The crisis of the century has begun to unfold in Europe. Fleeing their homes by foot, by train or by rubber dingy, many leaving with nothing but a few small essentials and the tattered clothes on their back, are, so far, four million Syrian refugees. Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq have opened their borders to and sheltered over 3.5 million displaced, most of the rest making their way to Germany. However, over six million people still lie at the mercy of a hauntingly violent civil war riddled with devastating property damage and thousands of civilian casualties.

Those that have escaped in the past months are – along with millions of Somalian, Afghani, and Pakistani refugees – just the first in what, throughout this century, will be waves of migratory chaos; fleeing anything from undue violence, religious persecution, and, if fossil fuels continue to be coveted fuel sources, the tectonic wrath of a Mother Earth plucked and plowed beyond conceivable reason. These Great Global Migrations (GGM) will drastically alter the world’s cultural, political, and economic landscape into the unforeseeable future.

While this influx of people flooding their borders has been overwhelming, European countries have yet to see the numbers that the four immediate neighboring nations mentioned above have experienced. Yet, many countries, unlike those four Middle Eastern safe havens, are shamelessly engaged in hateful xenophobia; promising to any form of care or lodging to all refugees at their borders.

It may be easy to paint nations like Hungary, Slovenia and Denmark as anti-immigrant, but one must remember the same sentiment permeates our own borders on such a national scale that the current leader in the race for the Republican nomination for President has stated on multiple occasions the first action of his warped administration would be to deport “all of ‘em” (11 million Mexicans and Latin Americans) out of the U.S. and build a Great Wall, presumingly with his name on it, to keep them from coming back.

Although most of us have the capacity to scoff at these incendiary responses to immigration, it must be noted that they have a way of prevailing in every country worldwide, especially in ours, even though we were founded by and flourished because of, immigrants.

So how do we combat this primitive, unintelligent reaction? Without any influence from the six major media sources fattening their ratings and the public’s bloated ignorance with manipulated drivel, educate yourself. Seek out researched, scholarly material presented by peer-reviewed papers. We must realize that these “borders” so heavily defended and fought over are arbitrary lines redrawn over and over again at the whim of whoever holds the pen.

Though this, the first GGM, is concentrated across the pond, America must play a central role. Not for any moral reason, not because we are the only modern superpower and are capable of doing so, but because in the intertwined world economy in which we find ourselves today, any international crisis is one to be treated as if within our own “borders.”

By the end of the century, it’s easy to imagine well over 100 million migrants will set forth on a voyage to a new home. We cannot sit on our hands and wish this problem away. This is only the beginning of a century defining issue that, if climate change predictions for the next half century are even a quarter true, will expand exponentially past the already complicated dilemma presented by warring Syrian factions and bring chaos to mainland Europe, destroy the lowlands of Bangladesh, the Caribbean Islands, and potentially drown nearly every coastal city imaginable by way of slow and steady ocean reclamation. Without proper education and preparation on this issue, the United States and the world will change, whether we’re ready or not.