Refugees as scapegoat for terrorism

Abstract

In the last five years, there has been a growing concern about the fact that there might be some terrorist mix in the surge of refugees fleeing war-torn Muslim-majority countries. The concern resulted in people rethinking about refugees are granted asylums. Some Europeans call for their governments to quit bringing to their countries any more refugees at all. This however goes against what these countries agreed and signed in the 1951 Convention and the 1967 United Nations Protocol concerning the status of refugees. In this article, it will be examined if it is true that migrants bring terrorists with them, how this proposition itself came to be, and whether or not there are rock solid data to support it. As it will be discovered in the following paragraphs, there is no direct correlation between refugees and terrorist activities that take place in different places which happen to be hosting refugees. Instead, the idea security threat in refugee host countries and migrants they accommodate roots from attitude the people in those countries have towards migrants, demographic differences as well as real world issues. The solution to this misconception requires both refugees and receiving nations to collaborate; such as the refugees helping authorities to identify any terrorist recruiter who may be lurking among them and on the other hand the authorities should devise a seamless system of border control in order to know who enters their countries and who leaves. They can also engage in activities helping the public to distinguish between terrorists and migrants by raising awareness.