This year, the 111th World Day of Migrants and Refugees will be celebrated alongside the Jubilee of Migrants, as part of the Jubilee Year, on 4-5 October. Normally, it is held on the last Sunday in September.
The World Day for Migrants and Refugees invites us to recognise the contribution that they make to our nation. It also encourages us to welcome them. In times of economic hardship, hospitality to people coming from other nations is especially important and challenging. Many people are forced from their own homes by poverty and conflict and seek a new life elsewhere. At the same time, people in more wealthy nations fear for jobs and homes.
People leave their own nations for many reasons. Many flee from war and the military bands that plunder and kill in their homeland. Others are displaced as global warming leads to higher temperatures, lack of rain, or floods and fires that destroy their crops. Others flee from lawlessness and violence that threaten them and their children. In the face of harsh conditions in their homelands, they are attracted to the safer and more plentiful life they see in developed and peaceful nations. They may also be seduced by the unrealistic promises of people who exploit them. They make their way to other lands by plane, boat or overland.
The number of people who have fled from their own nations to seek a life abroad has grown greatly in the last five years. This has also been in a time of relative economic hardship in the nations to which they flee, where many people live precariously and find it difficult to find shelter.
They may resent the newly arrived migrants and refugees. In response, many nations have tightly regulated legal immigration, sent back people or held in camps people who arrive by boat.
In England, for example, there has been a great increase in irregular migration by people arriving by boat, partly in response to the closing of other ways of arriving by train or in lorries. Many English citizens have been alarmed by the numbers, stirred by xenophobic politicians who hold noisy protests at the hotels where people seeking protection are housed. This xenophobia is also found in many other European nations, too, as they shut their borders in response to migrants and refugees. Some envy the cruel Australian expedient of dispatching irregular arrivals to Nauru or returning them to their own countries.
Such hostility to migrants and refugees has always been latent in most societies. It has been exacerbated now by the planned mass expulsion of Latin American migrants from the United States. The Government’s response is designed to terrify and humiliate people who have built a life in the United States and contributed to its prosperity.
In this climate, Migrant and Refugee Sunday is particularly important. It reminds us that each human being is loved by God and that we are not enemies but brothers and sisters. A happy society is one that is hospitable to strangers, compassionate to people in need, and respectful of difference. In Australia, our ancestors were all once immigrants and foreigners.
Read Pope Leo’s message for World Day for Migrants and Refugees.
Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ writes for Jesuit Communications and Jesuit Social Services.
