Beyond the net positive economic impact of uprooted peoples resettled in our countries, refugees can bless our communities culturally.
When God’s people were in exile in a foreign land, swept off to Babylon in captivity, they were able and ready to contribute to their new homes. “Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jer. 29:7).
Not all refugees welcomed into the West are brothers in faith, but the importance of seeking the good of the city and a common welfare between natives and aliens is true for displaced persons of all communities. We should not believe we alone are blessing foreigners; they too are blessing us. And, if we open our eyes, we’ll see they have much to offer.
Balancing Values
For one things, many refugees bring a deep sense of values.
There will naturally be some dissonance across cultural chasms and we need not fake excitement about all foreign values (for instance, discriminatory gender norms), but the truth is that uprooted peoples tend to introduce a deep commitment to many healthy values that are often overlooked in the West. The importance of family, community, loyalty, modesty, humility, honor, sacrifice—such are more readily apparent in peoples from the global South and East than in people from the West. This is not to say the Western value counterparts are inherently bad, but surely we can acknowledge that a sense of duty to others should temper our radical individualism, a public modesty might well inform our present love-affair with brazen and flamboyant sensuality, and an emphasis on integrity and decency could help to balance the West’s psyche of “success”-at-any-cost.
A Syrian refugee working in a grassroots peace organization told me how years of war helped him become socially active in the cause of peacebuilding. Refugee men in general are unambiguously more affectionate toward their children than is the norm for Western men. Materialism is not a priority for most. Fealty and dedication to God is a lifestyle. I am, of course, speaking generally, but the fact of healthy, even holy, values in many uprooted peoples is something I cannot deny. Many of these values are Christian, whether they would call them such or not.
When visiting refugees in their tents and apartments, I have often wondered if their postures—often grateful and firm in faith—would be the same for Westerners in equivalent circumstances. Again, we should not fall into East-versus-West stereotypes, nor should we romanticize the “traditional” over the “progressive”. There are good and bad in both. But there is something obvious and affecting about the way refugees interact in foreign cultures and the value sets they bring with them that can permeate their neighborhoods. The West should be observant, testing values, but also open to receive the many good gifts refugees bring into our culture.
Multiculturalism and Solidarity
Not long ago, I was chatting with a Christian refugee couple from Congo. Hoping to find a job placement for the wife, I asked what her skills and hobbies were. Most refugees say things like mechanics, agriculture, computers, cooking, soccer, and singing. This woman looked at me ponderously for a long moment before answering with a single word: “Praying.”
Here she was, dressed in a vibrant African pattern, whispering and giggling with her husband in their native language, practicing hospitality by offering me what food she had, and with the gentle innocence of a young woman uprooted by war, she tells me that her most notable skill and hobby is prayer. What culture is this? What a beam of sunlight! What a powerful point of connection between worlds, between nations, between peoples, between humanity and God.
Almost by definition, when refugees come, they are fiscally poor. But they are never poor in culture. Just as diversity is a boon for the economy, it is the wealth of society.
The multiculturalism that comes with welcoming refugees is a means of balancing and promoting respect for difference. Variation in religion, politics, giftings, and culture naturally endows host countries with a sense of the grandness in God’s design for people, the unity in diversity. Through refugees, we are introduced to new civilizations and new worlds. We can become students, learning a great deal from refugees whom God has given very different life experiences.
This multiplicity is a treasure for the Church as much as for society. Arab prayers, black prayers, South Asian prayers—they are not the same as rich white American and Canadian prayers. The music is different. The sway of bodies and the meditation of hearts look and feel different. The emphases of our sermons, our understandings of the Word, our experiences of God are all varied. We come to know God better by understanding our fellow human’s experience of God. And all this richness reflects our own stories, coming together in one swirling cloud of incense before the mercy seat of God, reflecting also his nature and the praise of his vast and blanketing holiness.
Multiculturalism in the Church and in the culture also do away with stagnation. With a constant flow of migrants, we will always be challenged to grow the good in society, rid ourselves of the bad, and adopt the better. New ideas, new foods, new songs, new dances, new products, new voices—such are the blessings of refugees on the nations that open their doors.
