Toward a Theology of Migration

Social Justice and Religious Experience

G. Cruz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137400765
• eBook ISBN: 9781137375513
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law

Offering a theology of migration, Cruz reflects on the Christian vision of 'one bread, one body, one people' in view of the gifts and challenges of contemporary migration to Christian spirituality, mission, and inculturation and the need for reform of migration policies based on the experience of refugees, migrant women, and others.

PART I

MIGRATION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

CHAPTER 1

LIVING ON THE EDGE: MIGRATION, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE UNSKILLED WORKER

As a social phenomenon, globalization has primarily been associated with the flexibility and extension of the forms of production; the denationalizing and rapid mobility of capital, information, and goods; the deterritorialization of culture; the interpenetration of local communities by global media networks; and the dispersal of socioeconomic power. One can deduce from such a description that the shrinking of spaces is a distinguishing feature of globalization, especially given the fact that, as a concept, it has to do with both the compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole.

While globalization as a term emerged fairly recently when the world economy rapidly evolved new forms of integration and independence, globalization structures are not new. Roland Robertson, for instance, maintains that patterns that connect the world have appeared from time to time throughout history and that these patterns have almost always resulted from or resulted to a wide-scale movement of people.¹ In fact, I submit that nowhere is globalization’s strongest impetus and effects most illustrated than in the ability of a huge number of people today to move from place to place at an increasingly faster pace.

MIGRATION AND GLOBALIZATION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Migration’s relationship with globalization goes way back in history. It dates back to the 1500s, when Europe expanded by colonizing and causing large intercontinental movements of people.² These movements involved peoples of three continents and existed in two separate circuits, namely the tropical and nontropical circuit. Up to 61 million Europeans moved to the settlement colonies to search for better living conditions and to enable some parts of Europe to avoid serious overpopulation. This group then fueled migration by going back and forth between the colonies and their countries of origin. Moreover, this period involved the movement not only of millions of European colonizers but also of the colonized peoples.³ About 11 million Africans were forcibly removed from Africa in order to work in overseas plantations and mines. Roughly 1.3 million Indians and Chinese, also known as Asian “coolies,” in the meantime, were placed on indentured labor in plantations in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.

European colonization also triggered the mass migration of another group of colonizers, that is, those who colonized the soul of the natives. To be sure, European culture and religion was subtly, if not forcibly, imposed on the colonies. Among Filipinos, as was the case among Latin Americans colonized by Spain, sixteenth-century Spanish Catholicism is the icon of this means of colonial subjugation. As such, one cannot discount here the Christian missionaries who also came in waves with the merchant and battle ships. These missionaries played a crucial role not just in the religious conversion but also in the political pacification and, consequently, easier subjugation of the natives.

This combination of voluntary and involuntary migration went on for more than four centuries. As a result, over 1 million people a year, or about 10 percent of the world’s population, moved or were transported to the “new world” by the turn of the twentieth century. What is also clear is that, as with the current process of globalization, international trade significantly expanded in this period.⁴ In fact, the migratory paths and patterns followed throughout this period established well-worn routes still traveled today by peoples and goods.

After the collapse of the European colonial empires and the creation of the nation-states, lesser transport costs relative to wages, lower travel risk, and in particular, existing ties between European colonizing countries and their former colonies facilitated the movements of people. While formal and regulated system of passports and visas has been developed at this time to control the flow of people across national borders, people continued to move considerably. In search of a better life and reunification with their loved ones, who have been brought as slaves or recruited as workers by their former colonizers, colonized peoples noticeably moved again in this period. Indonesians moved to the Netherlands; Indians and Pakistanis moved to England; while Vietnamese, Cambodians, Algerians, Tunisians, Moroccans, and other French-speaking Africans moved to France. The effects of this phase of international migration could still be seen in the diverse ethnic make-up of many countries in the Western Hemisphere today.

