It is International Women’s Day and I pause as I think about the different women in my life who have shaped me, who have helped me grow in areas that I wouldn’t have otherwise. This group of women don’t look like each other – they range in color, size, shape, and personality. They are from different countries as well as different racial and ethnic backgrounds. But where they differ in those attributes, each one is a strong force of faith, hope, and love.
I am so incredibly fortunate to have these role models and mentors in my life. But she who has been gifted much has a mandate to give back.
Everyone of us view the world through a different lens. My lens is public health, and it’s through a public health lens that I think about justice for women in the world on this International Women’s Day. What I see through this lens troubles me greatly. Consider these facts from the World Health Organization:
Approximately 810 women die every day from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth
94% of all maternal deaths occur in low and lower middle-income countries.
Young adolescents (ages 10-14) face a higher risk of complications and death as a result of pregnancy than other women.
Skilled care before, during and after childbirth can save the lives of women and newborns.
Violence against women – particularly intimate partner violence and sexual violence – is a major public health problem and a violation of women’s human rights.
Global estimates published by WHO indicate that about 1 in 3 (35%) of women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime.
It feels like a desperately slow road for women’s health and wellbeing. I remember my dismay at my first visit to the women’s and children’s hospital in Rania in 2018. It reminded me of hospitals in Pakistan from my childhood, many, many years ago. Though things in western countries have improved dramatically through the years, little has improved for women in the developing world. I struggle deeply with all of this. I long to see better health outcomes for women, long to see real change occur. I long to see greater justice and focus on women’s health and education, because they are so integrally connected.
I long to see us working toward greater justice and equity in women’s health around the world.
And even as I write this, I am acutely aware that justice and equity are not found in a blog post.
Justice is not an instagram story or a facebook post. Justice is not loud outrage followed by a hot latte. Justice is not one stop shopping or a one time event. Justice is not fired up mirror neurons or copycat anger.
Justice is not pity. Justice is not “poor you!” Justice is not a “noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” Justice is not meaningless nods or empty words.
Justice, true justice, is hard work and community giving. Justice is partnership over pity. Justice is daily humility, letting others be the teacher. Justice is knowing we will get it wrong, but working to get it right. Justice is loving and serving others when it hurts. Justice is quiet acts of courage that people don’t always see. Justice is hard repentance and soul searching.
Justice comes from a heart of love and a spirit of generosity. Justice without love is like bread without salt – it looks good but it tastes all wrong.
So on this International Women’s Day, I publicly reaffirm a commitment to my small part in this journey. I commit to learning, to growing, to cultural humility, to working toward greater equity in healthcare, to loving and serving well this group that holds up half the sky.
Here’s to the women around the world who have never heard of International Women’s Day, but faithfully do what they have to do to care for their families and communities. Here’s to the unsung heroes, the stories that may never be told, and the the daily sacrifice of so many. Here’s to resilience and strength, resourcefulness and tenacity. Here’s to the million choices that are made by women daily – choices that hold up half the sky. Here’s to women.
The reckoning is how we walk into our story; the rumble is where we own it. The goal of the rumble is to get honest about the stories we’re making up about our struggles, to revisit, challenge, and reality-check these narratives.
Like many of you, I have thought a lot in these past weeks about race and racism. Also like many of you I have posted, reacted, posted again, thought again, reacted again, and finally stopped to catch my breath. It’s only as I’ve stopped to catch my breath and pray that I have felt a measure of peace in moving forward.
As I look at the purpose of Communicating Across Boundaries, it is not surprising that there have been many posts by myself and others around racism, immigrants, refugees, and loving the one who is other. It is the “what”at the heart of what I do. It is the “why” at the heart of what I believe, for if a gospel cannot transform me and our world from the inside out, what good is it? Why does it matter?
This time I post with even more care than usual. We have a huge portion of the population of the United States who are in pain over injustice and racism. It is a callous person indeed that doesn’t recognize this and respond with deep love and care.
