The Syrian Refugee Crisis

This report will provide: (1) a summary of the recent history of the Syrian crisis, starting in the 1970s; (2) an orientation to the Syrian refugee flows; and (3) an outline of the Canadian and international refugee resettlement efforts. [...] The economic slump of the late 1980s negatively impacted the public sector, froze social benefits, and degraded the lives of the state-employed middle class. [...] In parallel with the detrimental economic status of Syria, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 1990s peace processes regarding the Israeli war increased the distrust for the regime. [...] The loss of aid resources from Syria’s biggest patron forced the regime to compromise its stance regarding Israel, leading to peace processes led by the U. S. At the same time, in order to make up for the loss of external aid, the regime partly opened foreign investment to Western countries, and turned over the monopolies to the private sector and the military budget (Hinnebudch 2012). [...] According to a BBC report (Rodgers, Gritten, Offer, & Asare, 2016), the lightning rod for the civil war in Syria in the spring of 2011, in the southern city of Derra, was the protest against the arrest and torture of teenagers who painted revolutionary slogans on a school wall.