The social upheavals brought by the two world wars also led to a significant wave of migration of a new breed of people on the move, that is, refugees and asylum seekers. A large number of people also moved as the colonizers used or recruited many of their former subjects to be foot soldiers then lured more by opening their doors to immigrants to help rebuild their war-devastated economies. While there were definitely positive aspects, tragedy litters the stories of many immigrants in this period. The earlier waves of immigrants, especially in the Western Hemisphere, were confined in ghettoes, blamed for crime, disease, and the persistence of poverty. Europe and the United States had to learn how to cope with multicultural societies, resorting to restrictive policies in the process. Asian immigrants in the United States, for example, suffered from outright racism, particularly through various restrictive legislations.⁵

Migration Today

Today migration continues to define humankind’s story and remains embedded in global patterns of integration. What makes contemporary migration different is that it is intensified by changes and processes rooted in or related to globalization as we are experiencing it today, such as growing demographic disparities, the effects of environmental change, new global political and economic dynamics, technological revolutions, and social networks. Moreover, some of these processes that serve as “push and pull factors” are new if not different. The combination of graying population and falling fertility rates in developed countries, for instance, has not only fueled the demand for immigrants to bolster the decreasing pool of workers; it has also created a lucrative job market for health professionals, who are sorely needed for taking care of the exploding elderly population.⁶ The recent political turmoil in various countries in North Africa and the Middle East, in the meantime, has dramatically increased and put the spotlight again on people displaced by civil wars and conflicts.⁷ The irresponsible use of the world’s natural resources for survival and profit, meanwhile, has created a different type of refugees, that is, environmental refugees. Last but not the least, global patterns of integration have also created a different breed of economic migrants. These are the “skilled transients” (the corporate managers, consultants, and technicians who hop or get transferred from one international branch of the transnational company to another) and the “transnational migrants” (the elite group of rich entrepreneurs who can “buy” citizenship and shuttle or split their time in two or more countries).⁸ All these have led to a switch in the nature of migrants and destination countries from migrants as citizens of colonial powers entering new lands to migrants as displaced persons, refugees, and laborers entering industrialized nations. These have also led to the evolution of migrant rights from essentially a recognition of the rights of the individual’s country of origin to a recognition of the rights of the individual himself or herself.⁹

What makes contemporary migration also different is that it is far more complex than it used to be. It is noteworthy to mention, for example, how the statistical breakdown of a report by the United Nations on international migrants somehow challenges traditional assumptions that the West is the only destination of all migrants. The specific intake of migrants (in millions) by continent (Europe: 50.5, Asia: 42.0, North America: 39.3, Africa: 13.0, Latin America: 4.9, and Oceania: 4.3) actually shows Asia receiving more migrants than North America.¹⁰ The distribution also shows that continents stereotyped as migrant-sending such as Latin America and Africa also received a significant number of migrants. Speaking literally and figuratively, Dennis Müller correctly points out that “the cards have been shuffled and that it is no longer so easy to distinguish between the host countries and countries through which migrants travel” as “the supposedly clear distinction between countries of arrival and countries of departure is equally tending to become blurred.”¹¹ The density and velocity of contemporary mobility also contribute to this complex blurring of boundaries.

Of course all these changes are largely made more possible by the advances in communication, transport, and technology as well as the forging of alliances between nation-states (e.g., European Union’s Schengen treaty) and economic integration brought by globalization. And while there are certainly positive developments, migration conditions and patterns in the context of contemporary globalization show, in many ways, the worsening of existing problems and the emergence of new forms of oppression. First, because global economic integration has increased the economic divide between rich and poor countries,¹² more and more people see international migration as the only way out of poverty. In fact, the UN points out that the most notable root of the phenomenon is the underlying disparities in livelihood and safety opportunities. While migrants are arguably not the poorest of the poor, survival still impels countless people to risk their life and limb as high levels of unemployment plague Third World countries. Impoverished nation-states, whose political and economic powers are diminished by transnational companies and institutions,¹³ then capitalize on and exploit their citizens by legitimizing and promoting migration.¹⁴ Today, migrants are the primary “exports” of many poor countries saddled by debt, consequently making migrants contemporary globalization’s flexible, expendable, and disposable capital.¹⁵

