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NEAR MALKO TARNOVO, Bulgaria Figures in camouflage and ski masks gather at a fishing lodge. Many are armed with long knives, bayonets and hatchets.

The 35 men and women are on the hunt in Strandzha Massif, a forested mountain range on Bulgaria's border with Turkey. Migrants trying to cross into Europe are their prey.

Patches on their irregular uniforms a coat of arms bearing a snarling wolf's head framed by Cyrillic text proclaim them to be members of the Bulgarian National Movement Shipka, abbreviated in Bulgarian as "BNO Shipka."

Members of the paramilitary organization form into ranks as their leader, Vladimir Rusev, speaks. A former colonel who says he fought in Chechnya as a volunteer alongside Russians, Rusev declares his support for a man they admire: President Donald Trump.

"The CIA is trying to undermine Trump," said Rusev, a compact 58-year-old with a neat mustache and short-cropped hair. "They want to destroy him. We offer our support to him."

Trump's hard-line stance on immigration and vocal criticism of Islam finds an appreciative audience here.

Most BNO Shipka members are friendly, courteous and open. The organization's website projects a different message: slick videos replete with firearms and military training, and declarations that Europe must be defended against Islam.

Rusev claims they have as many as 50,000 members, although NBC News was unable to verify this number.

"I'm not nationalistic or anything like that. I'm just a patriot," said Nikolai Ivanov, a 34-year-old who was one of the group's founding members in 2014.

"Many of these immigrants are not just some guys who are trying to run away from war. They are from age 17 to 35, with good physiques and training," Ivanov added. "It's not a problem that they are Muslims. The problem is it's a different civilization. They don't think like us, they have a totally different view about life, about everything."

While the group has been criticized by human rights advocates, it isn't hard to find people who agree with Ivanov's views in Bulgaria. The head of the country's border police praised a nationalist volunteer group for intercepting migrants in April.

Bulgaria occupies a place at the seams. Looking east, this Eastern Orthodox crossroads shares a traditional alliance with Russia. To the south is Turkey, once home to a Muslim empire that for centuries dominated the region. The European Union, with liberal values and a promise of wealth, lies to the west.

Since the end of the Cold War, Bulgaria has firmly embraced the West joining NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007. But the rapid rise in living standards for its seven million citizens stalled during the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Now, average annual income remains the lowest in the EU, even when measured by purchasing power.

In the Soviet era, heavy industry and chemical production dominated the economy. Now, abandoned factories litter a landscape replete with decaying smokestacks and depopulated villages.

On top of this, Bulgaria has become a major overland route as Europe grapples with a migration crisis due to its borders with Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Romania.

According to Eurostat, 20,165 people applied for asylum in Bulgaria in 2015, the most recent year for which firm numbers were available. This was a fraction of the around 1.2 million who claimed asylum in the EU that year, more than three quarters of whom were from majority Muslim countries.

Although only a handful of Europe-bound migrants have settled in Bulgaria, concern about the newcomers resonates in a country that was dominated for centuries by the Ottoman Turks.

Ivanov believes the refugee crisis was part of a plan in which ISIS militants would slip into the country and attack. Then, neighboring Turkey would deploy troops to Bulgaria under the auspices of the NATO alliance, he said, effectively reclaiming a portion of the lost Ottoman Empire.

Conspiracy theories like this abound among BNO Shipka members, some of whom make a point of speaking Russian. Their affinity for Moscow is perhaps understandable in the context of Bulgaria's unhappy history with its Muslim-majority neighbor. Shipka, after all, refers to a battle in which a Russo-Bulgarian force defeated the Ottoman Turks in 1877.

Bulgaria's weak economy and status outside the borderless Schengen area means most migrants aim for Greece as a gateway to more prosperous countries further west.

Migrants line up to buy food at Bulgaria's Harmanli refugee center, which is located near the border with Turkey, on Nov. 25. Nikolay Doychinov / AFP - Getty Images

So the "refugee situation here is not that serious," said Krassimir Kanev, a founder of the human rights group Bulgarian Helsinki Committee. "Bulgaria is a transit country, the refugees want to move to [other] EU countries."

