My local church has helped various asylum seekers over the last several years: acquiring furniture, buying supermarket cards from them so they can shop where they choose, driving them to hospital, writing to the local MP on their behalf, witnessing for them in court. We now work in conjunction with the Boaz Trust and several other local churches to provide a meal and a place to sleep for destitute asylum seekers during the cold months. According to Bretherton’s guidelines, the church should act locally first but also try to act structurally rather than just respond pastorally. Bretherton also suggests that churches should decide who is the particular neighbour to be loved in their context, and I think he gets it exactly right when he chooses refugees as the neighbour to be loved in the national context. From first hand experience I know that the government regularly violates the human rights of refugees. I’ve known single mothers of young children treated like violent criminals; young children and parents forcibly separated for long periods of time; children’s health jeopardized by ignoring the advice of doctors; not to mention uninterested state-provided lawyers failing to change cut-and-paste forms to reflect information accurately. Many of the asylum seekers I know have been kept in limbo for years waiting to hear if they are successful or if they will be sent back to danger; imagine the stress of that situation; nor can they work in the meantime. And this mistreatment is compounded by the government’s frequent scapegoating of refugees, and the way it arbitrarily fixes numbers of how many to accept (surely such numbers should partly be a response to events which drive people from their homes over which we have no control). Its approach to students from abroad is equally about pandering to votes and extremely unhelpful to universities.
All of this suggests a group of people that our politics and society fails and positively mistreats. That may be reason enough to regard them as the neighbour requiring our help. But reading Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism I was struck by her comments on the mob. ‘The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented.’ It is a caricature of the people but it is not the people and should not be mistaken as such, and yet sometimes it is and its demands given some due. I would submit that groups such as the English Defence League are Britain’s contemporary mob and their target is, of course, above all the refugee. ‘While it is a mistake to assume that the mob preys only on Jews, the Jews must be accorded first place among its favorite victims.’ And yet the ‘fickleness of the mob is proverbial.’ Arendt first uses the term ‘mob’ in her discussion of the Dreyfus affair, and it is this line that is really chilling: ‘Not only the mob but a considerable section of the French people declared itself, at best, quite uninterested in whether one group of the population was or was not to be excluded from the law.’ The plight of refugees is strangely absent from our media and public debate, from public consciousness, but this silence is in some sense a complicity with the mob. Bretherton points us to the Citizens for Sanctuary movement as a beginning for action.
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