The Rights of Refugees:
One in Every 50 People Is Uprooted!

Factors That Create Refugees
Labeling the Uprooted
Fears and Solutions
Role of the Church

One in every 50 human beings is now a refugee, a migrant, an asylum seeker, or a displaced person. Most of these uprooted people are women, children, and youth. A very small percentage of them have sought refuge within the United States, and some live precariously in our neighborhoods and cities.

In Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere, people are being torn from their homes by violence and despair. But behind the massive global dimensions of today's uprootedness are individual stories of terror and hope, triumph and disappointment.

"I lost my home, my community--everything," said a refugee woman from Rwanda. "I worry about my husband and my children who are not with me. Will our family ever be together again? I am grateful to be away from the killing but I do not feel safe. Many women in this camp have been raped."

"When the war broke out," said a Bosnian refugee who is a physician, "I received telephone calls from my patients telling me to be careful because they would kill my husband and rape me and my daughter. Some threats came from people who had been patients for 15 years."

"I cry every night," said a domestic worker in California. "No woman should be forced to make such a choice. Parents don't know how lucky they are to be able to kiss and hug their children every day. My employers don't even know that I am a mother."

"I can't bear this life of hiding any more," said an asylum seeker in England. "They say that I am not a refugee, but I will be imprisoned, tortured, even killed if I return. They ask for proof that my life is in danger. I worry about my wife and children back home."

"I went to play with my friends close to my house," a 10-year-old Cambodian girl reported. "All of a sudden BOOM! My right leg was blown off by a landmine. Sometimes I dream I have my two legs again."

"We had dreams," observed an Ethiopian refugee resettled in the United States, "but we can only cope with what is happening now. The racism we face in the streets, while shopping, and at work and the racism our children experience in school is abusive."

A pastor from Rwanda asked: "Where were the church leaders before and when the killing started?"

Factors That Create Refugees

We need to understand the complexity of the causes that create refugees, driving people out of their own countries, as well as the conditions that force people to become displaced within their countries or to flee and seek asylum elsewhere. All the causes that uproot people violate basic human rights and reveal the inability or unwillingness of governments to protect people.

Oppression of minority points of view, suppression of dissent, and militarism represent political causes. The unequal distribution of resources, the global restructuring of economies by economic elites, and the resultant poverty for whole populations are economic factors. Extreme nationalism or nativism (fostering the fear of foreigners), enemy-imaging, and other harmful types of stereotyping exemplify the use of racial or ethnic excuses to make people enemies and hence targets of repression. Appeals to nativism have changed the very nature of war so that human displacement, once a result of war, is now a strategy of warfare. Rwanda and Kosovo are devastating examples.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that there are 50 million uprooted people in the world.

• There are 1.7 million refugees in Central Africa.
• Around 1 million people are displaced in Angola.
• In a 30-month period, 1.7 million refugees from Mozambique in southeastern Africa walked or used ferries, cars, trains, and planes to go back home.
• There are 1.2 million refugees and displaced persons still waiting to return to their homes in Bosnia.
• While 4 million Afghan refugees have returned to Afghanistan, 2.6 million Afghan refugees are still in Pakistan and Iran.
• More than 100,000 Burmese refugees live in 14 camps along Myanmar's border with Thailand.
• Between 500,000 and 1 million people have been internally displaced in Colombia by years of civil conflict.
• The United States deported 300,000 undocumented immigrants in the last two years--more than twice the number sent back in the previous two years.
• About 16,000 asylum seekers are in detention in the United States. More than 3000 are being detained indefinitely, with little chance to be released.

Labeling the Uprooted

Those who have benefited from events that uproot people, along with governments which have been unwilling or unable to deal with the consequences, have further deepened the crisis of uprootedness. One harmful practice has been the different ways people who have been forced to migrate are labeled. Words and their definitions have become critically important in determining the difference not only between mere subsistence and sustainable family life but even between life and death. Here are some labels and their definitions.

Refugees are people fleeing their country of origin because of a well- founded fear of persecution or death for reasons of race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, or membership in a particular social group or political party. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is mandated to protect and assist them in countries of asylum.

Asylum seekers have fled their home country for the same reasons as refugees, have entered a country of asylum, and are seeking legal recognition from the host government. Asylum seekers differ from refugees in that they have not been granted "refugee status" through some internationally recognized process.

Internally displaced persons are people who have been forced to flee from their homes but who have not crossed international borders. Therefore they do not receive protection or assistance from the UNHCR.

Economic migrants are people seeking economic opportunity that is not available in their home country for various economic and political reasons.

Undocumented immigrants are people who enter a country without the permission of its government.

Immigrants are noncitizens who are given legal permission to enter and settle in a country other than the one in which they were born.

While governments take these definitions very seriously, God does not. Increasingly, churches are using the term uprooted for all who are forced to leave their homes--be they refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, or internally displaced persons.

