If Tiny Jordan Has Room for 1.5 Million Refugees, the US Can Fit More Than 1,500

Since fighting broke out in Syria, four million people have fled the nation. Jordan, a relatively poor nation of 6 million citizens, has accepted 1.5 million Syrian refugees into its borders. The US, a very rich nation of 312 million people, has accepted 1.5 thousand. It doesn't plan on accepting any more.

If Jordan, whose population is smaller than New York City's, can accommodate 1.5 million people, the United States can probably accommodate more than 1/1000th that.

More importantly, it could do so in a peaceful and orderly fashion. A report funded by the German government that details the "near-miraculous" refugee effort in Jordan climbed to the top of Reddit today, and it's the most goddamn affirming thing I've read in ages. The influx of refugees has put a serious strain on the nation but there's a prevailing attitude of compassion, and there's been no unrest or violent conflict.

"Native Jordanians will tell you how difficult things are," the Qantara report explains, "but you won't hear any protests from them about the refugees, although only around a fifth live in refugee camps, while the rest are accommodated in Jordanian towns and villages, which has put great pressure on rents: alongside water, this is the second fundamental area of life that has been hugely compromised by the refugee crisis."

That's right—the vast majority of the 1.5 million refugees have been absorbed, willingly, into Jordanian social fabric. This is the humanitarian and charitable accomplishment we should be celebrating above all others right now. It's nice that 10,000 Icelanders offered to open their homes to refugees, and that viral story certainly resonates with western audiences numb to seeing images of dead migrants plastered on their social media feeds—but Jordan's prolonged, organized, and good faith effort to support the displaced, disadvantaged, and distraught on a truly massive scale is amazing.

"It is a near-miracle that the situation has not led to riots, or protests at the very least," the report says. "It is also a miracle that this very fact has drawn little attention from the Western public. Not that the West is ignoring the region itself, but reports are dominated by the horrors of Islamist terrorism."

Jordan's example offers a model that Western nations might study, as climate change and desertification begin to spur further mass migrations in the near future; Syria's war was sparked, in part, by drought exacerbated by global warming. There are 60 million refugees languishing in various states of purgatory around the world right now, many of them in squalor, and that number only promises to grow.

If you are outraged by the death of Aylan Kurdi, then you should feel compelled to help accommodate his peers—it is fear and a lack of imagination that restricts our refugee policies and so limits the number that the US accepts. Nations with the capacity to spare have an ethical obligation to consider reform.

We seem to have reached a unique juncture—we can either throw in with Trump and the xenophobes and bury our heads in the sand and bluster on about building walls, or we can look at the likes of Jordan for examples of how to sustainably adapt to the world's fast-changing geographies and fluid demographies. Ecological, economic, and geopolitical forces have thrown large swaths of the world into turmoil that will not likely settle for the foreseeable future. At the very least, nations like the US have the resources, infrastructure, and space—not to mention the economic inclination—to do a lot more. The humane option is pretty clear.