However, Bulgaria "registered 31,281 new arrivals in 2015, which represents 89.3 percent of all land arrivals in the EU for the same year," according to a report by Radoslav Stamenkov, the head of the Bulgaria office at the International Organization for Migration. The "migration shock" that began in 2013 created social tensions "in a country that had a very limited experience of receiving migrants," Stamenkov wrote.

Kanev sees BNO Shipka and similar groups as xenophobic nationalists at best, or at worst, violent and racist extremists. In October 2015, an Afghan migrant was shot and killed when he tried to cross into Bulgaria. In November, protests by locals over rumors of disease forced the temporary closure of the country's largest refugee camp and led to riots.

"There are ongoing criminal proceedings against a number of these groups," Kanev said. Bulgarian vigilantes have detained migrants and tied them up, sometimes beating and humiliating them before forcing them back across the border, he added.

Asked for its position on vigilante groups, Bulgaria's Interior Ministry did not respond.

Back in the forests of the Strandzha Massif, BNO Shipka is going out on patrol. In bitter cold and with snow on the ground, this isn't the high season for refugees crossing from Turkey. Some still try.

After a series of short speeches by leaders, members gear up and head toward the border. But the presence of a large group of people in ski masks and military regalia dashing from cover to cover in view of the highway attracts the attention of local authorities.

Two border police officers, accompanied by several soldiers armed with assault rifles, drive up in four-by-fours and ask for an explanation. They seem less concerned than confused. Most BNO Shipka members wear Bulgarian military fatigues from their own service so the groups merge, trading jokes and cigarettes. Only the slung rifles indicate who is an active soldier and who is a vigilante.

The authorities seem unsure what to do, particularly with members of the media present.

A map showing the location of Bulgaria's Strandzha Massif. Google Maps

A BNO Shipka squad leader informs journalists that police are letting them continue, but the training mission has been completed and the team will return to the fishing lodge. As the group marches back, police follow them having called in reinforcements.

No one is detained or questioned further, but police return the following day.

Undeterred, BNO Shipka members record a video message to Trump. They put on snow camouflage oversuits and sneak around police stationed at the road leading to the lodge.

Asked if he is afraid Bulgaria is losing its identity, founding member Ivanov nods. "If we don't do something soon," he said. "It's not just Bulgaria, but all of Europe."

BNO Shipka didn't catch any migrants this time. Still, they intend to keep looking.

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Bulgarian Vigilantes Patrol Turkey Border to Keep Migrants Out ... - NBCNews.com

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As a measure of how serious this problem is a new report from Europol, the EUs law enforcement agency, also says that migrant smuggling is now comparable to the illegal drugs market.

Across the continent people are furious at the huge number of migrants who have arrived, the strain they have placed on resources and the deliberate reluctance of European leaders not least unelected Eurocrats to confront these issues.

It is no coincidence that in Holland, France and Germany anti-migrant parties are storming up the polls.

The European establishments attempt to dismantle national borders has been a major factor in exacerbating this problem.

The Schengen agreement which eradicates controls between member states has made it easy for migrants to dodge the authorities.

Meanwhile far too little has been done to protect the EUs external border.

Some European leaders have to their credit expressed concern at the failure to take border security seriously.

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But the unwieldy nature of the Brussels bureaucracy means tougher rhetoric has not been translated into action.

The EU is a flawed institution that has proved totally incapable of getting the migrant crisis under control.

However its most important figures continue to refuse to accept the need for fundamental reform. What a relief we will shortly be getting out.

AFP/Getty Images

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A young boy cries at a makeshift camp for migrants and refugees at the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni

In January more than 80,000 NHS patients were stuck on a trolley for at least four hours waiting for a hospital bed.

Labour will tell you this is all due to a lack of funding but the reality is that the health service faces a range of challenges.

