Khanya (Orthodox Christians in South Africa)
Photo from the article Xenophobia and load shedding
[...] Actually, immigration is not one issue, but many, all of which are sometimes hotly debated.
If we look at history, we find that sometimes countries encourage immigration, and at others they discourage it. Many countries encourage immigration of people with skills that are in short supply among their citizens. But they are less welcoming to people who are unskilled, or whose skills they don’t require, and who will merely come to swell the ranks of the unemployed. And sometimes it works both ways. Here in South Africa, for example, we see trained medical people — doctors and nurses — emigrating to countries where they will be paid more. And we find doctors and nurses from countries where they are paid less wanting to come and practise in South Africa.
This has led to some strange things. For example, before the mid-1970s a lot of medical services in rural areas were provided by church hospitals and clinics. Often the doctors came from overseas. They could have been paid more in their own countries, but many of them saw their work as part of their Christian calling, so they wanted to be of service, even if the money was less. The government of the day did not like church hospitals, and in about 1973 most of those in the so-called “homelands” were nationalised, so that they could be under the ideological control of the government. The supply of overseas doctors dried up, and South African doctors did not want to work in the rural areas, where the money was not so good. So many of the former church hospitals were staffed by medical students who had been conscripted into the army.
Many immigrants, both skilled and unskilled, are refugees or semi-refugees. They are often prepared to do any work, whether it fits with their skills or not, and they are often prepared to work harder than local people, and to do work that the local people are unwilling to do.
I had a brief experience of this myself, back in 1966. I had finished my university degree in South Africa, and had a bursary to study in the UK, but because the South African academic year finished in November, and the UK academic year only started the following October, I had about 10 months to fill in while waiting. I worked as a bus driver in Johannesburg, and was trying to save money for my fare to the UK when I got a phone call from a security policeman who wanted to see me the next day, so I skipped the country, and landed in the UK almost penniless. I applied for a job driving buses for London Transport, but had to be able to show the immigration authorities that I would not, by doing so, deprive a British citizen of a job. At that time London Transport was short of 7000 bus drivers and conductors — more than the entire operating staff of the Johannesburg Transport Department, which had about 1300 drivers and conductors altogether. There were all kinds of bureaucratic hoops to jump through. In order to get a job, one had to have permission to work, but in order to get permission to work, one had to have a job. So I got a taste of the kind of thing that most immigrants have to go through (and, in that time of apartheid, South Africa discriminated in similar fashion against the majority of its own citizens).
Father Frumentius, the priest
in Atteridgeville (from here)
In South Africa in 2008 there were outbreaks of xenophobic violence between February and May. They started in Mamelodi, where we go to church, and spread to other places. Foreigners were beaten up, chased out of their homes, their homes were sometimes set on fire, and some were killed. And the complaint was that the foreigners were taking jobs. The strange thing, though, was that, as Father Frumentius, the priest in Atteridgeville, noted, when the foreigners had been chased out, there were no South Africans moving in to provide the goods and services that the foreigners offered (see No bread, no matches, no candles — thanks to xenophobia).
There is also a perception that immigrants, legal and illegal, are responsible for the high crime rate, and this leads to resentment of immigrants and fuels xenophobia. How much truth there may be in this perception I can’t say, but there is also a suspicion that much of the xenophobic violence of 2-3 years ago was sparked by criminal gangs who were threatened by foreigners muscling on on what they saw as their territory. There were reports that they arrived by minibus taxi and began attacking foreigners and calling on others to join them.
All these things, and lot more, help to make immigration a contentious issue. Sometimes the contentiousness gets quite irrational, as I noted in a post on my other blog a few months ago, which is perhaps worth repearing here: Notes from underground: Which country are we talking about here?. It referred to a letter that appeared in the Cyprus Mail:
Surely I’m not the only person to see the irony of British expats in Cyprus making comments on the UK elections last week such as: “I’ve got nothing against immigrants but there are too many and it’s getting out of hand” and “Immigration concerns me. It’s only a little island”?And the comments on that blog post referred to several other instances of this irony — British ex-pats living in Spain with similar complaints to those in Cyprus and Danish immigrants to Argentina complaining about immigrants from other places living in Denmark. But best of all was the story that Pauline Hanson, an anti-immigration politician from Australia, who had herself immigrated to Britain. So it seems that some of the people who are most vociferously opposed to immigration are themselves immigrants. As the old Fidonet tagline put it: “Illegal immigration is a problem in Australia; ask any Aboriginal.”
