There could be little doubt that an enormous variety of individuals are migrating all over the world today. The latest available figures for international migration from the International Organization for Migration, that are for mid-2024, give the variety of migrants worldwide at around 304 million.
The precise reasons that folks migrate are unique to every individual migrant, but broadly speaking we will say that folks migrate for each positive and negative reasons. Positively, people migrate to try to higher the lives of themselves and their families. Negatively, people migrate because they’re expelled from where they’ve been living or because they need to escape poverty, war and persecution or various kinds.
Just because the causes of migration are various, so are attitudes to migration. However, generally speaking, we will say that the arrival of migrants is a controversial issue in all those countries to which large numbers of migrants have moved, or to which they’re searching for to maneuver.
This is true, for instance, within the case of individuals from Zimbabwe or Mozambique migrating to South Africa, Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar migrating to Bangladesh, people from Southern and Central America migrating to the United States and other people from Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe migrating to the countries of Western Europe, including the United Kingdom.
In all these countries to which migrants are moving, the questions of whether migrants ought to be admitted and in what circumstances is one on which each politicians and the population at large are divided and the Christian churches share this division.
In this text I need to explore the theological framework inside which Christians should take into consideration these divisive questions and contribute to public discussion of them.
To start off with, I need to suggest that there are 4 non-negotiable points on which Christians should agree.
The first is that the Bible teaches us that every one human beings, no matter sex and nationality have the identical intrinsic dignity because they’re all made within the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26-27).
In addition, the Bible also teaches that the final command to like our neighbours as ourselves (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 19:19, Romans 13:9) has the particular meaning that we should always treat the foreigners sojourning in our midst with love and justice. As the ‘Theology of Migration’ set out by the Reformed Church of America puts it:
“‘Do not ‘oppress,’ ‘detest,’ or ‘pervert’ the justice as a result of the foreigner or sojourner are words repeated throughout the Bible, demonstrating unequivocally that God loves people on the move and desires them to be protected and treated with dignity and respect. The Bible also makes it clear that those that do oppress, detest, or pervert justice as a result of the foreigner or sojourner are to be cursed (Exodus 22, Exodus 23, Deuteronomy 23, Deuteronomy 24, Jeremiah 7, Jeremiah 22, Zechariah 7, Ezekiel 22, Psalm 146, Malachi 3, Deuteronomy 27, Matthew 25).
“The Bible goes further by stating that the foreigner ought to be treated similar to residents of the land (Exodus 12, Leviticus 24, Numbers 9, Numbers 15, Ezekiel 47), and that foreigners in need ought to be taken care of, whether or not they need a spot of refuge (Numbers 35, Joshua 20) or food and other provisions to survive (Leviticus 19, Leviticus 23, Deuteronomy 14, Deuteronomy 24, Deuteronomy 26).”
The second is that we’d like to avoid hypocrisy when discussing migration. In the words of the biblical scholar and theologian Chris Wright:
“What strikes me most uncomfortably when the problem of migrants and refugees is hotly debated in some western countries is the blatant hypocrisy of the rhetoric. Almost all western nations have experienced centuries of immigration. Some, just like the USA and Australia, are what they’re today almost entirely as the results of immigration — a few of it soaked in blood and oppression. Whole areas of the national economy within the UK couldn’t function were it not for imported labour in any respect levels. Yet someway, some political voices in these countries and their policies need to pull up the drawbridge and keep others out. There can be hypocrisy within the language used. Why, for instance, are Britishers who’ve gone overseas, many in quest of higher economic opportunities, known as ‘expatriates’, or ‘expats’, while all those that come to our country searching for the identical, are vilified as ‘migrants?’
“And there’s the hypocrisy embedded in the shortage of any historical perspective. Five hundred years ago, Europeans decided to migrate. En masse they exported themselves everywhere in the world, sometimes conquering, sometimes colonizing, often each. They asked no permission and needed no visas. They just went and took and stayed — for hundreds of years. And now the world bounces back. Not all, but a tragically great amount of the crises in war torn regions of the world could be traced to the gross historical injustices of European expansionism, colonialism, the slave trade, the carve up of Africa after which the Middle East after the First World War, and other evils perpetrated on the world.”
These observations may not provide answers to the thousands and thousands of refugees pouring into Europe from the Middle East, he acknowledges, but they “should at the least generate some humility and fewer moral superiority in the way in which we attempt to talk concerning the issue, and pray into it.”
