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Who Are the Syrian Refugees? – Article by Alex Nowrasteh

Who Are the Syrian Refugees? – Article by Alex Nowrasteh

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The New Renaissance Hat
Alex Nowrasteh
November 20, 2015
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This is the demographic information on all 2,234 Syrian refugees admitted to the United States from October 2010 through November 2015, according to the Refugee Processing Center.

Data on religion for all refugees is from the same source; some additional information comes from the American Community Survey.

Gender and Age

Refugees from Syria are overwhelmingly young. 43 percent of all Syrian refugees are children under the age of 14.

syrian-ages

The gender ratios for Syrian refugees are more balanced. 53 percent are male, 47 percent are female.

syrian-genders

Males aged 14-30, the most potentially dangerous group, are 13 percent of all Syrian refugees.

syrian-males-prime-age

Religion

Data on religion was collected for all Syrian refugees admitted from fiscal year 2011 to today.

About 96 percent of the refugees are Muslim of any denomination; about 3 percent are Christians of any denomination. About 1 percent are nonreligious or of other faiths.

syrian-religions

The Syrian refugee flow is much more Muslim than the global average. Of all refugees resettled in the United States, 44 percent are Christian, compared to less than 3 percent from Syria.

all-refugees-religion

Note about worldwide religious data: I suspect there is some double counting.  

Ethnicity

The Syrian refugees are 87 percent Arab and 10 percent Kurdish, with small representations from other ethnic groups.

syrian-ethnicity

 

Education Level

Since 43 percent of the Syrian refugees are under the age of 14, and 56 percent are under 20, Syrian refugees tend to be less educated. 9.4 percent have a technical, university, college, or graduate school level of education. Since the refugee flow skews young, this group should become more educated as they age.

syrian-education

Adult Syrian Americans — over age 25 and born in Syria — are more educated than the current refugee flow.

Overall, Syrian Americans are both more and less educated than the population as a whole. 44 percent of Syrian immigrants have just a high school diploma or less, compared to 38 percent of native born Americans, but 39 percent of Syrian Americans have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 30 percent of the native born.

syrian-vs-american-ed

Sources: American Community Survey, 2014, 1-Year Sample, S0501 and S0201 Syrians

Location

Syrians resettled in the United States are highly concentrated in a few states.

Six states (CA, TX, MI, IL, AZ, and PA) have together received more than half of Syrian refugees.

syrian-state

Twenty states (AR, CO, ID, IN, KS, LA, ME, MD, MN, MO, NV, NH, NM, OK, OR, TN, UT, VA, WA, and WV) have received fewer than 50 refugees.

Fourteen states (AL, AK, DE, HI, IA, MS, MT, NE, ND, RI, SC, SD, VT, and WY) and Washington, DC, have not received any.

Alex Nowrasteh is the immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.

Blame America? No, Blame Neocons! – Article by Ron Paul

Blame America? No, Blame Neocons! – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance HatRon Paul
September 21, 2015
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Is the current refugee crisis gripping the European Union “all America’s fault”? That is how my critique of US foreign policy was characterized in a recent interview on the Fox Business Channel. I do not blame the host for making this claim, but I think it is important to clarify the point.

It has become common to discount any criticism of US foreign policy as “blaming America first.” It is a convenient way of avoiding a real discussion. If aggressive US policy in the Middle East – for example in Iraq – results in the creation of terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda in Iraq, is pointing out the unintended consequences of bad policy blaming America? Is it “blaming America” to point out that blowback – like we saw on 9/11 – can be the result of unwise US foreign policy actions like stationing US troops in Saudi Arabia?

In the Fox interview I pointed out that the current refugee crisis is largely caused by bad US foreign policy actions. The US government decides on regime change for a particular country – in this case, Syria – destabilizes the government, causes social chaos, and destroys the economy, and we are supposed to be surprised that so many people are desperate to leave? Is pointing this out blaming America, or is it blaming that part of the US government that makes such foolish policies?

