Why do people hate refugees? I have a theory. Maybe I'm wrong ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes that emoji means I'm old.

“Salam a lekummmmmmmmm. Salam a lekuuuuuum!” my friend Ali taunts me, doing an impression of me in an eerily accurate So-Cal valley girl accent.

“Fuck off,” I say, rolling my eyes.

We’d been walking in Sofia—he’s one of the young Syrian refugees I’m profiling for a book—when I’d overheard some young men speaking Arabic.

“Salam a lekum!” I called out. It’s the traditional Arab Muslim greeting that translates into “Peace be Upon You.”

I like doing this. They always automatically reply “Walayhum a-salam,” then do a quadruple take when they realize that some random white girl knows a traditional Muslim greeting.

As a pathological people pleaser, I enjoy the interaction because it always makes them surprise laugh. They seem happy that someone shows this tiny gesture of respect for their culture.

“They killed people like they were drinking water”

Like many Western Europeans, Bulgarians strongly dislike and fear the Mideast refugees. Thankfully, their antipathy manifests as private grumbling, not violence. But they certainly don’t make an effort to be nice, welcoming or interested in their very interesting stories.

These young people lived through one of this century’s most brutal wars. So far, I have yet to meet one who had not (barely) survived a missile strike.

Ali had the lovely experience of ISIS briefly taking over his town.

“They killed people like they were drinking water,” he tells me flatly. The humor vanishes—just as it does when a plane flies overhead and he freezes, remembering the bomb that dropped on him when he was 15. Then, flicking off the sky: “Fuck you.”

And then, still practically kids, they took a harrowing multi-border journey only to land in a country that doesn’t want them.

My grandfather, flouting Soviet-era controls on border crossings, made a similar journey—minus the war, plus the Gulag he was starved and tortured in (the moral arc of History bends towards … what?).

But when I draw these parallels, Bulgarians look at me like I have five heads.

Why don’t Bulgarians like them? There aren’t that many refugees here. They work back-breaking construction, often to send money back to poor relatives in Syria and Iraq, but there aren’t enough of them to depress wages or take jobs away from native-born Bulgarians.

Not that it should matter, but most of them don’t even look different than Bulgarians—many Syrians are light-skinned with dark hair, and some Bulgarians have darker skin and almost all have dark hair. I’ve met roughly an equal number of naturally blonde Syrians as I have naturally blonde Bulgarians.¹

And there’s not been a single notable incident of a Syrian refugee committing some heinous crime: in ten years there were three violent high-profile acts, all related to trafficking, which wouldn’t be a crime that would need to exist if the world had open borders. In one case a Syrian shot another Syrian over a trafficking dispute. In another case, a teenager smuggling refugees crashed into a police car by accident. That’s it.

Yet most Bulgarians loathe them, look down on them, and are mad that they’re here, even though the refugees have no impact, really, on their lives.

“They don’t shake hands with women!”

I made friends with some Bulgarian students at the public library where I liked to go write. Eventually I stopped going. Because, when the students asked me about my book and I told them that it combines my family’s immigration story with profiles of current-day refugees, they spewed Islamophobic cliches at me. “They don’t shake hands with women!” one fearfully whispered, then trotted out the obnoxious trope that as a progressive feminist I should fear and loathe Muslims.

After being goaded into another conversation on the topic, I asked another young man: “What don’t you like about them? They have literally no negative impact on your life,” I said. These, by the way, are hyper-educated youth—they should be in the vanguard of progressivism. “You can hardly tell the refugees are here,” I added. ²

He thought for a while. “Oh! You have no idea,” he said shaking his head melodramatically.

“OK enlighten me.”

“Well the other day I was on the bus and I saw this guy staring at a woman.”

To put this egregious sin into context, the Bulgarian guy I was speaking to is the kind of annoying Edgelord who, earlier, had tried to get a rise out of me by defending obscene cat-calling as men’s God-given right, and that uppity feminists like myself were too easily offended and humorless (I am neither easily offended nor humorless).

I told him: “So you think it’s hilarious and totally OK when Western or Bulgarian men say obscene, threatening things to women in the street. But you’re offended that an Arab guy was looking at someone?”

“Ah,” he conceded. “Hmmm.”

***

My Dad was recently here. After the 35th time I bitched to him about this, he retorted, “You can’t expect a people raised on the history of the Ottoman slavery to welcome Muslims and Arabs,” he said.

Look, OK, sure. The more than 500 years the Ottoman Empire colonized Bulgaria? The 19th century revolt that overthrew the Turks? This history is burned into the public psyche with a flaming hot poker for eternity.

And understandably so. The Ottomans were about as brutal and exploitative as any Empire. Even as a child I heard so many horror stories about the “Ottoman Yoke” that when we came to the U.S., I was frightened of a little Turkish girl, as skinny and English-less as me, in my 2nd grade class.

Here is my spiel in response to this argument; a spiel ranted in many social situations.

1. Syria and Iraq were also colonized by the Ottomans. Syria for longer than Bulgaria, in fact.

2. Sure. The experience must have been different among a Muslim-majority population than a Christian-majority population. But if we should be frightened of Muslims because of the Ottomans, they should be frightened of us because of the Crusades. The Ottomans, like all empires, merely used religion as a pretext for land grabs and exploitation.

3. You will never meet a bigger hater of Turkey than an Arab refugee who went through Turkey.

4. “AND MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL,” I crescendo, “Is… what the fuck do these young people, most born in this century, have to do with horrors from 500 years ago?”

***

As I rant, people tend to nod along. They probably just want me to shut up.

The point is that while the antipathy towards the refugees here is rooted in a highly specific history, there are more commonalities than differences in the fear and hatred for refugees everywhere in the world.

***

Americans think they elected Trump to get rid of “criminal rapists and gangbangers.”

But now we’re going, “Wait, what? Not them!” when their perfectly nice neighbors, coworkers and spouses are rounded up, imprisoned and deported.

Immigration is a manufactured problem. It’s abstract. It is not a problem in the real world. I’ve made this point before. Fear of crime is over-inflated, but, I mean, if you happen to be the victim of a crime, that sucks.

There’s no equivalent when it comes to immigrants. If you, are, say, the rare victim of a crime by an immigrant, that is very bad. But they didn’t do it because they’re an immigrant, they did it because they are a person who happened to be born in a different country who committed a crime. A “criminal.”

***