Aliens in our midst

In a famous passage from the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament, the voice of God tells the people “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” (Leviticus 19:32-33) In this passage the Hebrew people are reminded that what goes around comes around. They are reminded that they were once aliens, too. Later, Christian teachings extended this approach to its radical logical conclusion: that we are all same, that our ethnicity and our nationality are not important. We are all human. The early church was confronted with the question of whether to be a Jewish sect or a religion that extended beyond one ethnic group. In what was truly a radical departure, the early church, led by the apostle Paul, came to insist that the gospel was for everyone. It did not matter if you were a Jew or a gentile.

The Bible has a lot to say about aliens and strangers in our midst and how we should be treating them but it does not help matters that the definitions and terminologies are constantly changing and just as one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist, so too, one man’s alien is another man’s infiltrator. But it is precisely because of these conflicting definitions and the often violent responses that one encounters if one is on the other side of the line that one needs to unpack the issues of migration, displacement and alienation both with in our borders and outside our borders and then define a Christian response to this. As we will see though the barbed wire at the border makes a lot of difference , the essence of migration and its causes are often the same or similar.

India, itself, with its huge population and diverse language, caste and ethnic complexities is in the throes of a chronic debate about the migrant, the displaced and the infiltrator. We hear a lot of talk about people who are legal and people who are illegal. Our government is writing new laws and talking about building hundreds of miles of new fences on the Bangladesh and Pakistan borders for example to rein in infiltrators. Similarly, from time to time, there is a move to curtail the numbers of people who can live and work in metropolises like Mumbai. Therefore, given the many modes and nuances of migration and the understanding of who exactly are an alien and also the fact that new laws and judgements constantly shift the goalposts, understanding the phenomena is difficult. Understanding this from the perspective of the heart of God is perhaps even more difficult. Given below is a sample of what happens when two groups of people who are “different” clash, because they feel that they are intruding on each other’s space. From there, we will move on to study the roots of migration and displacement from different perspectives and attempt to arrive at a Biblical understanding.

Fifty-six Biharis were murdered in Assam in November 2003, over a week of sustained ethnic violence. In the face of intense competition for the semi-skilled D category of jobs (requiring a minimum of eighth standard education) in the Indian Railways (the single largest employer in the world), targeted bloodshed was the answer. A mere 2,750 vacancies in Assam had attracted 20,000 prospective applicants from Bihar. This prompted the local ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam) to call for protection of employment opportunities for the sons-of-the-soil, a long-standing ideology of Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena in Maharashtra. In the days of violence, 11 wage labourers were also brutally murdered because they hailed from Bihar.
This incident can be interpreted as a symptom of a larger malaise but the question can and should always be asked regarding what is the root of a force so vicious and desperate that it instigates mass murder on ethnic lines? Economically, the root of the problem is ‘jobless growth’ in the Indian economy, that is, despite acceleration in the growth rate in India; the pace of creation of work opportunities has not kept pace with the growing requirement. In the post-liberalisation period, unemployment on a Current Daily Status basis rose from 6.0 percent in 1993-94 to 7.3 percent in 1999-2000 resulting in an additional 27 million job seekers. The most disturbing fact is that of these, 74 percent are in the rural areas and 60 percent among them are educated.

This trend of rising unemployment is compounded by the existence of regional imbalances in development within the country, which have collectively accelerated the phenomenon of migration. All theories of migration concede that migration occurs when the region of origin lacks the opportunities which the destination promises. It is inherently a combination of pull and push factors. Variation in economic development across regions is a primary motive for migration to greener pastures. The rural poor are concentrated in eastern India, and in the rainfall-dependant parts of central and western India, which continue to have low agricultural productivity, while the bulk of the jobs are being created in western and southern India.
The phenomenon of overcrowding appears to be both a cause and a symptom of the exploitative labour process of distress migration. The growing phenomenon of rural-rural migration also has important implications for future generations who would also suffer from the same debilitating lack of opportunities and low productivity. For example, whole families of tribals from the Dang district of South Gujarat migrate for six to eight months to work in the sugar factories in the plains, resulting in their children being unable to enrol in schools.

