This is not to suggest that there are no circumstances under which Syrian refugees might at some point represent a security threat. Recently, one of the most articulate defenders of refugee resettlement, Daniel Byman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown and a regular contributor at Slate, warned that “the true terrorism danger is that the refugees are not cared for or are welcomed briefly in a fit of sympathy and then scorned and repressed.” He’s right. The trouble is that Syrian refugees are not a monolithic bloc, and even the most generous resettlement policy might feel repressive to, say, Syrians who believe that the doctrines of gender equality and sexual liberalism represent an affront to their religion. Policymakers don’t have the power to decide how their actions will be interpreted. Nor do they have the power to dictate how ordinary Europeans will react to Syrians on a human level. In much of northern Europe, it is common to hear European Muslims complain of the emotional coldness of their native-born non-Muslim neighbors, who never stop treating them as foreigners, no matter how hard they try to fit in. This subjective sense of exclusion does much to fuel resentment on the part of European Muslims, and understandably so. It’s not clear what policymakers can do about these failures of integration at the intimate level.

Elsewhere, Byman has elaborated on the policy dimension of integrating Syrian refugees, observing that Europe already has a large population of radicalized Muslims, and that there is a real risk that these radicalized Muslims “will transform the Syrian refugee community into a more violent one over time.”