The third point, nonetheless, is that there’s a Christian moral case for policing the borders of the nation states which God has called into existence all over the world by placing restrictions on immigration. In the words of the ethicist Nigel Biggar in Between Kin and Cosmopolis – An Ethic of the Nation:
“Borders exist primarily to define the territory inside which a people is free to develop its own lifestyle as best it will possibly. Unrestricted mobility would permit uncontrolled immigration that might naturally be experienced by natives as an invasion. Successful, peaceful immigration must be negotiated: immigrants must display a willingness to respect the ways of their native hosts and to a certain extent abide by them; natives have to be given time to accommodate recent residents and their foreignness.”
An identical point is made by Brad Littlejohn in his essay, ‘Theology of Immigration.’ Littlejohn notes that those advocating a liberal immigration policy make appeal to the necessity to indicate hospitality to strangers (Hebrews 13:2). However, he then goes on to ask:
“But does the appeal to ‘hospitality’ entail a call to abolish or open our borders? To show hospitality in my own residence, I should have a house—that’s, a house with 4 partitions and doors that open, close, and (ideally) could be locked. To invite people into this home, I have to maintain a transparent distinction between residents and guests. If every passing drug addict can crash on the couch, I could also be running a worthy ministry, but I’m not maintaining a house. In fact, if I even have children … I’ll know instinctively that I have to sometimes put their needs above the practice of hospitality. Some strangers will likely be too dangerous to permit into my home. Others could also be protected enough, but they may compete for the limited temporal and financial resources that I owe to my wife and kids before all others. Of course, a residence totally closed to neighbours and strangers would likewise be a travesty; it may be a phenomenal house, but we might rightly hesitate to call it a house.
“Hospitality, then, is a necessary function of a house, and yet a vast, revolving-door hospitality would quickly destroy most homes. The lesson is evident enough: a nation, likewise, should be open to strangers, but it’s going to soon have little to supply either residents or visitors if it doesn’t establish appropriate limits. A nation without boundary lines isn’t any higher than a house without partitions. Common sense, subsequently, shows us that, like every creaturely good, hospitality (whether by household or nation) is made possible only by recognition of its limits.”
In terms of the present debate on this country about immigration, what these 4 points mean could be listed as follows:
Firstly, all human beings, including those that have migrated to this country, or who’re searching for to achieve this have to be treated with love and justice as neighbours who’ve been created by God in his image and likeness.
Secondly, which means that we should always in principle be prepared to let people immigrate to this country who’ve reason to want to achieve this, in the identical way that folks from this country have migrated to other countries previously and proceed to achieve this today.
However, this doesn’t mean that we should always have completely porous borders. Just as it could be mandatory to limit the number of people that come right into a family home, so also it could be mandatory to limit the number of people that come right into a national home. This implies that there have to be appropriate limits to migration.
What results from that is that immigration policy must be determined by the exercise of the virtue which the Christian tradition calls prudence, the virtue that consists within the smart application of ethical principles in a given situation. To quote Littlejohn again, we must live in accord with national borders and “care as best we will, first for our own, after which for our neighbors and the needy of each society”.
He continues, “Only prudence can determine the suitable degree of hospitality. How often should the professor have college students over for dinner? Should a family soak up a foster child—and even adopt? Even for my family I cannot answer questions resembling these within the abstract. The answer now could also be different five years hence. Just so, each nation must resolve what number of visitors or immigrants to confess, weighing its own need for security, prosperity, and cultural cohesion. Even essentially the most philanthropic soul must consider limits. In order to supply the most effective home for native-born and immigrants alike over the long run, strict limits on the variety of newcomers could also be mandatory.”
In terms of motion which means that Christians must reject the simplistic slogans offered by those on either side of the present immigration debate. They cannot rightly align themselves either with those that need to say, ‘No foreigners welcome here,’ nor can they align themselves with those that need to say ‘All foreigners welcome here.’
What they should say as an alternative is that foreigners ought to be welcomed, but that the variety of foreigners who’re allowed to make Britain their home has necessarily got to be limited (the country couldn’t absorb 304 million migrants should all of them wish to return). Furthermore, justice demands that decisions about who’re allowed to make Britain their home have to be made on an affordable and consistent basis and that the burden of providing housing and other support for migrants must be acknowledged and equitably shared across the country as an entire.
This form of nuanced answer will not be what people need to hear, but it surely is the best answer for Christians to present after they are asked where they stand on the problem of immigration.
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