The suffering of refugees should elicit mercy, not fear
His big, brown hands clutch the tiny, pale infant against his chest. The grief in his eyes is unmistakable. She cradles her baby under a plastic tarp in a makeshift shelter hoping to keep him safe in the squalor of the camp. They are burying another family member in earth that is far from home.
These pictures capture the plight of the Rohingya, the persecuted Muslim minority being driven from their villages in Myanmar (formerly Burma). Some 400,000 have fled to neighboring Bangladesh leaving behind their torched homes and the bodies of loved ones gunned down in transit.
These pictures capture the plight of refugees. Being a refugee means experiencing loss after loss after loss. Loss of home, loss of loved ones, loss of the familiar. For one refugee I met this year, a slender 17-yearold Eritrean girl, being a refugee meant loss of education, four years’ worth to be exact, while she languished in an Ethiopian refugee camp. She’s now trying to start again while learning to speak English.
Are these the faces Americans imagine when they think of refugees? An anguished father? A brave girl? Do we see them at all or are they hidden by a kind of moral blind spot? Americans are the most generous people in the world in terms of private donations to philanthropy and government foreign aid, but we are remarkably unhospitable when it comes to welcoming refugees.
There are 22.5 million refugees worldwide. This year the U.S. will admit 50,000 refugees, less than half of last year’s total of 110,000. Some in the Trump administration want to reduce the number to 40,000 refugees. President Donald Trump believes the most cost effective and “safe, responsible, and humanitarian approach” to refugees is to provide assistance to hosting countries in the region rather than to resettle refugees here as he explained in his U.N. General Assembly speech.
Providing financial support to refugee host countries is certainly generous, but is it truly compassionate? Of the top 10 refugee hosting countries, only Germany is prosperous. The rest of are developing countries. Two of these small nations, Jordan and Lebanon, took in 1.7 million refugees since the Syrian crisis began. The United States, the third largest country by landmass and the wealthiest by far, has taken in 12,587 Syrians refugees. It would seem the least have given the most and those with the most, the least.
Part of the problem is that many Americans fear refugees even though no fatal attack on America has been committed by refugees. Islamist terror attacks in the U.S. have been perpetrated by radicalized U.S. citizens or foreign travelers with visas. Our system for vetting refugees works well. Likewise, in Europe, most terrorist attacks have been committed by individuals born or raised there.
Some Americans conflate refugees with other types of migrants, as President Trump seemed to do in his U.N. speech. But refugees aren’t seeking economic opportunity like legal or illegal immigrants do when they cross our borders: refugees are seeking simply to live without persecution and violence. How can this realization not inspire us to mercy?
I met another refugee this year. She was picking up her belongings at a church which had stored them while she was getting settled in a new apartment. The church, built in the 1950s and a bit threadbare, had made assisting refugees in Aurora a mission. The wall near the front door displayed scripture painted colorfully in a dozen languages. Truly, this congregation with its humble house of worship in a shabby Aurora neighborhood had the right response to refugees — “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give
you rest.” Mac Tully, CEO and Publisher; Justin Mock, Senior VP of Finance and CFO; Bill Reynolds, Senior VP, Circulation and Production; Judi Patterson, Vice President, Human Resources; Bob Kinney , Vice President, Information Technology