Migrants are people


No family chooses to exile itself from all that is familiar without desperate cause. However, over several years past, migrants from troubled nations presenting themselves at the international borders of western countries have been looked upon as invading enemies.

Like non-people, they are shunted onto isolated offshore islands, sometimes even prevented from placing their feet on dry land, simply abandoned at sea in rickety boats like unwanted flotsam. Despite arriving from war-torn, debt-colonised, under-developing states, or simply fleeing common violence resulting from failed justice systems, few in western governments are asking why these people are leaving their homes.

A recent cartoon published in a British newspaper depicted a mother backgrounded by the slogan, Control Our Borders, leaning over the side of a coffin-shaped boat while struggling to hold the head of her child above the waves. The cartoon put a focus on the indifference of government authorities to the human dignity of people exposed to these terrible dangers on the open sea.

Ironically, these scenes of indifference are occurring at the same time atrocious events from our own past that saw people treated as non-people are receiving public condemnation.

However, what is most disturbing is the superficiality of discussions taking place between nations whose border doors are being knocked on by people seeking refuge. Few are questioning why they are arriving in flimsy crafts supplied by people traffickers plying an illegal trade that feeds on the victims of western governments’ inability to formulate or adhere to their own immigration policies.

During the Cold War, people fleeing the Soviet Union were accorded a welcome and resettlement in the west. However, with the collapse of Eastern Europe sympathies died, replaced by indifference and hostility.

Xenophobic headlines drip-fed fears of new arrivals. The old enemy of the Soviet Union, the picture frame through which western democracy defined itself, receded. It seemed the west needed a new enemy to redefine itself.

That new enemy appeared. It was immigration. It emerged to the extent it became the centre point of political campaigns in the European Union leading ultimately to the separation of children from their parents and the departure of Britain from the Union.

Some political leaders feed on the carrion of anti-immigration disinformation, xenophobia and cheap patriotism under the banner of safeguarding culture and tradition. Others in the Union posture as protectors of European Christian culture in their effort to exclude immigrants, although this attitude flies in the face of the fundamental Christian tenet to welcome the stranger.

Nevertheless, there is a beacon of hope on a dismal anti-immigrant horizon coming from a most unexpected source: Ireland. Ireland, a country whose people departed in their millions seeking solace in other parts of the world for more than 150 years has now become a nation that receives migrants. Membership of the Union changed the country. It suddenly became a destination of foreign investment to the extent it needed immigrants to service various areas of the economy.

In a few short years, with its long experience of people leaving the country, Ireland found itself coping with something quite different, people coming to stay. The skylines of its cities and countryside once packed with the crosses of Christian churches began to include the symbols of mosques and temples.

Tensions did arise out of anti-immigrant disinformation that the Irish themselves had been on the receiving end of over the previous century-and-a-half. Most Irish people were aware of the racist colonial images pushed by British periodicals depicting them as needing a civilising hand. However, amnesia can set in quickly and pockets of hostility did emerge over government plans to spend money on housing for those seeking asylum on Irish shores.

Nevertheless, proper preparation among local populations saw asylum seekers mostly welcomed, in spite of the toxic anti-immigrant headlines of tabloids stuck in a bygone era of the racism the Irish had learned from their historic partnering with the British in its empire-building.

The reality of the present world will be not just human migration, but all other types of migration, animal, plant, bird, insect and, of course, invisible pandemics, a wake-up call of an interdependent world. Populist exceptionalism, of whatever variety, is no longer a shield guaranteeing safety. Neither are borders with all the paraphernalia of modern technology.

The global home and a sense of belonging are in the words of Robert Frost: something we shouldn’t have to deserve. They are human rights in a global economy. In that scenario, major religions must continually ask global powers and institutions on what basis they think they can exclude people.

Columban Fr Bobby Gilmore lives and works in Ireland.

Listen to "Migrants are people"

Related links

The Far East - New Subscription

Code : 4

In Stock | MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTION

$6.00  

Annual subscription to The Far East magazine, published by St Columbans Mission Society 8 times per year. It features mission articles and photographs by Columban Missionaries from the countries where they work.

 

See all products