‘I WAS ASTRANGER AND YOU TOOK ME IN’
Offering sanctuary to refugees reflects our American values
I have watched during this campaign season as our nation’s refugee program has become a political punching bag. Much of what has been said about the program is misleading at best, and outright demagoguery at its worst. Texas leaders’ latest threat to leave the federal refugee program is just the latest salvo.
I served for just over a decade on the board of Interfaith Ministries of Houston, including a two-year stint as its chairman. Interfaith Ministries’ motto is “the strength of shared beliefs.” It promotes interfaith dialogue to demonstrate the commonality of many of the beliefs of many of the world’s great faith traditions.
It also performs service projects that exemplify those shared beliefs. One of its projects is a program that helps refugees, who the U.S. State Department has allowed to enter the country and who are relocating to Houston.
In recent years, the U.S. has granted refugee status or asylum to about 90,000 individuals each year. This is down significantly from earlier years. In 1980, for example, more than 200,000 were admitted. To qualify, the applicant must show that they are being persecuted in their home country because of their race, religion, nationality or
political opinion.
These refugees and asylees come from all over the world. In the past five years, the largest number of refugees came from Burma and the largest number of asylees came from China. Only about 4 percent of refugees from the same time period came from Syria. Historically, refugees from Cuba have been a large cohort. Many of the refugees come to our country to escape religious persecution. So far in 2016, 52 percent of refugees entering the U.S. have been Christians. About 40 percent of all refugees coming here are children.
Interfaith Ministries assists with refugee resettlement because welcoming strangers is a tenet of virtually every faith tradition. It is a core belief of the Abrahamic faiths. The Old and New Testaments and the Quran are particularly pointed in their admonishments regarding refugees. For example, Deuteronomy 10:17-19 says, “God ... shows no partiality ... He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. And you also are to love those who are aliens ... for you were once aliens in the land of Egypt.”
I am not suggesting that our faith means that we should be reckless about who we admit to our country or that we have any moral obligation to admit those intent on doing us harm. Certainly anyone wanting to enter this country should be vetted.
But contrary to current election rhetoric, refugees are extensively vetted before they can enter the country. To obtain refugee status an applicant must go through nine steps that include the collection of biometric data and background checks by the National Counterterrorism Center, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the State Department. The process typically takes 12-18 months.
Can the vetting process be improved? Perhaps. But of the 784,000 refugees admitted to the U.S. since 9/11, three have been charged with plotting a terrorist attack — that’s a 99.999 percent batting average. Nonetheless, if anyone has specific ideas about reasonably improving the vetting process, we should embrace those ideas because as we have seen that just one individual can do tremendous harm.
I recently saw Tucker Carlson on Fox News conducting an interview with a refugee advocate. He asked her what the benefit was to Americans from admitting any refugees. Unfortunately, the interviewee stumbled over her answer. Her answer should have been that we admit refugees because it is at the core of who we are as a nation and because the faiths followed by the vast majority of Americans demand it as a moral obligation.
The implication of Carlson’s question, that we should not admit refugees unless there is tangible benefit to us, is unAmerican and heretical to the faiths to which most of us adhere.
Most people of faith believe that someday each of us will be called on to account for our lives. For Christians, St. Matthew describes that day in the 25th chapter of his Gospel. In that passage Matthew describes a judgment day on which those standing before God will be divided into two groups, based on five criteria of how they treated their fellow human beings. The third of these tests is: “I was a stranger and you took me in.” According to St. Matthew, God’s judgment for those who refuse to take in strangers will be severe.
When we all stand before our maker on that day and he shows us that iconic image of the small child on the beach having drowned when his family attempted to escape, or, as in another memorable photo, of the bloody child riding in an ambulance after a bombing at- tack, what are we to say? I do not think an explanation that we did not allow innocent children from Syria to take refuge here from the hell into which their country has devolved because there was no benefit to us will carry much weight. So before we surrender to the hysteria and demagoguery about those displaced from their countries, perhaps we should pause and remember what we believe, as Americans and as people of faith.