Social care problems have caused elderly people to be stuck in hospital when they would be better off elsewhere.

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There are also too many people going to hospital when they only need to see a GP.

And then there are the demographic challenges: the extra burden placed on the health service by migration and our ageing population.

Just throwing more money at the NHS is not and never will be a proper solution to these issues.

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At Crufts the dogs of war have been let slip.

A rule that ribbons cannot be put in the dogs hair has sparked fury with one judge complaining that she has been harassed by a number of overseas exhibitors.

Lets hope their bark is worse than their bite.

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COMMENT: Migrant crisis proves we are right to leave the EU - Express.co.uk

As millions of Syrians are forced to flee their home country, the descendants of earlier migrants enjoy a life of cultural and economic assimilation.

By Giulia Afiune and John Wihbey

The ongoing political and legal controversy over President Donald Trumps revised executive order banning visitors from six Muslim-majority countries is the latest flashpoint in what has become one of the great moral conundrums of our time: What to do about the refugees of the Syrian Civil War?

Since 2011, the Syrian Civil War has forced some five million Syrians out of the country. And as millions flee and risk their lives trying to find a stable land, surrounding countries, Europe, and the Americas have struggled to deal with the unprecedented inflow of people. Many have effectively closed their borders, with the new U.S. restrictions in some ways merely crystallizing a wider patternan iron immigration curtain now descending across much of the West. The United Nations calls the Syrian refugee crisis the single largest for almost a quarter of a century.

At the same time, nationalism and inward-looking policy ideas have taken hold in many Western societies, from the rise of Marine Le Pen in France to Brexit and the election of Theresa May in the United Kingdom. And while the United States did admit substantially more Muslim refugees in the final year of the Obama administration, that trend is sure to end.

The Syrian refugee crisis can seem a catastrophic historical anomaly, one wholly without precedent or hint of a solution. But virtually unknown todayburied in the historical annalsis a parallel event that furnishes an alternative path. In the late 19th century, a massive wave of Arabic-speaking peasants left greater Syria, in search of opportunities elsewhere. Even though they found obstacles in destination countries, many migrants were eventually integrated to the host societies, making expressive contributions to their new economy and culture.

Decades later, the descendants of the Syrian-Lebanese migrantsnow working in law, medicine, politics, and business across societies in the Americasstill see this lost chapter in history come to life in the form of family tales shared over feasts of falafels, hummus, kafta, and other Arab delicacies.

Between 1890 and 1920, an estimated 360,000 migrants spilled from the area that now includes Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Jordan. (It wasnt until after 1890 that missionaries and intellectuals popularized the existence of a specific region called greater Syria.)

In the early migration outflow, about a third of the regions population left, motivated by a number of factors: the debt-ridden Ottoman Empire was falling apart; economic recession, drought, and eventually famine hit the region hard; and the world was lurching toward World War I.

At that time, people were moving because they were poor, and they were looking for good life conditions, says Kazim Baycar, of Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul, whose research has focused on Ottoman history.

In contrast with today, these migrants went primarily to the Americas: The United States, Brazil, and Argentina, among others, saw tens of thousands of Syrians come to their shores. They spread out across major cities and small towns in the New World.

Weve been here a long time, and in fact we are very much part of the fabric of what makes this country what it is today, says Akram Khater, a history professor at North Carolina State University.

The experience of peoples from lands in the Arabic-speaking world has long been characterized, he says, both by cultural acceptance and assimilation, as well as suspicion and challenge. The Syrian refugees of today, of course, are another episode in this long narrative arc.

Many in the earlier Syrian migration came with the idea of making money and returning, but about two-thirds of them wound up staying in the U.S. Once pioneer family members got established, they began bringing over other kin. It was the beginning of a classic chain migration pattern.

An estimated 129,000 persons of Syrian-Lebanese-Palestinian origin were in the United States by 1920, according to researchers at the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State. Arab-Americans settled in northeastern states such as New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, as well as in Ohio, Michigan, and even Texas.

