Malta and the immigrant crisis
From a tiny country that’s been at the heart of the Mediterranean migration crisis, Church Mission Society mission partner Doug Marshall examines what the Christian response could be
In a top ten list of the UK’s most unpredictable controversies of 2015, the Songs of Praise segment from the migrant church in Calais must be right up there.
But in a top ten list of refugee-hosting countries, the UK is nowhere to be seen. So, in search of an on-theground perspective of the migrant crisis, we turned to Malta, the country at number ten on that list, and the only European country apart from Sweden.
Here, Doug Marshall, a Church Mission Society mission partner, is trying to advocate for a Christ-like response in a tiny country that has had to cope with more than 18,000 arrivals since 2002.
In the last two years numbers have dropped due to the European Mare Nostrum naval operation that started up after the October 2013 disaster off Lampedusa. But that has still left one of the most densely populated countries in the world with a big proportion of ‘people of concern’ as designated by the UNHCR.
Challenging assumptions
The concerns of the Maltese population are perhaps understandable – and familiar to many in the UK, but Doug says, “We always encourage people to follow the example of Christ and if that means to challenge your cultural assumptions, you need to do that. It’s a very difficult thing.
“We do see Maltese people saying we want to follow the example of Christ. When the Bible says to love the alien, we want to do that. There are some outstanding people whose faith shines through the cultural barriers.”
Typically when people arrive they are issued a removal order – basically repatriation order, Doug explains. Asylum seekers, or ‘irregular migrants’, are then placed in detention. Once in detention they can apply for asylum. These days the timescales are much shorter than they were. Typically you used to spend a year and if you were approved you were released, and if not you were kept a further six months.
Many others are placed in open centres with basic amenities and free to come and go as they please. But it’s very difficult to get the work, and a place to live, which means they can’t leave the centres.
“Financially it’s very difficult to do that,” says Doug, “so connecting people to the right organisations and institutions is also part of what we do – so they can start the process of getting back to a semblance of normality.”
But who are these people seeking asylum?
Meeting migrants
“I’ve met a Christian man from a very strong Islamic country where he was basically threatened with his life for leaving the faith. He is a man who had to move away from everything he knew and seek refuge. And so despite Malta being a more difficult place to live for him at least it is safe.
“That is something I think we don’t understand in the West. Because we have freedom to believe and follow the faith that we choose or are drawn to, we don’t understand what it means to move away from something and be threatened with your life for having done so.”
There are others who move just because of sheer economic necessity. “Families often send the brightest children to Europe so they can get a job and send the remittances home and their family can survive. And failure to do so does not just bring shame, but means that people literally don’t have money to live.
“People who have come through the Sahara to Libya and onto the boat and arrived in Europe – whatever initially displaced them, that journey has made them vulnerable and at risk. Oftentimes they need counselling and support.”
Resist the rhetoric
Doug is leading a team for the International Association for Refugees precisely to provide some of that support. It is, he repeatedly says, “not rocket science: just be a person to a person!”
Doug’s team are working with local churches on microfinance initiatives and the like, but the main thing is “just being available and ready to meet people and show them that dignity that they are acknowledged – which is not often something they find.”
As for the global explosion in forcibly displaced people, Marshall admits he doesn’t have answers – but ignoring it is part of the problem.
Whether it be Malta or Calais, the challenge to Christians, Marshall says, is to stand in the refugees’ shoes. “There’s been a lot of very anti-immigration rhetoric; a lot of it is incorrect and it stirs people up.
These people are desperate and if we were in their shoes we would do the same thing, We would be waiting for a truck to get across to the UK. We would do what we had to do.”
For Marshall it’s clear what the church’s role is: “We have a responsibility to be Christ, to follow what’s been given us in the word of God, and that is to look after the alien and the stranger.
“God doesn’t joke around. If he has given us that to
do, then we should do it. And he will sustain us in that. So we’ve got to ask ourselves some hard questions as a church. This is not make-believe, it’s real.”
What is God doing?
As Songs of Praise showed, there are many Christians among those migrating to Europe. And this is one reason why Church Mission Society has an almost expectant view of the ‘migrant crisis’.
Philip Mounstephen, executive leader of CMS, is urging Christians to to ask: what is God doing in all this migration?
“There are huge gifts in the global church already present in Europe,” he says. “Certainly in Anglican terms, a significant proportion of congregations in Europe are made up of people whose origins are elsewhere in the world.”
He sees not a crisis, but a possibly significant opportunity: “There’s a terrific arrogance in the church in Europe and the UK which thinks that the solution to its own problems lies within itself. It doesn’t. It relies on the release of the gifts of the global church into this context.”