I Went to Where Our Era Began and Found Something Deeply Moving
This essay is part of The Great Migration, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today.
These days, antipathy to migrants can seem akin to gravity — an obvious, eternal and immutable truth driven by the laws of human nature. But it's actually something that happened very quickly. In less than a decade, begun in 2016 by Britain's vote to leave the European Union and consolidated by Donald Trump's return to the White House this year, opposition to migration has become the central organizing principle of politics across the globe.
How did the world change so completely, so quickly? If there was a zero hour, it came in 2015, when more than a million migrants sought refuge in Europe, many seeking to cross the Mediterranean in rickety boats. Among those who attempted the crossing was a two-year-old Syrian boy named Alan Kurdi, who drowned along with his mother and brother. A photograph of his tiny, waterlogged body, face down on a beach in Turkey, ricocheted across the globe, wordlessly transmitting the full horror of the Syrian civil war.
European leaders pledged to open their borders. But voters disagreed. After the shocking Brexit vote, in country after country, right-wing parties have gathered strength by demonizing migrants. In America, Trump perfected the trick — conjuring fictitious invasions by Muslims, Mexicans, Venezuelans and Haitians — to win the White House, twice.
It's practically commonplace to say that the cataclysm in Syria reshaped the very architecture of global power. The pitiless civil war became a laboratory for 21st-century warfare and geopolitical competition, shaping every conflict since. It shattered illusions about humanitarian intervention and international law. It nurtured extremist insurgents that wreaked havoc on Syrians and mounted terrifying terrorist violence across the world. It accelerated the erosion of American hegemony, creating a vacuum into which other powers readily stepped. It tested and found wanting virtually every element of a postwar consensus that was already unraveling, its assumptions of peace and prosperity pulled apart by relentless bloodshed.
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