Reader Writes April 2024

Migration! It’s a big issue, and in a fraught election year in both America and Europe, it may take

centre stage and even drive the results to where liberal minded voters hope never to find

themselves. Christians, especially, have to think through the principles before they can hope to

withstand the strong currents both in their communities and nationally. Let’s just remind

ourselves of the historical backdrop. In 2015 Angela Merkel led Germany’s principled acceptance

of a million Syrian refugees, and not without significant misgivings and opposition that has fuelled

the rapid growth of far right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD). But go back to 1945 and in the

mess and suffering of the end of WW2, some 15 million ethnic Germans, long time settlers and

residents, were driven out of what is now Poland and the Czech Republic.

The AfD has recently got itself into the news for apparently serious secret planning for possible

“remigration” of non-ethnic Germans. Their rhetoric and spite cover the full spectrum of

intolerance, even hate, for migrants identified as foreigners. But what admiration so many of us

felt for German opposition to the Right’s dangerous and hateful philosophy; a hundred thousand

people came out on the streets of Berlin, and a quarter of a million in Munich. A prominent

placard read “AfD ist so 1933”; it’s been often said that those who cannot remember the past are

condemned to repeat it.

Now, alas, far closer to home. If you haven’t seen Ken Loach’s latest drama The Old Oak (pub) I

recommend it. Set in the Brexit atmosphere of 2016 in the NE of England, two traumatised

communities collide; Syrian refugees, almost entirely women and children escaping from the

destruction of places like Aleppo, and the local underemployed remnants of what had been a coal

mining community. We see plenty of ignorance and bigotry, then we see some heroic goodness.

The conclusion suggests hope and redemption, notably centred around the publican’s and the

refugees’ conviction that those who eat together stick together.

Not one of us can be smug about immigrants, especially living in a market town in the Welsh

marches. No high tide of foreigners has yet reached us in our living experience, but consider the

forecasts. The World Bank expects there to be 260 million climate refugees by 2030, and up to 1.2

billion by 2050. Right leaning politicians like to distinguish what they call economic migrants from

“real” refugees, but climate breakdown is already grinding down the rural poor across central Asia

and the African Sahel. And, painfully, we can’t talk about migration without the word complicity,

whether through mistaken wars in our name or our unrestrained carbon use.

There is much we can do to rein in that complicity, even when it appears to hold little hope. But,

whether hair shirt climate activist or frequent flier, we can remind ourselves that we are, for the

time being, exceptionally lucky, and we need to be principled and generous towards immigrants.

Jesus put it simply and forthrightly; the most important commandment is to love the Lord your

God with all you heart and all your soul and all your strength, and the second is “to love your

neighbour as yourself”. When Afghanis or Africans reach our community by whatever desperate

route or for whatever desperate reason, they are our neighbours.

Robert MacCurrach