This past Sabbath, I had the opportunity to chat a bit about the European refugee crisis at church with a friend of mine who happens to be the only Norwegian-born American I know. As a result of rebuilding ties with her relatives, she pays attention to the local press of her home area in remote northern Norway, and she was particularly concerned about the geopolitics of the refugee crisis, particularly regarding the fact that Russia has been giving exit permits to refugees for Norway, which is a part of NATO, and not for Finland, which is not. While it struck me as somewhat ironic that someone who serves as a textbook example of a good immigrant would be so concerned about the presence of other immigrants in her native land, a land where she no longer resides but clearly thinks of and still identifies with, I was reminded of the fact that refugees inspire a great deal of varied and complicated emotional responses that are not strictly logical in their basis.

From time to time I write about the problems faced by refugees [1]. In many ways, the difference between an immigrant and a refugee is a subtle one, given that both words are part of the same semantic domain by which someone resides as an alien in a nation or region not of their birth or origin. For the purposes of this discussion, let us provisionally remark that immigrant is a broad term for someone who resides somewhere where they are not from, especially but not limited to international borders, while a refugee is someone who departs the area where they are from and goes to another in an atmosphere of crisis. For example, when I went to Thailand in 2011, I did so as a temporary immigrant, with a plan, with a good deal of preparation, and with a personal infrastructure in the area where I traveled, with a job to do. When I left Thailand more than a year later, I did so as a refugee in a context of personal and political crisis, ending up in an area I had never known, with the need to start again and build a life, thankfully with the help of the few friends in the area I had when I arrived and those I have made since then. When I think of a refugee, therefore, I do not do so merely from the point of view of someone who is detached from the situation, but from the point of someone who knows what it is like to lie awake terrified in one’s bed afraid of a visit from government agents, and what it is like to be made distinctly unwelcome where one is, and be faced with the need to seek a job and roots in an area in the aftermath of such difficult trauma.

Being a person who combines a fair amount of idealism with a fair amount of cynicism, I see the problem of refugees from several angles. Most of the immigrants I have met over the course of my life fit one of two categories. Some of these immigrants have been well-educated peers of mine who were classmates in my undergraduate or graduate studies with whom I expected to compete for highly technical jobs, people with strong family ties and a desire to and an ability to make the most of life, even if it meant a great deal of travel from the places of their origin to do so. As someone who has traveled many miles in life, I viewed their determination with respect and gladly helped them to understand, as best as I was able, the legal and cultural elements of their desire to settle in the United States and be fellow professionals of a similar kind to me, even if they were in some respects competition for the lifestyle and positions I have sought for myself. The rest of them were very poorly educated, often without an ability to speak or write in English, who sought to perform in agricultural or casual labor, often illegally. My desire for all men, women, and children to be able to better themselves contrasted with my desire that people should live orderly lives in accordance with reasonable and proper laws, and left me with an ambivalent feeling about their presence and the resulting chaos and corruption it signified. Given that companies often sought to pad their bottom line by deliberately exploiting such a population and their ignorance of and inability to take advantage of the laws of this country regarding wages and working conditions, and given that political elements sought to exploit them for support for dubious government programs only increased this concern.

In looking at a refugee, we must look at several elements. For one, we must seek to understand who the refugee is as a person. Are they who they present themselves to be? When seeking asylum in a country, immigrants may have to tailor their stories to those areas that attract the most sympathy and that lead to the most acceptance. For example, one of my high school Spanish teachers was a Cuban refugee to the United States who had left Cuba for economic reasons but who fabricated stories of political oppression in order to be accepted into the United States. Had he been a talented baseball or soccer player, no such subterfuge would have been necessary. In understanding what is really driving a refugee to depart their country, assuming that they are a refugee and not someone posing as one for nefarious purposes, we seek to view them as people and not merely as huddled masses yearning to be free. Yet we must also view them in the aggregate. After all, as is to be expected, refugees often dwell among others of the same background, whether it is in refugee camps or whether it is in areas with a strong immigrant community of people who are likely to understand and share their background, to make a foreign land seem a little less strange. Where there is little communication or integration between immigrant communities and the larger nation in which they are a part, or where an immigrant population becomes too large a percentage of a population in a given area, such refugees face difficulties in acculturating and being accepted in their adopted areas, where they may learn the language skills, cultural skills, and technical skills necessary to find good jobs and fit in among the population of their adopted lands.

