I am writing this while sitting in the corner of a large cafeteria in Los Chiles, Costa Rica, a town on the border with Nicaragua. The place is called Casa Esperanza (House of Hope) and serves the population of people who are in movement.
When I visited Casa Esperanza 9 months ago, most of the people were heading north, hoping to apply for asylum in the United States. Now, all are headed south after the border was closed on January 20.
Most of the people migrating are from Venezuela. They didn’t want to leave, but they were forced to do so. If a member of your family were killed by the government and the police started looking for you, what would you do? If you were a diabetic and your local pharmacies didn’t have any insulin, what would you do?
Close to 8 million Venezuelans (more than a quarter of the population) have had to leave Venezuela. Roughly 80% of them went to Colombia, Brazil, or Peru. But another 20% went north. Now the north is closed. Where will they go? Colombia and Brazil have significant gang violence. Peru is quite xenophobic. Where would you go if you were them?
One afternoon, I played make-believe with some girls while their mother had an appointment with a mental health professional. At one point, we imagined that we were being attacked by pirates. I pretended to be afraid, until the youngest girl began to reassure me repeatedly, “He doesn’t have a gun, so I wouldn’t worry.”
I paused. Our play had suddenly taken a serious turn. I wondered how many times these girls had seen their parents held at gunpoint in their travels through the jungles of Panama and the deserts of Mexico. Were the gun-wielders agents of criminal violence or agents of government violence? In some places it’s hard to tell the difference. These children had definitely seen dead bodies littering the trail. Had they actually seen anyone killed? Our make-believe had gotten complicated.
It’s hard to find reliable data about the sexual violence faced by those who are migrating. On the low end, President Trump said multiple times in his first term that one in three women were assaulted on the journey. On the high end, the now closed TV network, Fusion, reported that up to 80% of women face some sort of sexual violence while passing through Mexico. No one knows for sure. But the dangers are so real that many women on the journey take birth control as a precautionary measure. My racing mind returned to the girls playing make-believe with me at Casa Esperanza. I looked at them and my stomach twisted in knots. How young did a girl have to be to be safe from such horrors?
So much of the dialogue in the US and in Costa Rica focuses on the dangers posed by people who are migrating. There is a grain of truth to that. People in desperate situations are occasionally forced to do desperate things to survive. Every population has a subset of people who are dangerous, and that includes people who are migrating. But the simple truth is that a person who is migrating is far more likely to be the victim of violence than the perpetrator of violence.
Narratives are powerful. Some narratives focus on the dangers posed by foreigners. A much truer narrative focuses on the needs of vulnerable foreigners. There is still another narrative that I see in key places in the Bible: foreigners are a blessing.
Jesus was a refugee in Egypt, and did many of his miracles while traveling among gentiles. Ruth left her homeland, blessing Naomi and through her offspring the entire nation of Israel. Jonah, against his will, saved Nineveh from destruction. The missionary, Paul, was frequently pushed out of one city and on to the next by persecution, spreading the gospel as he went. So much blessing!
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah really illustrates for me the three narratives regarding foreigners, all in one place. The men of Sodom viewed the angels as people to be exploited, or perhaps as threats. Lot viewed the angels as vulnerable people who needed to be protected. Little did he know that it was he who was in need of protection. The angels saved him and his family. Lot was blessed by the very people he tried to help.
On my second day at Casa Esperanza, a group of 50 students came to visit from Earth University, a university dedicated to teaching agricultural sciences. Most of the students were from Africa and the Caribbean. Many were once refugees, displaced from their home countries. Now they are studying new farming techniques to help the communities that they now call home.
The students brought games for the migrant kids and clothes to donate. There was hair-braiding and face-painting. Someone put on some music and some impromptu dancing broke out. I saw smiles spread across the faces of the migrants. Some of them looked like they hadn’t smiled in months. As the migrants and the students mixed on the dance floor, it became harder and harder to distinguish between one group and the other.
Immigrants bring blessing in so many ways. They play a crucial role in the construction and agricultural industries. It is very likely that you were sheltered and fed today by foreign hands, including several who were probably undocumented.
But the blessings brought by immigrants can’t be reduced to economic usefulness. When we talk of immigrants and refugees, we’re speaking of our friends and neighbors, our coworkers and siblings in Christ.
My mother has no biological grandchildren, but has managed to adopt nearly a dozen kids from her neighborhood. She bakes cookies with them and reads with them. She brings them to concerts and to the zoo. All are from refugee families who have been separated from their own biological grandparents. These adopted grandkids bring so much joy to my mother’s life. So much blessing!
Have you been blessed by immigrants today?
God sent angels to Sodom to find out just how evil it was. How would the city treat these suspicious outsiders? I wonder if God still sends angels to find out how we’ll treat them. May they find us worthy of blessing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Micah Schuurman grew up in Wheaton, Illinois and studied at Dordt University and Calvin Seminary. He has lived for the past 11 years in San José, Costa Rica where he teaches Old Testament at ESEPA, the School for Pastoral Studies. His particular interests include Biblical Narrative and the Psalms of Lament. In his free time, he runs, reads, bakes, and helps with a chess club for kids from his neighborhood.