The big news story of 2015 was the European refugee crisis. It was big for the numbers of refugees seeking asylum in the European Union. Experts estimate more than one and a half million refugees and migrants sought asylum and inclusion on the continent last year. Germany was singular in admitting more than one million.
The refugee crisis was a big story too because of the suffering and deprivation it put on view. That suffering was captured in the photo image of the drowned three year-old Alan Kurdi lying face down castaway on the Turkish shore. The boy’s family, refugees from the war-ravaged Syrian town of Kobani, had been aboard an overcrowded inflatable boat that had capsized only five minutes from shore.
Perhaps no other contemporary global crisis raises such a complex set of political and moral challenges—for governments and societies, but also for transnational organizations like the Roman Catholic Church as the movement of peoples.
Strained to the Breaking Point
The refugee crisis was also a big story for its impact on European and world politics. The challenge of resettling large number of Arab Muslims strained the European Union. Right-wing, populist parties gained strength and xenophobia became visible and vocal nearly everywhere in fear of being overwhelmed. Poland, Hungary, and other Eastern European countries resisted a quota plan for distributing the refugees across the continent. Countries from Sweden to Slovakia re-imposed border controls and put the Schengen Agreement, which had provided for open passage between European Union countries, in jeopardy.
Due to her firm commitment to admitting a million refugees to Germany, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the preeminent European leader, though admired at first, lost standing both domestically and Union-wide.
Funding to hard-pressed countries of first asylum like Jordan and Lebanon has fallen far short of the need. The resulting hardship led some Syrian refugees to return in despair to their former homes in the war zone.
The scale of the crisis overwhelmed the legal arrangements for refugee admission to the European Union. But the breakdown of free movement across Europe was only the most evident case of the failure of international arrangements for people on the move. Australia blocked migrants and refugees from South East Asia and warehoused asylum-seekers on isolated island way stations. Thailand and Bangladesh refused asylum to the Rohingya fleeing Myanmar. Thailand and Indonesia rejected asylum seekers from Bangladesh and Myanmar.
The year 2015, however, saw a small reduction of illegal entrance to the United States across the Mexican border. The rush of unaccompanied minors, which had threatened to explode only two years before subsided due, in part, to stricter control by Mexican authorities of their territory. In January 2016, the Obama administration, despite an ongoing campaign of enforced deportation for illegal aliens, announced its intention to make special provision for refugees fleeing violence from the three Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Aspiring asylees would be able to apply for admission to the United States through UN offices in the three countries. The allotted 9,000 slots, however, would only meet a small portion of the previous demand.
The Movement of Peoples in Catholic Social Teaching
As the world’s largest transnational organization, and an actor in world politics in its own right, the Catholic Church has been at the center of the migration crisis. Its agencies care for refugees and displaced persons and settle migrants and refugees worldwide. More cosmopolitan than nation-states, the Church has recognized the right to migrate as a human right and a core principle of Catholic social teaching. Pope Paul VI’s apostolic exhortation Octagesima Adveniens (1971) articulated the right to migrate for economic reasons as a basic right commensurate with the individual and the family’s right to a livelihood. Furthermore, the Church holds that receiving countries have a duty to show hospitality to economic migrants and that the migrants have a right and a duty to integrate themselves into the host society.
The Church recognizes, however, that no nation can bear the burden of major population movements alone. In his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate (“Love in Truth”) Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wrote, this “social phenomenon of epoch making proportions” requires “bold, forward-looking policies of international cooperation” with especially “close cooperation between their countries of origin and their countries of destination.”
But where the countries of origin are failed and conflicted states, as they are in much of Africa and the Middle East today, the need for a more coordinated and integrated transnational cooperation is clear. Even with international collaboration, the migration crisis will not be easily solved. It involves issues of development, job creation, and welfare. It requires policing of human trafficking, and effective enforcement of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) to check the sources of disorder and underdevelopment that push both economic migration and refugee flight. It will also demand checking terrorism and the spiraling collapse of states across the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia. The catastrophic failure of the world refugee system shows the necessity of a global solution to what can be expected to be a decades long problem.
In his 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris Pope John XXIII proposed that such grave transnational problems were matters of the universal common good, requiring global institutions for their resolution. As philosopher Henry Shue has argued, standard threats to basic rights require institutional solutions. In the case of refugees and migrants, they are the rights to life and bodily integrity, the right to subsistence, and the right to livelihood. Accordingly, in 2009, appealing to the principle of the universal common good, Benedict urged the development of “a true world political authority,” among other pressing tasks, “to regulate migration.”
Pope Francis
From the outset of his pontificate, with his one-day journey to the refugee camp on Lampedusa, Pope Francis made migration a top priority. In “The Joy of the Gospel” (Evangelii Gaudium), his first major teaching document, he declared that “Migrants present a particular challenge for me, since I am the pastor of a Church without frontiers, a Church which considers herself mother to all.”
The Pope continued, “For this reason, I exhort all countries to a generous openness which, rather than fearing the loss of local identity, will prove capable of creating new forms of cultural synthesis.”
In his September 2015 address to the U.S. Congress, Pope Francis evoked the aspirations of the American dream. He recalled how “millions of people came to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom.” He continued, “We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners.”
He concluded, “When the stranger in our midst appeals to us, we must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past. We must resolve now to live as nobly and as justly as possible.”
Principles of Responsibility
The international system requires clearer principles of responsibility. Here are two suggestions of our own.
The first moral rationale for reparatory action on behalf of refugees is culpability. The greater the culpability of the actor, the greater the responsibility is to alleviate the burdens of the refugees or migrants. As former secretary of state Colin Powell said, in the context of the invasion of Iraq, “You break it, you own it.”
U.S. culpability for Iraqi and Syrian refugees is somewhat qualified. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, the Islamic State, and sectarian Iraqi politicians are more culpable in the present crisis. But the United States bears remote responsibility for the sectarian conflict generated by the invasion of Iraq.
American culpability is more direct, though shared with local politicians, in Central America where the United States has meddled for years, most recently in the Contra Wars of the 1980s sponsored by the Reagan administration.
A second moral principle is that of capacity. The United States has the financial resources and the space to accept refugees, from Central America to be sure and from Iraq and Syria too. It also possesses exceptional historical experience in integrating the foreign-born into its population, and it has trained personnel and institutions to execute the duty.
In addition to granting asylum to greater numbers of Middle Eastern refugees, the United States shares the duty under the principle of the Responsibility to Protect to provide security and aid in situ or in countries of first asylum. In the long term, it has the duty with others to help create the institutions to protect and support migrants and refugees in the future.
“With the Same Passion and Compassion”
In the most moving and challenging passage of his address to Congress, Pope Francis invoked the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Mt 7:12):
“This rule points us in a clear direction. Let us treat others with the same passion and compassion with which we want to be treated. Let us seek for others the same possibilities which we seek for ourselves. Let us help others to grow, as we would like to be helped ourselves. In a word, if we want security, let us give security; if we want life, let us give life; if we want opportunities, let us provide opportunities. The yardstick we use for others will be the yardstick which time will use for us.”
Practicing the Golden Rule with refugees is a challenge not just for this year, nor for a decade. It is the challenge of the century.