Migration at the time was destined to countries that had flourishing economiesthe U.S., Canada, Brazil, and the likethat needed labor, says Guita Hourani, director of the Lebanese Emigration Research Center at the University of Notre Dame in Kesrwan, Lebanon. The migration of the Lebanese and Syrians was part of a world phenomenon that was taking place at the time. The so-called New World was offering opportunities not found at the time in Europe. According to experts, the Arabs joined a large flow of Europeans who themselves were escaping adverse economic conditions.

The Arabs were the free riders of this immigration because those routes were already well establishedboats were already going to those very important harbors, like Buenos Aires, Santos [harbor near So Paulo] and New York. They were just taking the same boats as the Europeans, says Cecilia Baeza, a professor at PUC-SP and FGV in Brazil, who studies the Arab diaspora in South America.

In the Americas, many went on to work in factories, others started peddling or opened small businesses, a mercantile tradition that still distinguishes some Syrian-Lebanese families across the Americas today. It seemed like they gravitated towards certain places that had lots of people who had to buy stuff, says Tylor Band, assistant professor at the American University of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates. So the Lebanese and Syrians made a lot of their money through these merchant activities.

Subsequent generations have gone into the professions and climbed the social ladder. While evidence of social mobility across the Americas may be largely anecdotal, Syrian immigrants and persons of Lebanese origin in the United States are generally better educated and have lower unemployment rates, as compared with both other foreign born and native born populations.

Syrian and Lebanese had larger economic and social mobility in Brazil than in the U.S., says Oswaldo Truzzi, a professor at UFSCAR-Federal University of So Carlos, Brazil. In the United States, the migrants from Ottoman Syria joined huge waves of European immigrants, perhaps diluting their overall impact and visibility.

In Brazil, you can see how they shaped our commercial practices, our food, our culture, Truzzi adds. Theres a reciprocal influence.

In both our current and past migration flows, war and climate change played a major role. Cecilia Baeza notes that modernization policies in the Ottoman Empire around 1908 included new conscription rules, prompting many families to accelerate the ongoing exodus. The Ottomans became involved in violent internal and regional conflict, for which they needed soldiers.

For these reasons, especially the Christian families, to avoid the military conscription, started to send their sons where they already had relatives, Baeza says. They were already living in the Americas.

Adding to the chaos were naturally shifting climate conditions around the time of World War I. What seems to have happened is that there was an El Nio event around the time of the war, says Band of the American University of Sharjah. Adverse conditions and a literal plague of locusts, combined with military blockades and an Ottoman policy of neglect, created area-wide famine, particularly in Mount Lebanon, where the so-called Great Famine claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Sources say that the amount of crops lost was equal to 40 to 60 percent of the Syrian crop in 1915, Band notes. While migration largely halted during World War I, the horrific regional conditions prompted further waves of immigrants at the conflicts end.

All of that echoes today. As researchers have documented, climate change also likely helped foster the conditions that led to the contemporary Syrian civil war. Rural Syrians were displaced by historic drought beginning in 2007 and migrated to cities in massive numbers, contributing to political unrest.

Around 98 percent of current Syrian refugees admitted to the United States are Suni Muslims. The proportion is similar among the two million Syrian refugees registered with UNHCR: Ninety-nine percent are Suni Muslims and only 1 percent, Christians. Shiites are a very small part of this population. This distribution does not include the 2.9 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey, because the country is responsible for registering them, not UNHCR.

In contrast, many earlier migrants were Christian, although there were a fair number of both Shiite and Sunni Muslims. There is anecdotal evidence that Muslims represented between 8 and 17 percent of all greater Syria migrants, although the numbers are highly imprecise, scholars say. Roughly one-third of Argentinas estimated 105,000 to 136,000 immigrants may have been Muslim, according to Khater.

While the modern-day states would only be established later in the region, the original notion of being Syrian emerged to distinguish locals from the Ottoman population, which carried with it traditional and highly prejudiced stereotypes of the terrible Turk, Khater says. They wanted to escape, for example, being mistakenly called Turcos, as they frequently were in Latin America.