Additionally, hospitality toward the dispossessed presents us with a unique opportunity for solidarity with the weak Jesus came to make strong. Not only do we see and interact with the people who fled war, persecution, and famine—we are granted a larger window into the places where those problems run wild. We see in the lives of refugees real problems in the world. Presidents and premiers do not see the injustices of society the way homeless and stateless people do. We can learn more from refugees about violence in Burma and Honduras and Iraq than we can from the news. We are closer to camps, child soldiers, orphans, and the poor when we make neighbors of the refugees among us.
Cultural Innovation
If refugees bring new acumen and outside-the-box thinking to business, they bring it in equal measure to culture. Tending to be younger and having larger families, they enliven and refresh society. They are social innovators.
We need hardly look beyond the list of refugees who have shaped our own society: scientists and thinkers like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Politicians and diplomats like Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright, and Raphael Lemkin. Entrepreneurs like Sergei Brin, Ralph Baer, Sir Montague Burton, and Sieng van Tran. Artists, musicians, and athletes galore.
Our palates would be blander, our radios duller, our knowledge dimmer, our products less powerful, our education less affecting, our world less explored were it not for refugees who were given a chance to flourish.
You yourself are the product of refugeeism somewhere up the tree. Your identity, insight, and creativity come out of that. Refugees are invaluable in keeping the culture fresh and growing, and in making our world a much more beautiful and constantly new place to live.
Reciprocity
It’s a funny thing how a culture of compassion breeds compassion. As the West, and the Church in particular, extends the grace of hospitality to refugees, we are also able to receive their grace and watch them press the bounds of their service far beyond national borders.
Refugees don’t forget who helped them. At the resettlement agency where I work, many of the interpreters and even some of the staff are refugees themselves. I know of churches that pay the tuition for refugees to go to seminary. When they are finished, those refugees bless their community in the West or return to their underserved homelands to be pastors. Likewise, there are individuals and churches that sponsor medical and law students who end up going back to places that need good doctors and honest lawyers. They contribute here, and then contribute even more mightily in their country of origin, equipped in new trades and able to train still more doctors and lawyers, activists and NGO workers, businesspeople and pastors.
A seemingly smaller example sticks with me. I was on my way to O’Hare airport to pick up a family of Pakistani refugees. They had a friend in Chicago who came to the United States as a refugee twenty years earlier. The US tie jumped in the van with me and I was immediately struck by his kindness, his humility, his maneuvering of American culture without forgetting his own. We stopped at a red light and, as often happens in the city, a homeless man approached the car, begging. My response was to cast a sideways half-smile and then look forward. The former refugee beside me, however, told me to stop, reached into his wallet and passed me a handful of bills to give the beggar. Here was a former refugee on his way to welcome more refugees, schooling me on what it truly means to be compassionate, to be generous, to give of oneself. He knew something about what the homeless man was experiencing better than I ever could, and he practiced a joyful generosity drawn not only from what he’d been given, but from what he had experienced.
The generosity we show to refugees now, as a Church and as a society, does not return empty. It has a way of multiplying, going out to the masses and even returning to us. Of course, it is not the goal of our compassion to be shown compassion in return, but it is a common fruit. Love teaches love. So love well.
Pure Opportunity
The culture does not think in this way, but the Church recognizes that a special thing refugees contribute to our society is their special need. The Church has a mission to love God, and part of that leads us to meet the needs of people—spiritual, physical, relational.
True, there are abundant needs already in the West, but the presence of sojourners among us is a fastball down the middle of the plate. There are needs here that God wants the Church to meet.
We are to be like Job: “But no stranger had to spend the night in the street, for my door was always open to the traveler” (Job 31:32). We are to entertain strangers and angels. (Hebrews 13:2). We are to choose the fasting of Isaiah:
To loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, and set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? – Isaiah 58:6-7
Refugees contribute an opportunity for the Church to be the Church. To care for widows and orphans. To love the stranger.
The people we serve should not abuse our hospitality, but that is ultimately beside the point. We are to be hospitable anyway.
The Church needs need. It is helped by helping. And when we see refugees, we should be honored not only to befriend them, but to come alongside them. What grace it is that they would come to us with their needs, that God would choose us, in this time and at this place, to step into the gap, to be light to those stumbling through whatever darkness haunts them.
In the final analysis, the Church must not be welcoming of refugees because of what they can give us. We can be welcoming because our God was welcoming to us, because it is beautiful, true, and good, and because we have a mission for it. And in view of the unbounded contribution of refugees to our society, our culture, our churches, schools, main streets, and neighborhoods, we can rejoice even more fervently at the call to be one with the uprooted.
Share this: