I applaud the willingness of Germany to receive Syrian refugees, and I agree with those who say that the United States and others should do more.  News reports, however, make it appear as if the only moral issue is the responsibility of Western nations towards these unfortunate folks. Reporters tell us that these refugees are fleeing war and poverty, bad things that befell them in their homeland. In the light of the misfortunes they had to endure we have a duty of humanity to welcome them.

Something is amiss, however. The refugees are not fleeing an earthquake or a tsunami: they are fleeing human evil. Michael Walzer said it best:

The tyranny of war is often described as if war itself were the tyrant, a natural force like flood or famine…[but]..Wars are not self-starting. They may “break out,” like an accidental fire, under conditions difficult to analyze and where the attribution of responsibility seems impossible. But usually they are more like arson than accident: war has human agents as well as human victims. (Just and Unjust Wars, 30-31).

The journalistic narrative rightly underscores our duties of hospitality but obscures that central fact. War and poverty didn’t just happen. Refugees flee war that was inflicted on them by a murderous regime and an equally murderous rebel group. Refugees flee poverty that was inflicted on them by inept, predatory economic policies. Bad rulers, not tsunamis, are at the root of this refugee crisis.  Injustice, not misfortune, created the crisis. And that injustice is not inequality or failure to regulate, but, on the contrary, a major invasion of these persons’ negative rights.