Accusing those who criticize US foreign policy of “blaming America” is pretty selective, however. Such accusations are never leveled at those who criticize a US pullback. For example, most neocons argue that the current crisis in Iraq is all Obama’s fault for pulling US troops out of the country. Are they “blaming America first” for the mess? No one ever says that. Just like they never explain why the troops were removed from Iraq: the US demanded complete immunity for troops and contractors and the Iraqi government refused.

Iraq was not a stable country when the US withdrew its troops anyway. As soon as the US stopped paying the Sunnis not to attack the Iraqi government, they started attacking the Iraqi government. Why? Because the US attack on Iraq led to a government that was closely allied to Iran and the Sunnis could not live with that! It was not the US withdrawal from Iraq that created the current instability, but the invasion. The same is true with US regime-change policy toward Syria. How many Syrians were streaming out of Syria before US support for Islamist rebels there made the country unlivable? Is pointing out this consequence of bad US policy also blaming America first?

Last year I was asked by another Fox program whether I was not “blaming America” when I criticized the increasingly confrontational US stand toward Russia. Here’s how I put it then:

I don’t blame America. I am America, you are America. I don’t blame you. I blame bad policy. I blame the interventionists. I blame the neoconservatives who preach this stuff, who believe in it like a religion — that they have to promote American goodness even if you have to bomb and kill people.

In short, I don’t blame America; I blame neocons.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

The Real Refugee Problem – And How To Solve It – Article by Ron Paul

The Real Refugee Problem – And How To Solve It – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance HatRon Paul
September 7, 2015
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Last week Europe saw one of its worst crises in decades. Tens of thousands of migrants entered the European Union via Hungary, demanding passage to their hoped-for final destination, Germany.

While the media focuses on the human tragedy of so many people uprooted and traveling in dangerous circumstances, there is very little attention given to the events that led them to leave their countries. Certainly we all feel for the displaced people, especially the children, but let’s not forget that this is a man-made crisis and it is a government-made crisis.

The reason so many are fleeing places like Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq is that US and European interventionist foreign policy has left these countries destabilized with no hopes of economic recovery. This mass migration from the Middle East and beyond is a direct result of the neocon foreign policy of regime change, invasion, and pushing “democracy” at the barrel of a gun.

Even when they successfully change the regime, as in Iraq, what is left behind is an almost uninhabitable country. It reminds me of the saying attributed to a US major in the Vietnam War, discussing the bombing of Ben Tre: “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”

The Europeans share a good deal of blame as well. France and the UK were enthusiastic supporters of the attack on Libya and they were early backers of the “Assad must go” policy. Assad may not be a nice guy, but the forces that have been unleashed to overthrow him seem to be much worse and far more dangerous. No wonder people are so desperate to leave Syria.

Most of us have seen the heartbreaking photo of the young Syrian boy lying drowned on a Turkish beach. While the interventionists are exploiting this tragedy to call for direct US attacks on the Syrian government, in fact the little boy was from a Kurdish family fleeing ISIS in Kobane. And as we know there was no ISIS in either Iraq or Syria before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

As often happens when there is blowback from bad foreign policy, the same people who created the problem think they have a right to tell us how to fix it – while never admitting their fault in the first place.

Thus we see the disgraced General David Petraeus in the news last week offering his solution to the problem in Syria: make an alliance with al-Qaeda against ISIS! Petraeus was head of the CIA when the US launched its covert regime-change policy in Syria, and he was in charge of the “surge” in Iraq that contributed to the creation of al-Qaeda and ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The idea that the US can salvage its disastrous Syria policy by making an alliance with al-Qaeda is horrific. Does anyone think the refugee problem in Syria will not be worse if either al-Qaeda or ISIS takes over the country?

Here is the real solution to the refugee problem: stop meddling in the affairs of other countries. Embrace the prosperity that comes with a peaceful foreign policy, not the poverty that goes with running an empire. End the Empire!

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.