There is also now a new phenomenon of circulatory migration in South Gujarat. Employers prefer to hire migrant labour, as they are considered to be cheaper and more docile than local labour. Consequently, labourers need to migrate in search of jobs, which they are denied in their native region. This perpetuates a vicious cycle of migration. Also, there often seems to be an inherent specialisation among labourers according to their place of origin, resulting in region and task specific movements. For example, road workers originate from the Panchmahals, quarry workers from Bharauch, cane cutters into South Gujarat from Maharashtra, and rice mill workers from the Jalan district of Rajasthan. These location-specific ‘skills’ however often are inconsequential for unskilled jobs with high content of physical labour. They are nevertheless perpetuated as a justification among employers to hire outstation labour.

These processes of seasonal migration have even developed into semi-formalised systems with the active participation of contractors as middlemen who gather migrant labourers for prospective employers. The seasonal movements are often debt induced as the contractors often provide a wage advance to the migrants. According to the NCRL (National Commission of Rural Labour), there were approximately 10 million seasonal/circular migrants in the rural areas alone in 1999-2000. This includes an estimated 4.5 million inter-state migrants. There were large numbers of migrants in agriculture and plantations, brick kilns, quarries, construction sites and fish processing.

While migration enables workers from underdeveloped regions to find employment, its impacts have been evaluated and the conclusions vary. Some people regard migration as a product of rational economic decision-making. The migrant makes a rational free choice to improve his economic condition by seeking more favourable employment conditions, even if the decision is being taken under distress. Scholars and economists who believe this way are therefore in favour of migration and suggest reducing the cost of migration. They believe that migration in fact ought to be encouraged and all efforts should be made to improve the bargaining power of migrants, improve information and conditions of their work and livelihood.

Also, the reality of migrants at a micro-level ensures that their constant motion and inherent insecurity of employment reduces their ability and inclination to unionise or enhance their bargaining positions for fear of instant dismissal. The policy recommendations of this group of academics would therefore be in favour of strict implementation of programs to reduce regional development imbalances, minimum wage regulation and right to work, for example, employment assurance schemes like the Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS).
Irrespective of ideological interpretations of the phenomenon of migration, it is an urgent crisis for the Indian state. The alarming call of political parties to curb migration on ethnic lines is a by-product of the economic distress facing the nation. Hence it is imperative to implement policy options to alleviate the situation for the short and long term.

All of the above looks at the prevalence of migration in India as the root cause of ethic tensions vitiated by economic distress at low level of skill and education. The problem of unemployment is in urgent need of redresses in India. The implications of its unchecked fury were evident in the ethnic violence in Assam. The phenomenon of low productivity due to overcrowding and cyclical unemployment have important implications for future generations in terms of education as it affects their labour market options to a improve their skills and vertical mobility. Therefore it is imperative to protect the right to work in the second most populous nation on the planet.
That leads us to examine next the daunting challenge of unemployment and all it leads to in terms of social and economic unrest. As we all know with restructuring and economic liberalization, many formal sector jobs have been shed. While employment options abound for the core circle of skilled professionals, the periphery of the unskilled and semi-skilled is worsening. Universalisation of programs like the Employment Guarantee Scheme might provide an important measure of relief and long-term growth for the rural economy. However, it must be noted that a decade from now, the problem that the nation will face is educational unemployment for which the Assam incident cited at the beginning of this piece serves as an ugly precursor. In fact, with the expansion of rural education, 8 million children have been taken off the fields in the last decade to join the rural schooling system. The aspirations of these first-generation literates require the construction of creative strategies for mass semi-skilled employment in the near future.