In some ironic way, it carries with it the same pejorative and threatening and othering, if you will, notion as Muslim does today, he notes. Thats exactly what a Turk was [at that time]a Muslim.

These stereotypes were Western, scholars note, and some Christians in greater Syria had relatively good relations with Ottoman authorities during that period.

According to the Department of State, almost 20,000 Syrian refugees from the current conflict have been accepted by the United Statesthe majority admitted in the final year of the Obama administration. Canada, by contrast, has recently become a welcoming havenit took in more than 40,000 Syrian refugees to date, having resettled around 25,000while most nations in the Americas have seen only a trickle of Syrian refugees this time. Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of Syrian refugees remain in a semi-permanent holding pattern in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, with little hope of asylum there.

The European Union as a whole has a very mixed record: With the exception of Germany (as of the end of 2015, it had accepted more than 115,600 Syrian refugees) and Sweden (more than 52,700), the remaining 26 countries in the E.U. have pledged a tiny number of resettlement placesaround 0.7 percent of the Syrian refugee population in the main host countries such as Turkey and Jordan, according to Amnesty International.

Some Latin American countries have pledged greater open door policies, as Lilly Ballofet of the Khayrallah Center at North Carolina State has noted. Still, the overall numbers of migrants taken in are not huge measured against the enormity of the problem. Through 2015, Brazil had taken in 2,300 Syrian refugees, while Argentina had taken in about 300, according to UNHCR data.

If there is any positive news on the horizon, it may be the potential of the current generation of Syrian migrants arriving in the West. People who are ending up in Europe and the United States now are highly educated, Khater says. They are coming in with a major advantage in some ways in the sense of their ability to work and to integrate. The disadvantage is that they are not coming into ethnic enclaves. Meanwhile, its worth mentioning that there have been no fatal terrorist attacks post-9/11 by persons from any of the countries covered under President Trumps executive order.

In any case, this largely unknown history remains poignant and relevant across many societies. It is deeply rooted in the experience of millions of persons with Arab and Greater Syrian roots across the New World whose families have been here for generations.

As a consequence of their integration in the Americas a century ago, Arab immigrants became entrepreneurs, professionals and even politiciansso why couldnt the same happen with todays Syrian refugees?

I think it would be good, not only drawing upon the history of the Syrian immigration itself, says Baeza, the researcher in Brazil, but in general, of having been an immigration country, to revive this narrative to be even more welcoming to the immigrants and refugees.

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The Syrian Migrant Crisis You've Never Heard ofand Why It Matters Today - Pacific Standard

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Hungary responded to the migrant crisis by erecting strong border fences on its frontiers with Serbia, which is entirely outside the borderless European Union (EU), and Croatia, which is inside the bloc but not yet included in its passport-free Schengen zone.

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The government is now upgrading these defences, which haveslashed illegal migration from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands and saved the country billions of forints. It is also recruitingan extra 3,000 border guards. But the prime minister warned 462 new recruits that we cannot afford to sit back during anoath-taking ceremony on Tuesday.

We have gained time between two major attacks, he declared. The storm has not yet passed, but has only subsided temporarily.

Orbn believes the country must take advantage of the current lull to reinforce its physical defences and bolster its border guard force, sending a clear message to illegal migrants.

If the world sees that we can protect our borders, if they see that the reinforced Hungarian border fence is impenetrable, and that we continue to insist on upholding our laws and we do not waver for a second then nobody will attempt to come to Hungary illegally, he said.

While spokesman Zoltn Kovcshas previouslyassertedthe fences are ultimately protecting the European Union, not Hungary, the prime minister warned that the Central European state should not expect outside support.

We can only rely on ourselves, he said, telling listeners that Brussels bureaucrats would only make our job more difficult.

