Prayer of the Refugee

Radio stations began playing "Prayer of the Refugee" in November 2006. The following month it came out as the second single from The Sufferer & the Witness. It reached number seven on the Alternative Songs chart and was certified platinum in July 2013.

Tim McIlrath wrote the lyrics, and the rest of Rise Against wrote the music together. The song opens from the perspective of a refugee telling a child about life before displacement, over slow, plaintive guitars, then breaks into a fast, chaotic chorus. It runs three minutes and nineteen seconds. Bill Stevenson and Jason Livermore engineered and produced it at The Blasting Room in Fort Collins, Colorado. Chris Lord-Alge mixed it, and Ted Jensen mastered it.

The video, directed by Tony Petrossian, places the band in a retail store. The camera moves in on shoes and toy cars, then pulls back to show foreign workers and children making them. Near the end, the workers stick Made in USA labels on boxes while the band smashes items, and the wreckage on the floor spells out "fair trade". Petrossian had first thought of a treatment about a refugee trying to enter the United States. He expected the band to receive several of those and chose another angle. The members agreed on it unanimously.