As a third culture kid growing up in the developing world, I had my own unconscious privilege to reckon with, and once made aware, to answer for. This privilege took different forms. From thinking “they” weren’t as smart as me to happily enjoying a life that would have been far more difficult if I had been born a different color or had a different passport.
A reckoning is, by dictionary definition, a “settling of accounts.” So what does that mean for me, as a privileged, little white girl growing up in a country where people had varying shades of brown skin? What does that mean to someone who is a guest in a country that had a recent history of colonization by the British Empire? For me, this primarily means being honest.
It took me a long time to recognize my prejudice and even longer to be aware of my privilege. Some of my recognition of this came when I began to write. The more I wrote, the more I articulated my perspective, the more I was reminded that that’s what it was – my perspective. I viewed the world through a particular lens and that lens affected all my experiences. I walked through the world with different skin on, and skin made a huge difference.
As I moved on to writing Worlds Apart, I realized how my childhood was affected by growing up in a land where colonization ended only 13 years before I was born.
To give context, a delightful activity for me as a child was “high tea” at a hotel near my boarding school. During the summer months, my mom would take us to a hotel that served mini pastries and savory snacks on three-tiered China platters. Tea was served in a pot and each of us had a separate pot of tea. There were waiters dressed in turbans and starched white coats, attentive to every need. They treated me like the princess I thought I was. I loved it so much. It was later that I realized there was another side to my experience.
“There was a darker side to high tea I would only confront much later. This pleasure that so delighted me as a little girl was a survival of Pakistan’s colonial past. The “British Raj” era, or the era of British rule, lasted for almost 100 years. It included the entire Indian subcontinent. Pakistan was born in 1948, and my parents arrived only five years later. I was completely blind to my privilege as a little, white, English-speaking girl. I cringe now at what I took for granted.
Those who were white and English-speaking went to the head of the line. Those who were white and English-speaking could casually criticize Pakistanis without thought. We traveled where we pleased, we went first class or third class on trains –it was our choice. We were educated and would have a world of opportunity. I thank God for parents that had the conscience and determination to discipline me and teach me in various ways that I was not better than those around me. Still, with a strong personality and ego to match, those lessons sometimes fell on ears unwilling to listen and a heart that would need continual reminders that privilege is not something I earned or deserved.”
Children grow up to be adults, and as an adult I’ve had to take responsibility for learning and growing in areas where I had a lot of pride and a lot of ignorance. That pride and ignorance led to wrong thinking and distorted theology.
Recently, I’ve focused more on the listening part of learning. My friend Caroline is one of the people I listen to. We became friends one cold, snowy evening as my husband and I made our way into a large room in New Hampshire for a church retreat. Caroline and her husband were helping to register us. It was pretty much love and friendhsip at first meeting. Caroline and I share a third culture kid background. She is ethnically South Asian, raised in several places in the world and a brilliant speaker and thinker. She said this in a sermon given in Wheaton, Illinois this past weekend:
Be on guard against cheap diversity! Cheap diversity settles for representation, cheap diversity is satisfied when the room looks colorful, Be on guard against cheap diversity. Representation is satisfied with people being present, justice says “I care about this person inside this room and outside of it.” Justice says “We see and do not stand for the way that our society and our culture upholds oppression and racial violence.” Justice says “I won’t quit until all are seen as image bearers.” The kingdom cares about life and shalom and flourishing here and now. If one of us is in pain or grieving, we ALL are in pain and grieving. If one is experiencing injustice, then all are experiencing injustice.”
Caroline Lancaster
She then gives action steps to her listeners. With her permission I am sharing them here:
Get in proximity: how can you be in community or learn from a community different than your own?
What are your spheres of power or influence? How are you bearing the fruit of justice in those spaces? How can you distribute power, access, money, etc. to steward power and influence well?
Educate yourself about injustice in both your passport country and your host country. Don’t walk through the world oblivious.