Then there is the phenomenon of brain drain that needs consideration. There was of course a time when people used to worry a lot about the "brain drain" from India. The apprehension was that the Indian state was spending a huge amount of resources to train doctors, engineers and technicians who were then emigrating to other countries and not contributing anything to India's national output. There was talk, even in responsible circles, of closing the doors, while keeping the windows open. Though some economists, even at the height of the debate, pointed to benefits in the form of remittances from Indian workers abroad, in addition to emigration providing a safety valve for frustrated unemployed or underemployed educated workforce, the general public opinion in India was decidedly against the brain drain.

Things have changed much since, particularly for India. In India, despite the so-called brain drain, there is no appreciable shortage of engineers or researchers as yet. The shortage of doctors in villages continues to be a big problem but it is highly doubtful whether stopping migration of highly qualified doctors (who have the necessary expertise for migrating to North America or Europe) would have mitigated this problem. However, to put the matter in its full perspective, there is however a shortage of skilled software professionals keeping in mind the growth of the software industry. As far as he economy is concerned, the huge remittances by Indian professionals, initially by workers from West Asia countries and then increasingly by IT professionals from the US, have largely contributed to solving our decades-old balance of payments problem. The resentment against the brain drain phenomenon has consequently reduced. This may also be partly due to the fact that most families have some relatives working abroad.

The brain drain, the way it has happened, has contributed in other ways too. International migration of professionals, instead of being a permanent brain drain, has, in many cases, resulted in reverse migration of people after training abroad. India has gained from the higher productivity of these workers. This would not have been possible if India did not allow its students/professionals to go abroad for higher studies or training. The Chinese did follow a closed-door policy during the Maoist time and paid the price for it. Now they are trying very hard to make up for the loss.

In recent times, there has also occurred a significant rise in work-related temporary migration from India to provide services in other countries (look at the thousands engineers of TCS working temporarily all over the world). Should this be considered brain drain? India's current advantage in the area of services exports (including software, medical services and R&D) is largely due to our past open-door policy towards higher education abroad. Though some Indian IT professionals decided to stay back in Silicon Valley in the US, they started companies that created a market for software developed in India. In addition, they indirectly contributed by creating a good image about the competence of Indian IT professionals.

Notwithstanding these positive fallouts, even now there is a good deal of talk about how to lessen the damage caused by brain drain. Prof Jagdish Bhagwati, in the 1970s, proposed a brain drain tax which would partially compensate the country of emigration for the education subsidy which these professionals received. The idea of a brain drain tax has not totally vanished from the minds of some policy-makers and academics. Other suggestions floating around include granting, like the rich nations, only time-limited visa which would force the emigrants to go back to their country with their expertise and savings after working for a few years abroad. But, then, in today's increasingly globalised market place, should we try to stop this flow of human resource? If capital can move freely across national boundaries, why not labour?

One argument for stopping labour migration is that the developed countries are allowing only the highly skilled workers to move in. This is increasing the income gap between high- and low-skill workers and consequently worsening the income distribution in countries such as India. By the same token, the disparity in income between high- and low-skill workers in a country like the US should be low as result of migration of cheaper (relative to the US) skilled workers from India to the US. That way global inequality may not necessarily go up as the income of poorer skilled workers from India are moving closer to the income of richer skilled workers in rich countries. In fact, technology has changed in such a way that everywhere the income gap between skilled and unskilled workers is widening. The demand for low-kill workers is going down all over the world. But there the primary blame should be more on the nature of technological progress, rather than migration.

Very recently another new trend has emerged. A global pool of high-skill human resource is emerging and employers in countries at different stages of development are all trying to draw from this global pool. Some regard this as the third phase of globalisation. In the first phase, goods moved globally, in the second stage, capital, and now it is the turn of skilled labour. Moreover, it is no longer restricted to a movement from less developed to developed countries as in the early phase of brain drain. Quite a few of the established professionals are now moving from countries such as the US to take up jobs in India.

