We all need a home—a place to live, to love and be loved, to heal, to grow, to learn, to prosper, to thrive, to know and be known. Migrants, more than the rest of us, also need a sanctuary, a place of refuge where they can be free from that which they fled.
The task of providing home and sanctuary to refugees is difficult for any takers. The roadblocks in resettling refugees are legion. Many refugees have no place to go and nothing for them when they arrive. The void in social and infrastructural resources for displaced people is gaping. Practical cross-cultural and interfaith engagement is just plain hard. And perhaps worst of all, loud minorities (if not majorities) in host communities do not want aliens living among them.
How can the Church respond?
We can press ecclesial and federal leadership to establish the institutional and legal rights of the displaced and protect those rights once they have been established. The Church can stir a tidal shift in its own internal culture to befriend and bolster refugee families, not belittle and bedevil them. Likewise, we can rally for legislation—and a broader cultural sea change—that aids the cause of the downtrodden instead of hindering them.
If the Church is really the Church, it must actively sponsor shalom, oftentimes in the form of development and certainly nonviolence, in countries that send refugees. Finally, Christians have the joy to unearth, foster, and grow opportunities for refugees in the communities and countries that receive them.[1]
The answers, like the problems, are anything but easy.
Resettlement is hard on recipient communities because of fear, lack of resources, lack of will, and all the impediments associated with the actions above. But the Church can take it, and it’s worth it.
Resettlement is hard on refugees too. While the vast majority of refugees are grateful for whatever they receive upon coming to the rich West—rent, furniture, food, jobs, money, freedoms—expectations are not always met. Hollywood has had the unfortunate effect of convincing many refugees that, when they arrive in the United States, they will be handed iPhones and big screen television, that Range Rovers will be reasonable purchases, that there are no rats in urban centers, that they will step right into high-paying jobs, and that life in general will be immediately and relentlessly comfortable. I remember one Ethiopian refugee who told me he left his prized possession, his music recording equipment, in Africa because he thought that kind of thing would be included in his apartment in Chicago.
Adjusting expectations (usually by lowering them) is one of the most difficult tasks for refugees arriving in North America.
Also, refugeeism being what it is, the incidence of trauma and mental health disorders among migrants is frighteningly high. Marginalization, persecution, discrimination, famine, violence, environmental disaster—these are the weights refugees are coming with, weights that can afflict them long after they step off the plane.
The life of the refugee is always traumatic, but it is particularly detrimental to children. Because children are more impressionable—their minds, bodies, and souls still very much in developmental stages—every good and evil thing around them has the potential to alter the topography of their social maps.
For instance, a child forced from her home at a tender age is not only affected by the phenomenon of homelessness, but is formed by it. It is a tragedy, of course, that anyone should become homeless at any point, but a child growing up in the condition of homelessness will not later understand, let alone recognize, the grounding, securing, orienting permanence of home. To lose one’s home and homeland leads to the intractable feeling of separateness and rootlessness.[2] Such alienations easily prompt depression—or worse.
To live the life of the refugee is to live, oftentimes, under constant threat. The potential for violence and loss is chronic. This is why it is so difficult to maintain anything like optimism, or even a healthy realism about the world. For the refugee, to see the world as it really is is unhealthy.
Many of us can scarcely imagine all of the issues plaguing the aliens who make it to our neighborhoods. Stress, fear, unspeakable grief, family separation, cultural alienation. Gang activity and community violence may have been prevalent in the camps from which they are coming. Having been compelled to work illegally during their displacement, many have seen their professional skills and socioeconomic status decline. Negative coping mechanisms run wild in refugee zones abroad and are not simply shaken off after resettlement. Family conflicts arise, peer groups dissolve, and religious, cultural, intergenerational communities see dramatic shifts. In a 2011 study of the uprooted Nepali-speaking Bhutanese people called Lotshampas, the suicide rate in refugee camps was considerably higher than the world or local averages, and after resettlement abroad—mostly to the United States—the suicide rate rose even more dramatically, landing at about triple the rate of the general US population.[3] Virtually all refugees I met from Syria and Iraq suffer some level of trauma. Afghan mother refugees in Pakistan have a 36 percent rate of mental health problems, and nine in 10 of those mothers experienced thoughts of suicide. A full eight percent said suicide was their “primary concern.”[4]
The stressors of refugeeism are true killers.
While many refugees do their best to build lives and livelihoods in their half-way countries—commonly suspended in limbo camps for years or decades—that only increases the hardship after ultimate resettlement as those new communities too are abandoned. Family support systems can collapse. Identities can be questioned. There is tension between “stayers” and “goers”, between the there, here, and nowhere of the refugee experience.
Shame, too—at having fled, at not being able to provide, at accepting charity, and in the form of survivor’s guilt—is rampant. This is especially true among Muslim refugees who often will not acknowledge their needs. Many displaced people are genuinely resistant to asking for help or to accepting charity, even though they desperately need it. This only highlights the call for the Church to seek out need and respond to it.
With all of this in view, we can be excited that the Church is a sanctuary. God is a fortress.
Refugees are always in need of something stable to cling to—a place, a relationship, an ideology. The latter is why some turn to fundamentalist groups that preach a firm, but often toxic, brand of religious or political persuasion. The stability of such worldviews may be harmful in the long run, but they are simply less transient and therefore less stressful than fuller and more dynamic views of the world.
The Church can provide something truer and more life-giving to cling to—places, relationships, vision, resources, God himself! Throughout history, God’s people have given sanctuary. Not only physical sanctuary, but spiritual and relational sanctuary as well. At the Lord’s command, Israel established cities of refuge (Ex, 21:13; Num. 35:6-28; Deut. 4:41-43). Apostles, deacons and deaconesses, monks and saints built up ministries of sanctuary from the days of the early Church onward. Churches were often key strongholds along the Underground Railroad, in Nazi-occupied Europe, and for immigrants from Latin America. The Church has welcomed the displaced since its earliest years, even when it was itself a very palpably alien body.
Wiring money and shipping good abroad is the order of the day. Repatriation to home countries is the international community’s preference, especially after 9/11. But in light of the desperate, urgent need for many refugees to find a new home, a new sanctuary, we the Church should ask why, when, and how we can tear down barriers and build up relationships, and in every case act in the best interest of the poor and downtrodden.
Resettlement is not the only way to be compassionate toward refugees. It is often not even the best way. But it is one way, and can be very good and from the Lord. We should pursue it. And in resettling refugees, the Church can have open doors. We can have open hands. We can love and give.
Remember what Jesus was. What would we do if he was in flight today? What would we do if every refugee was Jesus? We might be quicker to welcome him.
Less strategizing, more praying. Less talk, more movement. Less waiting, more welcome.
[1] Drawn in part from the Swanwick Consulation. Digest of the 1966 World Consultation on Inter-Church Aid at Swanwick, Great Britain. World Council of Churches. p. 108.
[2] James Garbarino. “Developmental Consequences of Living in Dangerous and Unstable Environments: The Situation of Refugee Children”. 2nd ed. Geneva: International Catholic Child Bureau. 1994.
[3] Guglielmo Schinina, Sonali Sharma, Olga Gorbacheva, and Anit Kumar Mishra. “Who Am I? Assessment of Psychological Needs and Suicide Risk Factors Among Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal and After the Third Country Resettlement”. International Organization for Migration. 2011.
[4] Heidi Ellis. “Suicide Among Resettled Refugees: Understanding the Social and Cultural Context for Prevention Strategies”. Refugee Health Technical Assistance Center. May 17, 2011.
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