If you are a Christian, choose a passage or a verse that anchors you in God’s heart for justice. Memorize it and meditate on it daily.
I will be on this long journey in the right direction for the rest of my life. Why? Because this is a journey directly related to who I am as a Christian. God cares about oppression. God cares about justice. God cares about hurting communities. God cares about color – he cared enough to create us in different skin tones with different hair textures.
Here are some things that continue to be a part of my long journey:
Confession – I had to begin with asking God to heal my thoughts and my eyesight. It was and still is hard, but in searching my soul I have realized that this sin is against God and fellow man.
Learn to recognize and confess my own bias. None of us is without bias and our bias comes from many things. But we can be crippled into wrong belief when we don’t recognize and confess it.
Develop real friendships with those who don’t physically look like we do. We walk through the world with skin on. That skin is perceived differently depending on its color. I walk through the world as a white woman. I have many friends who walk through the world as Arabic speaking, Kurdish speaking, and Urdu speaking brown women and men. I have other friends who walk through the world as black, English speaking women and men. Jesus himself walked through the world as an Aramaic-speaking brown man. Tamika in a recent post on Taking Route says this about color “If you say you don’t see color, then it means there is something about me that you can’t acknowledge.” Developing real friendships and relationships with people that don’t look like us challenges us and changes us.
Always, whether in leadership or as a follower, have a posture of humility and willingness to learn from people who look different than we do.
Be prepared for that leadership to look different – leadership is culturally based and may feel uncomfortable for a while.
Read and listen and learn. Let me say that again: Read and listen and learn. Then read and listen and learn again.
We will get it wrong. Our proverbial old habits die slowly and often painfully, but if we remain open to correction and change, to true repentance when we hurt others, to not letting pride block us, we will continue to move forward.
In my journey I’m learning more about empathy and standing beside – not in front of – people. Most of all, I’m learning that this is critical to my faith and my belief that we are all made in the Image of God.
Eight years ago my oldest daughter and I watched three movies in three nights. The first was a documentary called Central Park Five. The second was Fruitvale Station, and the third was 12 Years a Slave. Thus began my journey into what I didn’t know and what I still need to learn about race in the United States.
During these eight years of learning, God has also gifted our extended family with different cultures, colors, and ethnicities through marriage and partners, and so this learning has become a necessary, important, and good burden.
I am a slow learner, and even when I am confronted with documented truth, I want to question it if it’s uncomfortable. And for me, this has not been comfortable.
Osheta Moore, a peacemaker invites those of us who want to repent, respond, and reconcile to say and work on these three things:
I’m sorry. I’m listening. I’m learning.
It is in that spirit that I write this.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry it took me so long. I’m sorry that I had so many questions. I’m sorry that too many times it’s about me. I’m sorry I haven’t recognized my part in a system that puts down and wounds.
I’m listening.
I’m listening to important voices like Osheta,Latasha Morrison, Esau McCaulley, and Black Coffee with White Friends. Perhaps more importantly, I’m listening to over 60 community health worker students who represent communities of color, to a colleague who is a gentle guide in the process, and to people who I have the privilege of calling my friends.
I’m learning.
The books in the picture below are my companions in the journey. I have read Just Mercy, Notes from No Man’s Land, The New Jim Crow, and Between the World and Me. I just began The Warmth of Other Sons. These are not easy books. But if they are not easy for me to read about these circumstances and events, imagine the atrocity of living through them? My discomfort is a minor piece of the journey. My discomfort helps me to reckon with a history that needs reckoning. I’ve had the honor of joining the board of Asian Women for Health, an organization that I’ve long worked with. This takes my connection to a new level where I can learn from leaders in the Asian community as well as work alongside them in things that affect them specifically, the most recent being the many attacks against the community since the onset of COVID-19.