Orbn contends the migrant crisis will remain on the agenda until people everywhere realise that migration is the Trojan horse of terrorism. He told the recruits they were the defenders of both freedom for Hungarys present and hope for Hungarys future.

We Hungarians want a Europe in which we can live our own Hungarian lives. In the Hungary that we want, security is the foremost concern.

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Hungary Migrant Crisis: 'The Storm Has Not Yet Passed We Are Under Siege' - Breitbart News

By sheer chance, or perhaps premeditation, Mohsin Hamid's new novel, Exit West, grapples with two great global catastrophes of our time: the migrant crisis and spread of terror. While both themes have immense dramatic potential, the plot remains disappointingly thin, the central characters just stopping short of coming alive in their full human complexity.

Like Hamid's previous novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Exit West is set in an unnamed city in the subcontinent, under siege from an outfit like the Taliban or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). To curb the people's resistance, the militants indulge in unspeakable atrocities, leaving "bodies hanging from street lamps and billboards like a form of festive seasonal decoration."

Under these inglorious circumstances, Saeed and Nadia meet at an evening school, though they don't fall in love at first sight. Saeed is a sweet-tempered youth, almost docilely good-natured, while Nadia is fiery and rebellious, having left the security of home. Straddling a bike, she drives it across the city wearing a burqa so that men "don't fuck" with her. She smokes pot on her terrace, smuggles Saeed into her flat in a burqa, and has steelier nerves than him in the face of adversity.

READ: Why You Must Read This Novel About Two Girls Who Join The ISIS

But trouble pours into their lives soon. Saeed's mother has her head blown off in a freak gun battle, war breaks out shortly, rations become scarce and the sight of the dead on the streets as common as the living. Desperate for an exit, Saeed and Nadia buy a passage to another country from an agent, though they cannot persuade Saeed's father, broken by grief, to leave with them.

Hamid's writing is spare, unadorned to the point of severity, which may give the impression that one is reading the outline for a novel rather than its fully-fleshed form. He introduces brief digressions perhaps by way of complexity, opening up windows to happenings in other cities of the world in the US, Japan, Australia or Austria though these never add up to a sub-plot. Such fragments fit into the overall design of the dystopia he creates, but don't feel strictly germane to the progression of the master narrative.

The veneer of dystopia Hamid creates is understated, like his language, though its real-life correlation is too horrific for it to go unremarked. When Saeed and Nadia flee their country, like millions of refugees, they don't take a perilous journey by boat or other means rather, they pay the agent to walk through one of the mysterious, but ubiquitous, doors that have popped up in their city. Think of the magical door in Narnia or Alice in Wonderland or even the teleportation scenes in the popular TV series Fringe.

Such doors may be a familiar trope in assembly-line dystopias, but their parallel in the real world in incidents where millions have perished while fleeing oppressive regimes, lost their families or drowned in the seas are too wrenching to be turned into as seamless a transition as Hamid describes.

While Saeed and Nadia struggle to build their lives from scratch in places they find themselves in from the Greek island of Mykonos to the city of London to Marin Country, California their opponents, "the natives", are mostly portrayed in broad strokes, as a conglomerate of evil and desperation.

In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Hamid had succeeded in conveying the predicament of an outsider in a foreign land with nuance, showing up the politics of everyday life with an acute sensitivity. While he left behind the warmth of humanity in his first novel Moth Smoke, to my mind his best till date, he created a nexus of ideas in his more cerebral later fiction.

In spite of opening Exit West with two characters who absorb the reader's attention, Hamid quickly divests them of their humanity. This is not to say Saeed or Nadia becomes cardboard characters far from it but the spark they ignited in our minds at the start goes off halfway through the reading.

Perhaps this is Hamid's way of signalling their gradual disintegration as the life they had envisioned falls apart, a diminishing of their persons as immigrants in hostile societies. But he is also unable to resist the Dickensian urge to give us a glimpse into their lives years ahead an unfortunate device that heightens the shallowness of his character-building.

(Exit West is published by Hamish Hamilton, hardback, 232 pages, 599.)

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