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.
That is all true. But the war in Syria did something more than that: It seemingly initiated an intimate transformation in the minds and hearts of citizens worldwide. The changes to global power are abstractions, distant from the day-to-day lives of ordinary people who live far from the places perturbed by them — until the people from the places shattered by these ructions show up at your borders, asking for refuge. That’s what Syrian migrants were: the human face of a long-ago commitment that many in the West decided they would rather forget.
For much of the past year, as I’ve tried to make sense of this new era of anti-migration, I have traveled to the places migrants go, countries that offer some semblance of safety and opportunity. For this final chapter of the series, I wanted to go to Syria, the crucible that forged our age. The war forced more than six million Syrians into exile — at the time the largest refugee crisis since the partition of India in 1947. A vast majority went to neighboring countries, but Syrians made up the largest share of the 1.3 million people who applied for asylum in Europe in 2015 alone, bringing the most refugees to the continent in a single year since World War II.
Syrians suffered through these long years of violence, repression and dispossession. And then, suddenly, astonishingly, the war ended. On Dec. 8, Bashar al-Assad fled Syria, seeking asylum in Russia, and a rebel commander took charge as the country’s interim leader. Governments across Europe wasted no time announcing that they were suspending asylum applications, and some rushed to explore whether Syrians could be sent home. This hardhearted response was no surprise, given the past decade. But the end of the war made possible something so many Syrians longed for: the chance to return home, on their own terms. In the months since al-Assad fell from power, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have returned from exile, eager to rebuild their lives atop the rubble he left behind.
In the modern world, we think the most profound form of punishment is confinement, the restriction of one’s freedom to move unencumbered in the world. But it is worth remembering that the most fearsome and irrevocable punishment for much of human existence was something else: exile. In our most ancient texts, across countless civilizations, being forced to leave your home to live among strangers long served as a fate akin to death.
People in rich countries fear that people imprisoned by poverty and conflict will break out of that confinement and storm their citadels of plenty. What they fail to recognize is that, absent total cataclysm, there is perhaps no force in human history more powerful than the longing for home. Nowhere is this clearer, and more moving, than in Syria today.
Mohammed Rashed Younes never wanted to become a fighter. Like many Syrians, he detested the Assad regime. But he did not join the early protests, busy with his children and his thriving small business, a carwash. It was not until the protests gave way to a violent sectarian war that besieged his neighborhood that he felt compelled to take up arms.
“Everybody was fighting for this ground,” he said of his neighborhood in Yalda, a southern Damascus suburb. “We were caught in the middle.”
On one side were al-Assad’s forces, supported by Russia and joined in the fight by Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militant group. Younes had little interest in the apocalyptic agenda of the Sunni jihadist groups that had seized hold of his neighborhood, but as a Sunni and a community leader, he felt he had little choice but to align with their fight to defend his family and home. The entire neighborhood was surrounded. No one could leave, and no food, water or medicine could come in.
“For a whole year, people were starving,” he said. One of his nephews was killed by Hezbollah fighters while out searching for wild grasses to eat.
In 2018, with the help of Russian warplanes, the Assad government and its allies forced a surrender, striking a deal to allow opposition fighters and their families safe passage to rebel-held areas in northern Syria. But once again, Younes felt caught in the middle. He did not want to uproot his family to live among the jihadists in the north, and he feared that if he stayed put, the government would disappear him to a prison, as it had done with many others.
And so he once again did something he never considered before: He joined the more than one million of his countrymen who fled across the country’s border into exile in Lebanon. There, he hoped, he could at least find work and send money to support his wife and children. He paid a smuggler to get him to Beirut, where he found a place to sleep in a garage, which he shared with about a dozen people. He found work, but the conditions and pay were abysmal. He wanted to save enough to get his family out of Syria or to get himself to another country — somewhere in Europe or even just to Turkey, where he might earn better money — but there was never enough cash. Life in Beirut was filled with degradation and loneliness.
“They look at Syrians as if they’re animals,” he said.
He ached for his children, who were growing up knowing him only as a face on a mobile phone screen. “I would cry every night and pray all the time that I just want to see them,” he told me. While he was in exile, his mother died. He was devastated that he was unable to attend her burial.
When al-Assad fled on Dec. 8, Younes waited three interminable days to get his paycheck so he could travel home. It was a joyous reunion, but worries set in immediately.
“I felt lost right after the euphoria,” he told me. His carwash was gone. His home was still standing, but so much of the city had been destroyed. The economy has been shattered by years of war and economic sanctions. Younes now earns money by selling cigarettes but dreams of one day having his own small business again.
He is cautiously optimistic, though he worries about internal division and new sectarian conflict. And then there are the meddling regional and global powers. He hopes Syria can become a democracy and that, one day, he will get to cast a vote that actually counts.
“Even though I’m lost, I am so happy,” he told me. “I feel like I’ve been reborn.”