This is due to a number of factors. One, the compensation package offered to these people (when considered in terms of the standard of living they can buy in India) is better in India, compared to the US or Europe. In any case, the emergence of a global culture and the ease of international travel and communication have hugely reduced the role of the residency factor in a person's life. Second, some of these professionals feel that they will be able to make better use of their expertise and contribute more in newly-emerging economies such as India. An example: New start-up low-cost airlines in India are hiring professionals from abroad who have experience in running such a business in other countries.

Three, as more and more companies are going global, often by acquiring production facilities in other countries, employing local managers and professionals to run the ongoing facilities have certain advantages. Even Japanese and Korean companies, who so far stuck to their age-old practice of having only Japanese or Korean CEOs to head their subsidiaries abroad, are now changing in response to the new global trend. Transnational companies want to employ workers from many different cultures as an essential ingredient for successful global operations. To top it all, even entry-level engineers from countries such as Australia have started to take up jobs in India, as the job situation is becoming increasingly tight in their own countries. What is still now just a trickle may increase significantly in volume over time.

Finally, do not forget that even migration of world-class academics or scientists from India is not a loss as it has led to greater contribution to the global pool of knowledge from which India has also benefited, along with other countries. For example, the work by Amartya Sen or Jagdish Bhagwati on Indian economy conducted abroad has advanced the understanding of Indian economy more than much of the work done by Indian economists in India. Then, should we bother about brain drain when the flow of brain is moving in all directions in today's global economy?

Why should Christians be concerned? Coming back to scripture, Throughout the Old and New Testament, we are commanded time and again to be welcoming of and serve the needs of the stranger. There is no question about God’s expectations of us. In the earliest Hebrew books of the Old Testament, we hear the prophets teaching the Israelites that the test of their society would be how well the widows, the orphans, and the aliens fared among them. This theme carries on throughout the Scriptures all the way through to Luke’s Gospel story of the Good Samaritan and Matthew’s Gospel in which Jesus tells us that in the final judgment, we will be asked if we welcomed Him, in the form of the stranger.In Genesis, we learn that Abraham and Sarah provided hospitality to three strangers from another land and that this response became a paradigm for the treatment of strangers by Abraham’s descendents. We see the children of Jacob become forced migrants, with Joseph being sold into slavery. The enslavement of the Chosen People by the Egyptians and then the liberation by God led directly to the commandments regarding strangers. “You shall treat the stranger no differently than the natives born among you, have the same love for him as for yourself; for you too were once strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Lv19:33-34)Think of these passages when you consider today’s slaves. The migrants and the aliens and the displaced and the refugees and all the others we encounter today… well the Bible may not use that term to refer to them but that is what it is talking about. If so, then what are we doing as individuals and as Church to liberate these poor people of God? For the Israelites, not only were they commanded to care for the stranger, but they structured the welcome and care of aliens into their gleaning and tithing laws. (Lv 19:9-10; Dt 14:28-29)

One of the most satisfying as also one of the most painful initiatives I have been involved in my long NGO career happened when the Taliban were pretty well entrenched in Afghanistan, 9/11 was a long way away and there were swathes of Afghan refugees in India – mostly educated, middle class and secular minded Afghans reduced to penury by the harsh living conditions imposed by the Taliban. India was not the permanent dwelling place most had in my mind but it was the place of halt for the secular Afghan, escaping from Afghanistan and Taliban friendly Pakistan as they got organized for putting in asylum applications to various Western embassies.

It was a difficult life they lived in the mean while in refugee ghettos, creating a cocooned refugee sub culture of their own. Even as they did the rounds of the UNHCR offices to collect their stipends and the embassy lawns in Chanakya puri with their visa applications, they had carved out a living space of their own which can only imagined. A former army major selling second cameras in the Sunday chor bazaar behind Red Fort, doctors whose qualifications were not recognized in India practicising clandestinely among their own, a woman lawyer rendered unemployed working in an illegal Afghan bakery , their frames and despair filled faces still flash across my mind.