Not all will see all of these aims as desirable. Some people, forgetting their own backgrounds, have little desire in accepting or encouraging strangers to become good neighbors and brethren. For example, one of my great-grandfathers was an Olympic class athlete who settled for several years in Canada, married a wife there, and was a respected immigrant in the area of Ontario where he lived, being of solid Eastern Ohio stock with roots in the United States going back to colonial times. Yet this same man was immensely hostile to other, more alien, immigrant peoples. He disparaged Germans, Jews (despite being part Jewish himself), and other ethnic minorities with bigoted terms of abuse, not recognizing that as someone who had been treated with respect as a talented immigrant, he in turn had a moral obligation to reciprocate that honor and respect to others in the same position as he had been, once he returned to the United States. Likewise, just as not all people who have established roots in a land are willing to accept strangers into their communities, so too not all strangers wish to acculturate, sometimes because they lack the confidence in their ability to pick up the requisite skills, and sometimes because their place here is one of deliberate sojourn with no intent to settle for good.

Another reason that makes it harder to care for refugees than for the wider body of immigrants as a whole is that refugees come with significant baggage. Part of this baggage consists in the trauma that impelled them to leave, be it natural disaster, personal or political crises, war, famine, plague, or economic disaster, or any other related horror. Even refugees who come from relatively privileged backgrounds or who come with a great deal of skills also come with damage, the sort of damage that one gets from trauma—hypervigilance, hyperarousal, a high degree of nervousness and anxiety, a lack of trust, a tendency to quickly go into fight or flight or freeze mode, and difficulties sleeping and feeling at rest and at peace. These matters take time to heal; sometimes they never do. At any rate, these problems, however well they are dealt with, or whatever sort of gifts and talents counteract such difficulties, represent something that a community that is accepting refugees, however grudgingly, has to deal with. It is easy to resent people who, through little or no fault of their own, are the harbingers of trouble and who bear the wounds and scars of their torment. Yet such resentment is counterproductive for everyone involved, for many refugees are motivated by a strong desire to prove themselves worthy of being accepted that can serve for the benefit of the communities and institutions to which they belong, and often the intense drive and determination of refugees and other immigrants can improve the appreciation of those who may take their blessings for granted, without thought and reflection and gratitude.

Beneath our surface appearance, behind our varied and complicated backgrounds, behind the many and terrible circumstances that lead people to flee their homeland and seek another, behind all of the odd ways that immigrants bring with them from their own cultures, we are all sons and daughters of the same Heavenly Father. None of us is immune from the experience of leaving or being expelled out of our homes for one reason or another and facing the difficult experience of being a stranger in a strange land, whether we choose that experience for a season or whether it is forced upon us in a manner and time not of our choosing. Seeing, therefore, that we are all under the same threat of natural disasters or political disfavor or economic or personal disaster, or even simple wanderlust, we therefore have a duty and an obligation to treat the stranger and foreigner among us with kindness and understanding, setting an example of orderly conduct and obedience to law and instructing others to follow that example. We may not have asked for either being or being around a refugee, but we can behave as graciously as we can in whatever condition we find ourselves in. This world is full of enough burdens as it is, without our adding to it as a result of our folly and misguided resentment.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/06/14/you-dont-have-to-live-like-a-refugee/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/on-the-mae-surin-refugee-camp/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/into-the-refugee-camps/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/a-settled-home-for-the-refugees/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/book-review-blockaders-refugees-contrabands/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/09/13/so-far-from-home/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/forsan-et-haec-olim-meminisse-iuvabit/