It stands to reason that Younes would rush home; Beirut is right next door, and he had no hope of building a life there. But Syrians who lived in much greater material comfort and seeming safety in the West have also begun trickling back.
I met one of them, Wafa Mustafa, at a cafe just inside the gates of the Old City of Damascus, on a limpid morning during Ramadan. She fled into exile in 2013 after she learned that her father, Ali, had been abducted from their apartment by armed men. He was a successful businessman and an ardent opponent of the Assad regime who had thrown himself into the peaceful protest movement that began in 2011, inspired by similar uprisings in the Arab Spring.
Mustafa’s father took her to her first protest when she was 10 years old, in support of the Palestinians and against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, so it was only natural that she took to the ramparts, heedless of the tear gas and bullets to demand al-Assad’s overthrow. “I was raised in this kind of family,” she said. “To me, life is meaningless if I don’t have any values to fight for.”
After her father was abducted, she left Syria with her mother and sister, fulfilling a promise she had made that if anything happened to him, they would get to safety. They went to Turkey, where Mustafa worked as a journalist and activist, documenting the atrocities committed by the extremist group ISIS. The group began targeting members of the organization she worked with, Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, and she was offered asylum in Germany. Her mother and sisters eventually found asylum and were granted citizenship in Canada and the United States.
Mustafa settled in Berlin. Yet when al-Assad fled, she returned to Damascus as soon as she could, desperate for any hints of what might have happened to her father. She showed me a photograph on her mobile phone that someone sent her in the months after the collapse of the regime. It was taken at one of the country’s most notorious secret prisons, Branch 215.
“It says, ‘I love you, forgive me,’ and then my father’s name,” she told me. “The date is 10th of July, 2013.”
Working with the Syria Campaign, an activist group, she has pressed the new government hard to investigate the fate of the missing, meeting with Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Shara, and other officials. “We want to know the truth,” she said. “Telling us that they’re dead is not the truth we want. We deserve to know who killed them, when and where their bodies are.”
In the absence of new information, Mustafa finds herself drawn to the apartment where he was living when he was arrested. It isn’t her childhood home: They lived there only a couple of years. But it is the last place she saw him. “It has become like a pilgrimage. I just go there whenever I feel overwhelmed, whenever I feel sad. I just go there, and I sit in front of the building for a few hours.”
Despite its material comforts, she can’t imagine staying in Berlin. Her family wants her to stay in Germany and become a citizen. It is safer, they argue, to have another option. “Everyone around me thinks that I’m crazy for wanting to come back to Syria,” she said. But for her, “there is something about claiming dignity.”
In Germany she was active in the movement for the Palestinians, which got her into legal trouble: She was arrested at a protest, which could jeopardize her chances of becoming a citizen. In Berlin the feeling that her presence was always contingent, that any person could decide she does not belong, only deepened since the war in Gaza.
“In the West, I have to explain myself as a grateful person for being allowed to come to the garden of Europe,” she said.
Mustafa’s family is a blend of the many religions and cultures that make up Syria, an embodied expression of the palimpsest of Syria, an ancient crossroads. A few minutes from where we met is the Umayyad Mosque, a site that has played host to houses of worship for thousands of years — an Iron Age temple to a rain god, a Roman temple to Jupiter, the supposed burial place of John the Baptist’s head, a Byzantine cathedral and, for the past 13 centuries, a mosque.
That glorious past is an important part of Syria’s identity and a source of immense pride. But when a young scholar of architecture named Ammar Azzouz took me on a walking tour of his hometown, Homs, it was more quotidian sites that awakened his memory — the now-defunct movie theater where he had watched art house films, the neighborhood cafe where he once gossiped with friends over endless cups of coffee, the cemetery where he thought his friend and fellow architecture student was buried after al-Assad’s troops killed him during a protest near Azzouz’s home in 2011.
“The blood was just in front of our door,” he told me as we walked down the street on which he had grown up. It was a quiet, middle-class neighborhood with wide sidewalks flanked by elegant apartment buildings. But the serenity belied the terror that long predated the uprising in 2011. We walked past abandoned checkpoints where security forces would surveil and harass residents of the mostly Sunni neighborhood.
The early days of the protests were exhilarating. Azzouz took me to the bridge he used to cross on his walk to the university and showed me the spot where the army parked a tank to seal off the working-class neighborhood of Baba Amr.
“Just crossing this street from right to left would cost one’s life,” he said. Homs became “the capital of the revolution,” he said. “From early days, they just were unstoppable, they knew immediately that they would be killed, and they just continued marching.”
By then Azzouz had won a scholarship to pursue graduate studies in Britain. He left in November 2011, not realizing that nearly 14 years would pass before he could come home.