In small, window less rooms they lived and from these rooms their children went to school. Exiled from their homeland and with no clarity as if the children would ever see their watan, the mother land, the parents drew small pictures of hills and deserts on tattered pieces of paper hung up on peeling walls. There seemed to be no money for maps and atlases

Occasionally some one would get a visa but it was not always a cause for celebration. The entire family of course would apply for a visa, but it wasn’t usually the entire family that got the visa. One or the other did- some times the father, occasionally the mother, now and then the oldest child. The joy of it all was crowded out by the thought that the family would separate – two or even three generations that had always lived together – laughed and cried together were about to be separated … possibly for ever. It was not unusual for a family to be separated in another way. Most families had applied for asylum in more than one country. It was not unheard of for spouses to get asylum in different countries as faceless bureaucracies processed papers according to their own legalistic criteria. Aged grand parents would stay back with younger children and babies as other family members scattered around the globe leaving behind emotionally scarred families. Then 9/11 happened and of course, shortly thereafter allied troops poured into Afghanistan and the Taliban dislodged from power. Hamid Karzai, a liberal and a friend of India was brought to power. The refugees trekked back to liberated Afghanistan and the camps first shrunk and then disappeared.

Our project Umeed, conceived in hopelessness was no longer necessary with hope flourishing all around. Many people as they went back post cards sent greeting cards and even phoned or emailed us thanking Umeed for that it had done for them in some of the darkest hours of their lives. It was a time of great fulfilment, knowing that families would be united again, there would be proper careers for the lawyers and the judges and the teachers, that children could see their own deserts and mountains and not merely see two dimensional pictures on limp walls. It was a euphoric moment of joy. But in the initial days of the project and indeed all through its very existence, we had to be ready to answer many questions – why were we doing this, what was the purpose, what was the reason? Didn’t India, have many problems of its own that needed our time and energy? Of course it had. Specifically then, we had to ask ourself the following questions:

What is the Bible's attitude to foreigners in general?
What is the Bible's attitude to immigrants and refugees in particular?
What do the gospel and the kingdom have to say to our subject?

A superficial reading of the Old Testament could leave the impression that God's purposes are narrowly nationalistic. His covenant with Abraham, and promise to bless his descendants, and his election, deliverance and rule over Israel suggest that the nations are not his concern - except negatively, in the conquest of the promised land when he decrees their annihilation. Indeed, Israel is told not to be like other nations and the prophets are littered with frightening oracles against the nations of divine judgement of the utmost severity. After the exile, Ezra instructed those who returned to divorce their foreign wives. In fact, throughout her history Israel is to maintain a safe distance vis-à-vis the nations in order to protect her own cohesiveness in terms of ethnicity, language, territory, religion and political institutions. So are we left with a negative view of the nations in the Bible? Does the Bible unwittingly encourage xenophobia?

Not at all. The overall theme of the Bible's teaching is summed up in Exodus 22:21, "You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." Reminding the people of biblical Israel that they had been slaves in Egypt, the Hebrews are enjoined to treat aliens, foreigners and sojourners in their midst fairly and with respect. Leviticus 19:34 echoes and expands upon the Exodus teaching. "The alien who resides among you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God." From the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews we hear, "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so some have entertained angels unawares."

Why is the matter of the immigrant or the "foreigner who resides among you" such a concern of the Jewish and Christian faiths and what bearing does it have on the current immigration debate in our country? As for the first question, the answer is that God didn't want the ancient Hebrews to forget where they had come from, or how they had gotten where they were, namely, the Promised Land. They had come from slavery in Egypt. They knew what it was like to be exploited and taken advantage of.

It was for this reason that biblical law is remarkably generous towards and supportive of the strangers in Israel. It is acknowledged that such people have no power, and are frequently poor and needy. Yet they are accorded fair and hospitable treatment. Whether assimilating or not, strangers were protected from abuse, especially abuse stemming from patriarchal authority, protected from unfair treatment when employed by Israelites, and protected from unfair treatment in the courts, including justice at the city gate. The example of God is also cited as a motivation, as in Deuteronomy 10:17-19: 'The Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, he shows no partiality, and loves the alien.'