In my cultural competency work, I had a foundation to begin this work, but because my focus was on immigrants and refugees, the black experience in America was something I had put in the background. My inner dialogue was “I care about these other things. I don’t have the energy to care about everything. Culturally responsive care is my area of focus.” The problem with that thinking is that immigrants and refugees are entering into a system in the United States that privileges whites. So if they are any shade darker than me, they will enter into an experience that goes beyond cultural incompetency and enters racism. The other problem is that racial inequities are documented and serious in healthcare, and as a nurse I have a mandate to explore what that means and how I can help change it.
Latasha Morrison is a prophetic, compelling guide as she asks us to consider these “don’ts”:
Don’t deflect racism
Don’t defend racism
Don’t deny racism
Latasha invites us to listen in humility to black people who have lived experience of racism and racial inequities. More than that, she invites Christians specifically into a better way, a way of joining the hard work of justice and reconciliation.
Finally….
The movie Gran Torino, Walt Kowalski (played by Clint Eastwood) is a bitter old man living out his years in a neighborhood that has changed from working-class white to Hmong and Chinese. He does not like it and makes no pretense of civility and no apology for being an open racist. No one is safe from this behavior, particularly the Hmong mother who lives next door and who is victim to Kowalski’s growling and racial slurs every time they happen to be on the porch at the same time.
In the course of the movie, his character changes and he gradually makes peace with the neighborhood, getting to know the teenagers who live next door and becoming both friend and protector. A scene showing him at a Hmong feast eating food he has never seen before (and still makes no pretense of liking) is a beautiful image of the grudging respect he is gaining for these neighbors. Ultimately Kowalski gives up his life for these neighbors. It is a remarkable, unexpected story.
Kowalski didn’t back down. Once he began the journey, he continued it to the end of his life, which was shorter than he may have initially thought it would be. Like Walt Kowalski, to join this journey is to recognize that I can’t back down. I’ll be on this it for the rest of my life. It is a necessary burden.
Just before we head to bed, we hear the echoing mew of a kitten. It is pitiful and anxious, a mournful sound on a cold night. The sound reverberates through the hallway, as if to voice all the sadness and loss of the world.
My husband steps out into the cold hallway and there on the landing is one of the family of kittens that we had fed earlier in December. While we were away during Christmas break the mama cat found another place for her babies. This kitten wandered back to the first home she knew, and there, lost without her family, all she could do was cry.
He fixes some bread and milk and takes it to the stairwell. He comes back inside and asks me if we have a spare towel. We do, and with it he creates a bed of sorts in an upstairs area for this wandering kitten.
The kitten is pure black with yellow eyes and reminds me of the cats we had while growing up in Pakistan. There were several – favorite family pets through the years. Soon after the kitten is joined by her sibling, a golden/black mixture of fluff.
Sometimes all you can do is feed two kittens whose mother is nowhere in sight. Everything else is too big, too hard, too complicated. Everything else will take years for you to see results, but feeding kittens doesn’t seem impossible. So many other things are so far outside of our capability.
We can’t cure the cancer that is slowly taking the life of a friend’s family member. We can’t move the process of grant funders to get them to make a quicker decision about funding that we have requested. We can’t finish building the hospital that sits, less than a mile from us, desperately needed but sitting unfinished because of lack of money. We can’t change some of the societal values that hurt women. We can’t heal the sick, bring sight to the blind, and restore the lame.
But we can feed kittens. And sometimes that is enough. At least for that kitten.
The cynic might scoff: “Don’t be a white savior!” The realist might chide: “It’s a bandaid on an ulcer!” The social justice warrior might shake their head in disbelief: “But what about the really important things?” The idealist might challenge: “Dream bigger!”
But for us, for today – it’s our choice. And so we feed the kittens.
The rain came. One minute it was the hot, dry sun of a high desert and rays of light spread across my living room and peeked into the darkened hallway. I took a quick walk to our plant store nearby – we call it our arboretum – and walked back with a green treasure, its large leaves nodding to my step.
And then, the sky darkened, the sun hid, and the rain came.