Fears and Solutions

Traditionally, those working in the refugee arena have sought one of three durable solutions for refugees.

The first and preferred solution is voluntary repatriation. When conditions in the country of origin have changed to the degree that refugees can return in reasonable safety, refugee agencies attempt to facilitate their return. Long-lasting civil conflicts, the devastation of a country's infrastructure, and extensive deployment of landmines prevent this most desirable solution.

Local integration into the country of asylum is a second solution for refugees. Many have been welcomed into their host communities. But, as political and economic conditions in the countries of asylum deteriorate, governments adopt less welcoming policies.

This leaves the third and last solution, resettlement in third countries. Although available to less than 1 percent of the 13.5 million refugees in the world today, third-country resettlement has become increasingly their sole source of hope. Sadly, this avenue of rescue has also become difficult for many, because countries of resettlement, once hospitable, have begun reducing the numbers they will admit.

Today we are witnessing the steady erosion of this integrated system for refugee protection and relief. No one wants refugees anymore. Poor countries fear being overburdened (approximately 93 percent of the world's refugees and displaced persons are located in countries of the Southern Hemisphere) and rich countries fear being overrun.

It was this fear of being overrun that fueled the passage in 1994 of Proposition 187 in California. Proposition 187 revealed the climate of hostility toward immigrants that made possible the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA).

The IIRIRA is the one of most drastic revisions of immigration law in the history of the United States. The leaders of the US Congress, elected in 1994 by increasingly vocal and fear-driven citizens, gave full reign to harmful stereotyping of so-called "criminal" elements and to fears of "losing control of our borders." The Clinton Administration went along, somewhat reluctantly, perhaps bowing to the same negative pressures of public opinion. The IIRIRA has also left in its wake thousands of fearful and confused people--not only undocumented persons but naturalized citizens and permanent residents as well.

Role of the Church

Faced with the plight of the world's uprooted and with the suffering and abuses of legal and undocumented immigrants in the United States, the Council of Bishops of The United Methodist Church issued a strong statement in 1987--On Undocumented Migration: To Love the Sojourner. "Acknowledging our particular role among the pilgrim people of God," the bishops wrote, "we invite all those whose hearts are as ours to join hands with us in declaring our uncompromising intention to welcome the sojourners in our midst and to walk with them toward our mutual fulfillment as human beings. We pledge ourselves to know them, their circumstances and needs; to love them, to embrace them and their struggle; to bid them welcome to our communities, religious and civil, for as long as is necessary or as they should decide to remain. We commit ourselves to walk humbly with God toward that realm where justice is done because tender love dwells in the hearts of women and men."

Across the globe, The United Methodist Church--through the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR)--has been responding to monumental refugee crises like those in Bosnia, Liberia, Rwanda, and Kosovo.

More than 60 refugee projects around the world and in the United States are funded by United Methodists' contributions to Advance Specials. These funded projects give hope to refugees, displaced persons, and asylum seekers in countries of asylum and make it possible for others to return to their country of origin when circumstances allow, as in Mozambique, Cambodia, and Guatemala.

Since 1946, local United Methodist congregations have sponsored thousands of refugees, offering them the opportunity for a new life and making it possible for countries of first asylum to keep their doors open to those seeking refuge. Through the years, UMCOR has been able to adjust its resettlement program to respond to emerging needs, new issues, and new challenges.

In response to new risks being faced by the sojourners in our midst, UMCOR's Refugee Ministries at the General Board of Global Ministries and a United Methodist-affiliated local ministry--Just Neighbors Ministry--have begun a new program: "Justice For Our Neighbors." This collaborative project has been designed to enable local United Methodist churches to provide valuable assistance in immigration matters to immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. It seeks to facilitate the establishment of volunteer, church-based immigration legal-service clinics. Ten sites have begun extensive training in immigration law and practice as well as instruction in the fundamentals of clinic development and management. Another unique aspect of this program is the formation of a working group of people, both training staff and site volunteers, who are developing and sharing theological reflections and resources to undergird this ministry.

"Justice For Our Neighbors" was conceived to include four major components: Education deals with the circumstances that have brought people into these vulnerable situations with the law in all its complexities and hazards. Advocacy is the crucial response of discipleship, upholding and embracing the cause of God's love and compassion on behalf of endangered peoples. In service delivery we model, in our time and place, the servant leadership of Christ. And through theological reflection, we commit as Christians to be purposeful and reflective in responding to those Biblical mandates that compel us to "go and do likewise" (Luke 10:37).

To "go and do likewise," we must truly understand the Gospel message as we have never done before. Like the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37), we who are fortunate must learn to look at the world through the eyes of the wounded people left in the ditches of today's world. Then we must act from that perspective. As Jesus had to admonish his disciples and followers over and over, so we must continually remind ourselves of all the aspects of this task, lest we too fail to see with the eyes of the stranger and thereby miss the meaning in the message altogether.