Paso del Norte Port of Entry, El Paso Texas, Puente Benito Juárez (Wikipedia)

Immigration has been a controversial political issue in the United States for decades. Several Administrations have tried unsuccessfully to deal with it. The Congress has debated it endlessly and came close to a compromise a few years ago. In fact, our problems are small compared to what’s happening around the world. As of October, 2.75 million undocumented immigrants had tried to cross the southern border. That is the total of who were apprehended, many of whom had tried multiple crossings. They were counted every time they tried to cross.

The crisis at the southern border is extreme, especially at the El Paso crossing. Executive actions won’t provide the help needed, which requires Congressional Action. Our foreign policy has focused on Russia and China and ignored the severe problems in our own hemisphere. The immigrants from Central America, Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela are fleeing the violent gangs in these failed states. We can’t solve their problems, but we can take action to provide more direct humanitarian relief. That in itself would help reduce the flood of refugees.

According to the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, there are 27.1 million refugees around the world, and half of them are under the age of 18. The total number of displaced persons is 89.3 million. Most of them are not hosted by rich counties. Turkey has the most with 3.7, followed by Columbia, Pakistan, Uganda, and Germany, each with more than 1 million. As of July, more than 7.1 million refugees from the Ukraine have spread all over Europe since the invasion by Russia. Poland has taken more than a million.

What are refugees, migrants, and asylum-seeker? Refugees are defined and protected in international law. Asylum-seekers are seeking asylum in another country to seek the status of refugees. Migrants usually are moving across national boundaries for economic reasons, primarily to seek employment. The technical status is secondary to the huge human need due to wars, climate crisis, and civil unrest in failed states.

The United States largely has depended on NGO’s, charities, and churches for resettlement of refugees. The border with Mexico is the primary port of entry, with few from Canada, by air, or by sea. The U.S. Border Patrol as part of the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agency has been over-run with those crossing the border. That applies both to those who try to cross legally and to those who cross illegally simply by walking across the border. Efforts to build a wall to stop immigration have proven futile and a waste of billions of dollars. The processes and the services needed to handle and house the immigrants are broken, and until they are fixed with a major reform of our laws then chaos will continue to occur. Political stunts by the Governors of Texas and Florida gained some political points, but they may have inadvertently revealed the scale of the problem. Decades of Congressional gridlock and finger-pointing are a popular political game, but we simply can’t ignore these issues any longer.

Jesus and his family were refugees in Egypt for years. Surely retelling the Christmas story should remind us of the Christian mandate to greet the stranger with hospitality.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.