It came in torrents over the mountain. Flashes of lightening lit up the sky in a diagonal angle. The raindrops beat against our window. The dry clay land filled with deep puddles and rain poured through a small hole in our window, flooding the glassed in balcony.
It came with fury and vengeance, as if to say “I will conquer this dry space and fill it with water! I will win!”
The rain came, and for a while I thought it would never stop. It felt impossibly strong. And then, just as suddenly, it stopped
One of my favorite Indian movies is the movie Lagaan. It is set in a small village in India in the late 1800s when India is occupied by the British. A British captain has imposed an outrageous land tax on the people of the village. It is a tax that is impossible to pay, partially because of a long drought causing huge economic losses for the villagers. A young man in the village (Bhuvan) decides to rally the villagers to advocate for themselves. As they approach the palace, they observe a cricket match in play. Bhuvan mocks the game, and the British Captain offers a wager. If the villagers can defeat the British occupying forces in a game of cricket, they won’t have to pay taxes for three years. But, if they lose, they will have to pay three times the current taxes.
Bhuvan basically accepts the wager without the village’s consent and then has to rally villagers to create a team of people who know nothing about cricket with the hopes of winning a game against seasoned players. Throughout the film, there is a longing expressed for rain. No matter what happens, the villagers need this drought to end. People are suffering and the only thing that will change that is being able to bring in a harvest. At one point, black clouds roll in and a dance scene suggests that this is it, this is the moment. Rain is coming and no matter what happens with cricket or the British, this will be their salvation.
But it is a false hope. It doesn’t come. Then, at the very end of the film, after the drama of cricket and occupiers being defeated by the occupied, the rain comes. The rain comes in glorious, monsoon force while villagers dance in the downpour. The rain came. The game is over. The innocent are vindicated and there will be no tax.
The rain came on that village much the same way it came today. With a mighty force that can’t be stopped, with vengeance and sound that you can’t ignore; like an unexpected outpouring of grace when you think there is no hope, the rain came.
The prophet Isaiah talks about rain coming this way. In vivid poetry he says: “Drip down, O heavens, from above, And let the clouds pour down righteousness; Let the earth open up and salvation bear fruit, And righteousness spring up with it. I, the Lord, have created it.“* In Lagaan, that is what the rain represented. Vindication. A wrong confronted and made right. Justice finally came, and with it the rain.
Today, the rain came. And it makes me both tremble and hope – for justice, for wrong to be made right, for people who have suffered to be healed, for clouds to pour down righteousness, for grace to cover this hard, broken earth.
“you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land”
“Home,” by Warsan Shire
In the past few years I have had the privilege of meeting and hearing stories from many refugees and displaced people in different parts of the world. From the Sindh region of Pakistan to Northern Iraq, these are people who live out a stubborn resilience and will to not only survive, but thrive.
Brave.Resilient.Fierce.Tenacious.Creative.Strong. These are just a few of the adjectives I would use to describe the people who I’ve met. The stories I have heard include tragedy, humor, and everything in between. It’s a tapestry of the human spirit and a representation of the image of God in each woman, man, and child.
In the midst of the world wide crises another refugee/migrant crisis has been created on the borders of the United States. Children are being separated from their parents due to a ‘zero tolerance’ policy put in place on 4/6/2018. The policy was created by John Kelly and Stephen Miller to serve as a deterrent for undocumented immigration. It was approved by Trump and adopted by Sessions. While previous administrations detained migrant families, they did not have a practice of forcibly separating parents and children unless the adults were deemed unfit and unsuitable to care for their children.
Make no mistake – when voices on the left and the right all agree, then truth has risen above politics. That truth is this: This ‘zero tolerance’ policy that has been implemented at the U.S./Mexico border is immoral and evil. It separates families in unthinkable ways and punishes those who are desperate.
Consider these words released today by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on World Refugee Day: “The United States will continue to be a world leader in providing humanitarian assistance and working to forge political solutions to the underlying conflicts that drive displacement.”