Coming over here… can’t speak a word of the language and the colour – pink as lobsters, some of them.
So how should Christians respond to “the immigration issue”?
I think of our Church of St Nicholas of Japan in Johannesburg (photo from here), and there is irony there too. We started it at a time when most Orthodox Churches in and around Johannesburg were immigrant enclaves, where South Africans were (and in some still are), regarded as “xeni”. We chose St Nicholas of Japan as out patron saint because he was a Russian missionary who went to Japan and planted a Japanese Church, not a Russdian one. We wanted a South African church and a South African Orthodoxy that would be multicultural as South Africa is, and not an ethnic enclave.
But somehow we have always had a fairly high proportion
of immigrants in the parish. Some of them have been birds of passage,
stopping temporarily on their way to somewhere else. We had a Russian
family that moved to Australia (and a couple of Russians who went back
to Russia). We had a Syrian family that went to America, a Romanian
family that went to Australia. We’ve had Americans who have gone back to
America, and Brits who have gone back to Britain. We have several
Romanian families who have stuck around, Zimbabweans, Kenyans, Serbs and
Congolese, and some from Greece and Cyprus. So we are not just
multiethnic and multicultural, we are multinational as well. I suppose
that makes us more sympathetic to immigrants, at least most of the time.
We did at one time have a Bulgarian immigrant who joined the AWB and
wanted to chase all the black South Africans out of the church! In his
case the sympathy wore a bit thin.As Christians we are members of a “parish”, which makes us “parishioners”.
But what is a “parishioner”. The word comes from the Greek pariki, which means “beside the house”. The usual explanation is that the “house” is the parish church, and so the pariki are those who live around it. But if you translate it into Afrikaans, pariki becomes bywoners, which literally means “those who live next to”, but is usually applied to sojourners or squatters. In other words, people who are not permanent residents, but are birds of passage, temporary residents.
From the site of the St Nicholas of Japan Orthodox Church
In this sense, St Peter addresses all Christians as “parishioners” when he says “Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul” — ᾿Αγαπητοί, παρακαλῶ ὡς παροίκους καὶ παρεπιδήμους, ἀπέχεσθαι τῶν σαρκικῶν ἐπιθυμιῶν, αἵτινες στρατεύονται κατὰ τῆς ψυχῆς (I Peter 2:11). Parikous = strangers.
As the Epistle to Diognetus puts it:
For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking (literally, “paradoxical”) method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners (literally “parishioners”). As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring (literally, “cast away fœtuses”) They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all.The word translated as “sojourners” is, again, pariki. And, as Christians, we are all sojourners, squatters, temporary residents in this world. While “immigration” may be an issue for the world, for Christians there can be no issue about how to treat immigrants.
- Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt (Ex 22:21).
- But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God (Lev 19:34).
As Christians we believe that “the earth is the Lord’s and all that therein is: the compass of the world, and they that dwell therein” (Ps 23/24 v. 1). National boundaries and frontiers, citizenship and immigration and emigration are of temporal and not eternal significance.
“The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me” (Lev 25:23).`
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This post is part of a Synchroblog, where a group of bloggers post on the same topic on the same day, so that people can surf from one to the other and get different views on the same basic topic. You will find links to the other synchroblog posts here.
Note of the author, deacon Steve Hayes, from here: Christians can talk about xenophobia, preach and teach about it, and remind people that xenophobia is a sin that needs to be confessed. For Orthodox Christians a good opportunity to do this will be on the 5th Sunday of Pascha, which is the Sunday of the Samaritan woman.
NOTE of our blog
Please, see also
Saint Nickolas of Japan & the samurai Fr Paul Sawabe Takuma
The Heresy of Racism
Orthodox Mission in Tropical Africa (& the Decolonization of Africa)
Outreach to the refugees and migrants currently in Greece
The Church as the Liberated Zone: "All we Christians are terrorists..."
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