Podcast: Who are Europe’s migrants, and do they pose a threat?
People fleeing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and elsewhere will pay upward of a thousand dollars for space on a crowded, rickety boat for the trip across the Mediterranean and a chance at a better life. All the walls and guns in Europe won’t stop 60 million desperate, hungry people.
Robert Young Pelton is the author of The World’s Most Dangerous Places and founder of Migrant Report, a site dedicated to tracking the movement of people displaced by conflict. According to Pelton, the massive exodus of people from conflict zones will change the world and set European policy for the next decade.
“[Europe] is viewing this influx — something like a quarter of a million people came across by sea — as an invasion,” he explains. On this week’s War College, Pelton walks us through the realities of the migrant crisis, dispels its most pernicious myth and illuminates the human face of the displaced.