And yet, recordings of children sobbing at detentions centers go viral while in the background an agent is heard joking with the words: “We have an orchestra here.”
This, my friends, is cognitive dissonance: the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.
Most of us have little influence when it comes to big policy decisions, but truth challenges all of us to seek justice and a better way, and what better day to do that than the day set aside for #WorldRefugeeDay?
Can we ask ourselves these questions today:
How can we combat the cognitive dissonance that we see in ourselves and many around us?
What can we do to overcome apathy or fear?
What do you specifically need to do to avoid compassion fatigue and information overload so that you can care about what matters? What prayers need to be a part of our daily life? How do we need to start the day in order to face, with wisdom and grace, our life and the news around us?
What specific things in your community could you do to welcome refugees?
God of our Wandering Ancestors,
Long have we known
That your heart is with the refugee:
That you were born into time
In a family of refugees
Fleeing violence in their homeland,
Who then gathered up their hungry child
And fled into alien country.
Their cry, your cry, resounds through the ages:
“Will you let me in?”
Give us hearts that break open
When our brothers and sisters turn to us
with that same cry.
Then surely all these things will follow:
Ears will no longer turn deaf to their voices.
Eyes will see a moment for grace instead of a threat.
Tongues will not be silenced but will instead advocate.
And hands will reach out—
working for peace in their homeland,
working for justice in the lands where they seek safe haven.
Lord, protect all refugees in their travels.
May they find a friend in me And so make me worthy Of the refuge I have found in you.
Amen.
Friends – I am also incredibly excited to invite you to participate in the GoFundMe to help a country that has faced more than its share of war and displacement. Would you consider helping?
The peach looked beautiful. It had the feel of a peach that was ripe but not too ripe and it smelled perfect. Inside it was rotten to the core. I discovered this as I was cutting it into slices.
So beautiful on the outside, so rotten on the inside.
How like the United States, with its rhetoric of greatness and it’s perfect exterior. Well trimmed lawns, good highways, fancy buildings, plenty of goods for consumers, coffee shops by the thousands, grocery stores by the million, parades and protection are all a part of the eye candy that is the U.S. Yet it takes but a moment of digging to uncover the rotten interior. From rates of abortion to treatment of foreigners we live in a society consumed by self and misguided protection. We daily watch men and women with little soul and even less integrity mismanage a nation in crisis.
Bullet holes in black boys haunt our collective psyche as we try to dismiss of racism. We hear the cries of children ripped from moms in wombs and at borders, breastfed babies panting for milk from mothers who are nowhere to be found. Pride and corruption are rampant and the innocent struggle for justice.
Cries of “I can’t breathe!” fall on our ears. Coffins fill with black bodies and we try to justify this by focusing on rioting and violence, claiming they are not the way to handle this. How dare we. How dare I. We listen to the voices of white theologians and dismiss the voices of prophetic black theologians, because they might make us uncomfortable. How dare we! How dare I!*
Like the Old Testament prophets we cry “How long O Lord? How long?“
Tears dry on faces that look up to the Son for justice.
We plead the cause of the orphan, the immigrant, the falsely accused, the unborn who were never given a chance, the dead who can no longer speak.
We plead and we pray.
May we allow the surgery of confession and repentance to root out the rotten core. May we fall on our knees in humility and repentance. May we see with eyes of justice and love with hearts of compassion. May we act with hands of mercy and speak with lips of wisdom. May we pray for our leaders and for ourselves.
May we, like the prophet Micah, do justly, love mercy, and Walk humbly with our God.
Updated – June 15,2018 – A doctor observing says she has never seen anything like it – a toddler pounding her fists on the ground, inconsolable with longing for a mom from who she was separated. Breastfeeding infants, screaming in emotional and physical pain. God have mercy on the souls of those who sanctioned this; God have mercy on our souls for allowing this government sanctioned child abuse. My friend Laura reminds me of this verse:
“The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live.”*
And then she says “Call the midwives!” Amen and Amen.
