ADVOCACY: GLOBAL REFUGE (formerly Lutheran Immigration & Refugee Service) – Part 6
Searching for the Causes of Some of Today’s Global Migration
As Lutherans, we answer the prophetic call to work for justice. In doing so, we respond to immediate human needs, but we also address the systemic problems that create those needs. The breadth of our work is expressed in the advocate’s parable:
One day, a group of people noticed a child in distress floating down the river near their town. One person dived into the water to rescue the child and rallied the town to provide him food and shelter. No sooner had that child been cared for than a second one was seen floating downstream. Someone saved her, and others pitched in to rescue more children who followed. Finally, the group met and resolved to send a delegation upstream to find out why so many children were falling into the water. They wanted to see the bigger picture in order to help solve a problem that was endangering lives.
Applying the parable today, we see millions of people worldwide entering the stream of migration as refugees, asylum seekers, and economic migrants. To understand what compels people to leave their homelands, we go upstream to see the bigger picture.
Centuries of Globalization: Shakespeare wrote that the past is the prologue of the present. Using his insight, we find clues in history that help us understand today’s massive migration. Looking back half a millennium, we see that globalization was moving into high gear by the 1400s. In the ensuing centuries, part of the human family colonized their siblings in many regions of the world, mining natural resources, appropriating land for large-scale agriculture, and trafficking people for labor. Generations later, many of those regions still struggle from long-disrupted economies. The loss of lands for farming and foraging meant the loss of a healthy, reliable food supply and more. Some people have had to move to survive.
Taking an example from our hemisphere, in the late 1800s, North Americans became avid consumers of bananas and other tropical fruits. The United Fruit Company is one of the U.S./European firms that responded to this growing market. Such companies created plantations in Central America to produce bananas at low cost and high profits. Soluri (2005), a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon, studied U.S. banana production in Honduras from the 1870s to the 1970s, noting that wetlands were drained and forests cut down to accommodate plantations. The environment changed; workers were not paid sustainable incomes, and ultimately, the poor of Honduras began to migrate internationally.
The Doctrine of Discovery: Such stories of land and labor help explain the last few centuries in Latin America. Coffee growing dominated in El Salvador; sugarcane defined Haiti and Cuba, etc. To learn more about the effects of globalization, the ELCA is studying the Doctrine of Discovery. Europe's Christian leaders and monarchs in the 15th and 16th centuries proclaimed the Doctrine to justify colonizing the Western Hemisphere and Africa. It still supports property rights laws in many places but not always to the benefit of indigenous people. The past is not disconnected from today’s migration.
Humbly, we acknowledge that some of us have benefited from 500 years of the Doctrine of Discovery and that many of our global siblings have not. Through ELCA World Hunger and Bread for the World, we now invest in restoring some of what has been lost in formerly colonized regions so that people can remain in their homelands rather than migrate. Through Global Refuge, we welcome those who do relocate. In study, prayer, and action, we can support and advocate—topics for next month’s note.
Judy Messal
Soluri, J. (2005). Banana cultures: Agriculture, consumption, and environmental change in Honduras and the United States. Austin: the University of Texas Press.