We walked together through Baba Amr, the site of some of the bloodiest crackdowns in the war. The destruction is on a scale I had seen only in images from places like Dresden after World War II — piles of pulverized concrete snaked with ruined rebar stretched across a moonscape. And yet people were returning and rebuilding, taking up residence in half-destroyed apartment blocks, rigging up blankets to serve as walls, setting out tomato plants on makeshift balconies.
“People live in half-ruined buildings, as you see, but despite all of this, when you go to them, they would offer you coffee,” he said. “I feel like this is what makes Homs or any other Syrian city so special, this sense of hospitality and kindness beyond words.”
Azzouz completed his doctoral degree and is now a citizen of Britain. He has a prestigious fellowship at Oxford and is frequently invited to speak at universities around the world about his scholarship, which focuses on the ways architecture and urban design are affected by war and wielded by authoritarian regimes. But a sense of alienation and misapprehension eats at him.
“When we came to the U.K., most of the people would assume that you came from nowhere, you came from a place with no history or a place with no education,” he said. “That’s one of the biggest misconceptions: We came with nothing, and we are going to come and take everything.”
I asked Azzouz if he planned to return to Homs permanently, but he wasn’t sure.
“I’m facing all the existential questions now, because I’m really happy here,” he said. “I feel so much like the old me is alive again, and that’s so sweet to feel. I have a very tender feeling that I love walking in the streets here.”
Listening to Azzouz as we wandered through the Old City of Homs, I marveled at the material solidity of his notion of home. I long assumed that I was drawn to the subject of migration, about people who make seemingly impossible journeys from home to make a new life elsewhere, because of my own borderless life. But I have come to understand that it was less about the life that I had than the life that I didn’t.
The year before I was born, my parents left the United States to settle in Ethiopia, the country of my mother’s birth. They had met and fallen in love in Addis Ababa, where my father, an American from Minnesota, was studying. They returned to the United States to marry, and my elder brother was born there. But they longed to go back. My father dreamed of working with Ethiopian farmers, while my mother found life in Minneapolis strange and alienating.
They returned to Addis Ababa, rented a house they hoped to buy and began filling it with local carpets and handmade furniture. My grandfather, a prosperous and well-connected college professor and owner of a sprawling coffee plantation, had arranged an introduction to the minister of agriculture, who he thought could help my father find a job.
But when my father went to apply for a residency permit, the whole plan went awry. Officials questioned him carefully, my mother told me, and declared that they suspected that he was an American spy. They gave him 24 hours to leave the country. Their dream of raising a family in Ethiopia was dead.
That’s how I came to be born in the United States the next year, followed by another brother two years later. We did ultimately end up in Africa; I spent much of my childhood in Kenya and Ghana. These experiences shaped my life, but in truth, we had no real ties to these places. It was a rootless existence of international schools with a rotating cast of expatriate and local friends. I spent a few unhappy middle school years in the United States while my father completed graduate school, but I had no deep roots there, either.
My strange, peripatetic childhood led to a life I would not exchange for any other. But I have often wondered what my life would have been like had I grown up in Ethiopia, rooted by blood and memory in a specific place. Like all alternate lives, this one is unknowable. Given Ethiopia’s many troubles over my lifetime, I long took it on faith that I was lucky to be born in the United States. Now I can’t help but wonder about and even long for that other life I might have lived, born and raised in my motherland.
I caught up with Azzouz by phone a few days after he returned to Oxford and asked about his re-entry to life there.
“Somehow the return has been wonderful,” he told me. “Suddenly I feel like, my God, this is such a gorgeous city. I always felt that. But to return after being forcibly displaced, now I feel like I have two homes, whereas before, I felt like I have an original home I cannot go to and I have a second home that I’m not given permission to belong. And now I feel like I want to claim both cities.”
Migration changes people and places, at both ends of the journey. The places and people migrants leave are transformed by their departures, just as the places they move to and the people who live in them are transformed by their arrival. This process, especially when it happens quickly and in great numbers, is messy and destabilizing for everyone involved. But throughout history, the movement of people has also been the source of extraordinary creativity, innovation and dynamism. This is the paradox at the heart of migration: Most people never dream of leaving home, but the story of human progress is in many ways the story of those who leave behind the places they know to build something new.
In the decades after World War II, the victorious powers tried to manage this paradox by creating a system that, while deeply flawed, would seek to avoid such cataclysmic movements of people through diplomacy, humanitarian aid and international law — along with, as a last resort, a mechanism providing refuge for those who had nowhere else to go.
It seems clear that is over now. Our present crises — in Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza and more — have eluded the old solutions. They have brought those demanding justice and protection under the old rules too close for comfort for the citizens of the citadels of the West. The crises yet to come — the battles between rival powers, the climate crisis, the economic disruption wrought by the unwinding of globalization — will bring a world where ever more people are on the move.
As we face this new world, I hope that the human impulse to build fortresses to protect what we have from strangers will not blind us to the prospect of what we might gain if we build a different future, and a new home, alongside them.
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Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist.
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