An examination of the current Syrian migration crisis prompts several questions: What are the push factors that drive these groups of people from their home towns? Why have we seen the largest movement of international migration since World War 2? How far into the past can we trace the beginnings of the current crisis in the Middle East? What are the potential implications of these conflicts in the long-term, and how can these issues be fully and thoroughly solved? When research produces answers to these questions, we begin to discover the incredible complexity of the issues at hand; there are multiple push factors driving out Syrian refugees, and they’re all intricately connected with one another. Just when one course of action seems like the solution to a problem, other difficulties arise as a result. For instance, the regime change that took place in Iraq in 2003 seemed promising to the country’s civilians who’d been brutally oppressed by their leader, Saddam Hussein; this overthrow, however, left a dangerous power vacuum in the Middle East that gave birth to today’s Islamic State, an evolution of the terrorist group, Al-Qaeda, that no one had envisioned or predicted. The purpose of this research project is to better inform readers of the origins of terrorism, the Arab Spring, the toppling Arab power structure, and other events that fuel the current Syrian migration crisis. This will be accomplished by providing background history dating back to the 1960’s, laying out recent events that resulted from the House of Cards in the Middle East, and providing a map that illustrates the recent pattern of Syrian migration.

About the Author: Lucas Pavlounis is a Freshman at Gettysburg College, a selective liberal arts college in Southern Pennsylvania. He intends to double major in economics and political science on a pre-law track and hopes to attend law school in the near future. Pavlounis plans to pursue a legal career and serve the general public in the political arena.