A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.

Many of the principle weapons that the Nazis used during World War II had their first trial in combat in Spain - the Messerschmitt 109 fighter plane for example, the Stuka dive bomber, the 88 millimeter artillery piece, which could be used both for antiaircraft purposes and also shelling on the ground. And American soldiers were the victims of these things in Spain, American volunteers. So this war was really a testing ground for Hitler. And he learned a great deal from it about the strengths and weaknesses of these different weapons.

If your real wages are declining, your job is at risk, you fear your children will be worse off than you are, it's tempting to want to blame it all on an easily identifiable target: Muslims, immigrants, refugees, blacks, Jews.

Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.

Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.

Compared with how we've ducked it in the United States, Canada should be really proud of how you have welcomed a significant number of refugees - far more, in fact, than we Americans have, even though our population is vastly larger.

I think writers can respond by writing about the refugee crisis, by looking at problems faced by migrants, by trying hard to portray them as the human beings that they are.