swarm. It’s a small stream, or a thin, dying herd, finding its way onto a vast, fertile land. The world isn’t pouring into Europe. What few broken and wretched lives the richest nations take in, they should do so graciously, as the chief consumers of the world’s bounty. In many cases, the pursuit of that bounty is the very thing that has impoverished and war-ravaged the East. Maybe we should just pay our dues. Maybe we shouldn’t lose our minds if we see four Muslims walking down the street, one time. Nativist fury, not an exile’s pleas for rescue, is the irrational spectacle,...