The Brookings Institution says providing assistance to Syrian refugees could help reduce violence in the future.
Several think tank fellows presented research on the Syrian refugee crisis and argued that western nations should be more accommodating.
Gregory Maniatis of the Migration Policy Institute made a case that ignoring refugees could cause even more violence in the Middle East.
“If you want to prevent terrorism, you probably don’t want to leave several hundred thousand or a million Syrian children uneducated in Jordan and Lebanon for a few years, angry at the rest of the world because the rest of the world didn’t help them,” Maniatis said.
Alar Olljum, of Brookings and the European External Action Service, said the increase in refugees could reinvigorate an aging European population. “Over the next 10 to 20 years, the European population is aging and we need an influx. If we cannot increase the birthrate, we need an influx of young people and many of these Syrian refugees are young, they’re educated and willing to work,”Olljum said. “The question is do we have the leadership on the European side to make that cultural shift happen.”
All of this came after Iraq announced that it would be sharing information about ISIS with Iran, Russia and Syria.