Lonelyconverse123, in the mass migration we are largely seeing the consequences of climate change, and water shortages. Here is an explanation of the complexities of the Syrian situation.
A lot of Syrians originally came from rural areas where the 2006-2011 drought pretty much annihilated their farmland. There was massive scuffling over water rights and this became highly politicised.
After an event where some teenagers wrote graffiti on a school wall indicating they wanted their own Arab Spring, the teenagers were brutally tortured by the state. This caused an uprising. The graffiti was seen by the state as an attempt to topple the Assad regime, which was highly authoritarian and at that time giving water rights to political favourites.
Meanwhile deprived of a means of earning a living via farming, people started moving to towns and cities, putting great pressure on resources there, especially water. This, amongst other things, led to civil war. Since then large areas of the cities have been flattened. Tension is rife.
Now to bring this to life, imagine if you had moved from drought-ridden rural Norfolk to live in Luton, say, and suddenly Cambridge had been taken over by IS, London was run by an authoritarian regime, and Peterborough was occupied by resistance forces. These affiliations regularly changed so you could never be sure who was in charge of which area. Your home was subject to shelling every day, you were now living in the garage, there was no longer any local infrastructure or schools, and kidnapping was rife. Would you just sit there? Or where would you go?
Would you cross the Channel? If so, would you claim asylum in Calais and just take whatever reluctant crumbs Northern France offered you as one of literally thousands of unwanted incomers, or would you think, "Actually, my auntie has a villa in Spain, I ought to head down there with my kids and start a new life with backup and support" or "My second cousin has their own business in Canada. We should try to emigrate there as I know I will be able to get a job" or "I learned German in school rather than French, we should probably head there as I have a better chance of finding work and putting this behind me". In many ways, it is a good thing that people are seeking to distribute themselves throughout developed countries, rather than accumulate at certain hotspots at borders (where they would be sitting ducks for further hostilities anyway) and use the resources and networks already available to them where possible to move on. This is in actual fact an ideal situation from the point of view of the efficient use of space and resources, and it also promotes distributed integration.
Therefore the thinking processes and the behaviours of the refugees simply represent exactly what we would all do in the same situation. So it's entirely unreasonable to criticise other people for trying to spread out through Europe etc to places where they think they will be able to make an effective fresh start, hopefully with the support of friends and family. It is particularly unreasonable to punish them for a climate change problem we all contributed to. In addition, the role of religion in this is and should be negligible. These are people, it is a global problem, and we owe it to others to do what we can.
I have every confidence that those given asylum here and elsewhere in Europe will integrate as well as my Jewish, Ismaeli and Vietnamese neighbours and indeed my own family members from diverse backgrounds have over the years. The idea that Syrians, Afghans, Iraquis, Eritreans and so on are somehow less entitled to the type of settled, ordered, productive lives we are able to enjoy here is frankly abhorrent. As is the idea that Islam is a threat. It is not. Authoritarianism is the threat, combined with unstable regimes and the consequences of climate change. It is time we turned our attention to those rather than attempting to penalise their victims.