Exodus 1:17
In late February, a woman named Miriam G. from Honduras walked across the border from Mexico to Texas seeking politial asylum. She had all her papers and her 18-month old son with her.
She told immigration officers her story: She was fleeing danger in her home country. Every day more people disappeared and when her home was tear gassed, she packed up her 18-month-old and headed across the border.
Immigration officials took all her documents, including a birth certificate and birth record for her son as well as her own identity card. She spent that night in a detention facility on the border. The next day, two cars waited outside the facility: one for her, and one for her child. She was told to strap her child into the car seat and then the officer shut the door. Her last view was that of her child screaming as he was driven away to a federally sponsored foster home.
There is a new “zero tolerance” policy on illegal border crossings that is affecting even those like Miriam who are seeking asylum. Due to increased violence in Central America, people are fleeing in record numbers. Many are showing up at U.S. borders with their documents, essentially begging for mercy. Instead, they are criminally charged and their children are taken from them and put into federally sponsored care. In the first 14 days since this policy, over 600 children have been forcibly separated from their parents. This is cruel. There is no other word for it.
Regardless of what your view of immigration policy is or is not, the forcible removing of children from parents is unconscionable and must be stopped. We must do better.
Root Causes:
Take a moment to ask yourself why a parent would flee to a border that they know has become unfriendly. You have to be completely desperate and fearful to make this journey leaving home, family, friends, jobs and more behind. Those arriving are beyond desperate. They have run out of choices. Any policy has to address root causes to be effective, but while researching and looking to change root causes, temporary solutions and asylum are essential. We must do better.
Refugee Resettlement:
The United States will only receive 22% of the number of refugees that were resettled in 2016. Refugee programs throughout the United States have seen a dramatic decrease to their numbers. Fully functioning programs with robust volunteer programs do not have enough to do. The United States, with its many resources, can do better. We can do better.
Myths on Refugees:
How many of us have heard over and over of the “refugee burden”? But in fact, the “burden” appears to be only a short-term burden.
From Denmark to Uganda to Cleveland, studies have found that welcoming refugees has a positive or at least a neutral effect on a host community’s economy and wages…beyond the upfront costs of processing and settling refugees, the perceived burden of refugees on a host economy may not be as significant as it seems. “There’s not any credible research that I know of that in the medium and long term that refugees are anything but a hugely profitable investment,” says Michael Clemens, a senior fellow who leads the Migration and Development Initiative at the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank.
Clemens cites a study by Kalena Cortes, a Texas A&M professor who followed refugee and non-refugee immigrants who arrived in the U.S. in the late 1970s. Cortes found that it took the refugees a few years to get on their feet. But soon the refugees were out-earning non-refugee immigrants, and adding more value to the economy each year than the entire original cost of receiving and resettling them. [Source:The Big Myth about Refugees]
The Punishment of Removal:
Make no mistake, the forcible removal of children is being used as a punishment to parents, and today I stand against this. I stand against this as a mom; I stand against this as a human being; and I stand against this as an Orthodox Christian. The words of scripture sometimes whisper softly and gently; other times they shout from the pages of those who wrote so long ago.
Today, those words are shouting. Today those words are crying out from the pages of scripture, crying out from a God who welcomed children; a God whose hand stretches wide for justice, whose heart beats with compassion for those who deserve compassion and for those who do not; a God who calls out nations and leaders and turns around what the world sees as great; a God who asks that we do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with him as our guide. Will we listen?
An argument started among the disciples as to which of them would be the greatest. Jesus, knowing their thoughts, took a little child and had him stand beside him. Then he said to them, “Whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. For it is the one who is least among you all who is the greatest.” Luke 9:46-47 (also Mark 9:35-37)
Though Christians will disagree on immigration policy, let’s not disagree on this: forcibly separating children from their parents, except in cases of abuse or neglect, is inhumane and intolerable. – Jen Pollock Michel
Marilyn R. Gardner 