Ironically, while there is a considerable increase in terms of volume in contemporary migration, there is also a growing restriction on people’s ability to move, particularly for those who move for economic reasons. Despite the relative movement of capital and information, economic migrants are more and more subjected to restrictions on entry and settlement. Under pressure from their citizens, destination countries are particularly making it difficult for unskilled workers to enter. This is lamentable in the face of the reality that it is the unskilled workers who make up the bulk of the millions of people who are desperate to move,¹⁶ and the ones destination countries need the most, since many of the unfilled or available jobs are the so-called SALEP (shunned by all citizens except the poor) jobs or 3D (dirty, dangerous, and demeaned) jobs. In the United States, for example, the job areas that grew the most in the past few decades are the low-wage areas, which are oftentimes the SALEP and 3D jobs.

The threat and fear of terrorism among destination countries, especially in the West, is also putting people’s mobility in jeopardy as borders are now policed with the full array of military surveillance and pursuit techniques. When one factors in citizens’ growing negative perception of immigrants, particularly for irregular migrants,¹⁷ on top of the passage of local or state legislations curtailing political, economic, and cultural opportunities for migrants, one can say that the migration process is becoming more daunting, even life threatening, for migrants. This is particularly true for (irregular) unskilled workers whose plight arguably constitutes the heart of the justice question as far as migration in the context of globalization is concerned. The next section explores the risks and difficulties faced by this group.

The Challenge of the (Irregular) Unskilled Migrant Worker

The majority of people on the move are undeniably those who are poor and are looking for work, particularly unskilled work. On the surface, poor and unskilled migrant workers stand a good chance for migration because, in keeping with the current processes of economic globalization and the trajectories of international labor migration, the majority of jobs available on the global job market are in areas considered as unskilled.¹⁸ The problem is the trend on unskilled work for foreigners in the global job market is that of declining wages. Oftentimes, there are also terms and conditions of employment such as wage discrimination, which apply only to foreign workers,¹⁹ hence are less fair.

For poor migrant workers, economic globalization’s relentless pursuit for profit, combined with xenophobic sentiments in destination countries that are inflamed by politics or anti-immigrant political parties, leads to various forms of discrimination, abuse, and exploitation before, during, and after migration. There are a number of ways in which poor migrant workers experience such difficulties. First of all, unskilled migrant labor is usually not integrated into the global economy. Second, it is undervalued by national economies. Hence, unskilled migrant workers become easy target, on the one hand, in identifying scapegoats for economic hardships. On the other hand, they become convenient solutions to economic downturns as employers (even governments) turn to migrant jobs or wages for cost-cutting measures.²⁰ Third, unskilled migrant workers have to live with national laws and foreign policies that disadvantage migrant workers, in general, and unskilled migrant workers, in particular.²¹ In its desire to propagate the myth of “Japan as one ethnic nation,” for example, Japan, despite its acute labor shortage, does not grant visas to unskilled workers except to the nikkeijin (of Japanese ancestry) who are mostly from Brazil and Peru. The combination of the glut of contractors, small and large enterprises desperate for workers, and enticing Japanese wages then creates clandestine migration flows. Fourth, unskilled migrant workers’ jobs are unfairly regarded as “needed but not wanted,” cheap, and exploitative labor. In most cases this is because their jobs, for example, fishing and agriculture, construction, trade, and service sectors are the SALEP or 3D jobs, which are often mired in deplorable working conditions.²² Thus, in some cases they are at the receiving end of problematic labels such as “disposable people.”²³ Photographer Philippe Chancel even describes migrant construction workers in the United Arab Emirates as “the new slaves” of the Gulf.²⁴ Last but not the least, while skilled workers or “skilled transients” are wanted and lured and can more freely circulate in the global job market, unskilled workers are restricted.²⁵

This overall restriction and marginalization of unskilled migrant labor has serious repercussions as it renders unskilled work invisible or exclud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Robert Schreiter
• Introduction: Migration as a Locus for Theological Reflection
• Part I: Migration and Social Justice
• Part II: Migration and Religious Experience
• Conclusion: One Bread, One Body, One People
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index