Taking care of suffering refugees is a moral duty

Mary Sanchez

President Donald Trump’s controversial executive order halting the resettlement of refugees in America and banning travelers from seven Islamic countries has raised concern not only among liberals, civil libertarians and jurists. It has also led a group of prominent evangelical Christian leaders to remonstrate publicly with the president who rode to office in large part on the votes of their flock.

More than 500 of the nation’s most prominent evangelical pastors, authors and other worthies signed a letter asking Trump to reconsider the order. The letter, published in The Washington Post last week as a fullpage ad, reminded the president of the Bible’s story of the Good Samaritan, in which “Jesus makes it clear that our ‘neighbor’ includes the stranger and anyone fleeing persecution and violence, regardless of their faith or country.”

It’s heartening, amid the wasteland of cynicism that our politics has become, to see church leaders going out on a limb, challenging not only Trump but all Chris- tians in our body politic to attend to central call of their faith — “to serve the suffering” — even though it involves sacrifice and risk.

The clergy are looking at the big picture. We are in the midst of the largest global migration upheaval since World War II. At least 60 million people around the world have been forcibly displaced from their native countries, according to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a nonprofit group that has been aiding refugees for more than a century.

So it’s not a great time for America, long a beacon to the world’s oppressed, to close its doors.

Resettlement work is labor- and time-intensive. It’s social work, largely, with case managers helping refugees move into apartments, get training and find jobs, enrolling children in school and helping people learn English. Refugees arrive in their host cities often with little more than official documents stuffed in a plastic bag.

Refugees are not immigrants in the typical sense. Under a 1980 U.S. law, refugees must prove they have been persecuted or have reason to fear it due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or association with a particular social group. Essentially, refugees must prove they are fleeing for their lives.

There is a strain of ethnic nationalism in Ameri- can politics that does not care about the plight of the world’s refugees and intends to limit immigration to the U.S., legal and undocumented alike, only pretending to differentiate between the two. Trump came to power as the avatar of this ideology.

Here’s the statistic that ought to make us all pause: Fewer than 0.1 percent of the world’s displaced people — yes, those seen on the news floating precariously toward European shores and trudging for miles with their children strapped to their backs — are ever resettled through refugee networks. According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, most live marginal lives in urban areas as unrecognized residents, while many others languish for years in primitive and unsafe camps.

That sheds damning light on Trump’s refugee policy. Amid incredible human suffering, the U.S. president has deemed that we should do less, not more.