Much after these scriptures were written, in 586 BC Israel as a nation, or strictly speaking the southern kingdom of Judah, was exiled to Babylon. They were not so much refugees, but even worse, deportees; not chased out, but led out or shipped out. The forlorn Israelites sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept (Ps 137:1), with Jerusalem in ruins and their infants slaughtered. Predicted in Leviticus (26:33) and Deuteronomy (28:64; 30:3-4), lamented in the book of Lamentations, and with Ezekiel and Daniel as exilic prophets, the Old Testament gives much space to this catastrophic experience and future generations of Jews lived under its cloud. Even after the Return, not unlike Jews today who continue to shudder at the memory of the Holocaust, its shadow remains. With only a little overstatement, we could characterise the Old Testament as a book about refugees.

When we come to the New Testament, the obvious question to seek to answer is, what would Jesus do? What did Jesus do is more pressing and fundamental. In short, he did two things. Jesus broke into history with a kingdom from heaven which encompassed those Israel conventionally thought to be its least likely subjects, namely, the poor, women, children, the socially excluded (prostitutes, lepers) and eventually, gentile sinners like us. Jesus redefined the people of God. 'Many who are first will be last, and the last first' (Mark 10:31; Matt 19:30; Luke 13:30; cf. 20:8), sums up the breathtakingly radical reversal that stamped his work and agenda.
The second thing that Jesus did was to insist that those who acknowledge him as the Christ should care for the poor and the powerless. Each of the four Gospels captures a distinctive feature of the moral vision of Jesus for his people. In Matthew Jesus calls for a surpassing righteousness; Mark sees him challenging us to a heroic discipleship; John focuses on the common life of love Christians are to provide for each other

The example and teaching of Jesus impresses on us a compassionate response to refugees, strangers and the marginalised. We know the heart of the stranger, for each one of us were once lost and estranged from God. The same logic applies to us as it did to Israel. Christians of all people can empathise with foreign strangers. Once we were strangers to God, then having experienced his welcome, we become strangers in another sense - strangers to the world in which we remain. The Christian response of welcoming the stranger, in full knowledge of the attendant risks, is not based on Christian niceness. Rather, it is grounded in God's love for all, even (or especially) for the outcast and the stranger.

Therefore according to our scriptures, immigration is not simply a sociological fact but also a theological event. God revealed his covenant to his people as they were in the process of immigrating. This Covenant was a gift and a responsibility; it reflected God's goodness to them but also called them to respond to newcomers in the same way Yahweh responded to them in their slavery: "So you too must befriend the alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt" (Deuteronomy 10:19).

The gospel vision challenges the prevailing consumerist mentality of our culture, which sees life as an endless accumulation of goods, even while the rest of the world suffers. Jesus in his life and ministry went beyond borders of all sorts -- clean/unclean, saintly/sinful and rich/poor -- including those defined by the authorities of his own day. In doing so, he called into being a community of magnanimity and generosity that would reflect God's unlimited love for all people. He called people "blest" not when they have received the most but when they have shared the most and needed the least. Christians, as such, distinguish themselves not by the quantity of their possessions but the quality of the heart, which expresses itself in service. Above all, this quality of the heart is measured by the extent to which one loves the least significant among us.

Many immigrants sit at our doors like Lazarus, hoping for scraps to fall from our bountiful table of prosperity. They are seeking not simply charity but justice. In Matthew, Jesus says, "I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me." The corollaries to the immigrant experience are striking. Hungry in their homelands, thirsty in the treacherous deserts they cross, naked after being robbed at gunpoint by bandit gangs, sick in the hospitals from heat-related illnesses, imprisoned in immigration detention centres and, finally, if they make it across, estranged in a new land, they bear many of the marks of the crucified Christ in our world today