Abstract
Mobility is as old as the human species. In fact, it is regarded as an engine of human history. Borders have been redrawn; people’s stories have been rewritten; and identities and subjectivities have been transformed because individuals, groups, or masses of people took the risk to cross borders by either land, sea, or air. But mobility, particularly in its contemporary phases and faces, comes with considerable challenges. There is, for instance, the matter of density. At no other point in history has the number of people on the move been at such a large scale that the current period is being referred to as the age of migration.1 To be sure, this claim is not without merit. The International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) World Migration Report, for instance, says that the number of people living outside their country of origin dramatically increased from 150 million in 2000—when IOM published its first World Migration Report—to more than 214 million in 2010. That’s an increase of 64 million in a matter of ten years. Moreover, the IOM reports that the figure could rise to as much as 405 million by 2050.2 Today, about 3 percent of the world’s population comprises of migrants. While the percentage may seem miniscule, it actually represents a lot of people. In fact, if all migrants in the world were to come together to constitute a country, theirs would be the world’s fifth most populous.
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Notes
See Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World 4th edition (New York: The Guilford Press, 2009).
See also Andrés Solimano, International Migration in the Age of Crisis and Globalization: Historical and Recent Experiences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Whereas other previous great migrations have been largely based on and described according to ethnic or regional groups, migration today, that is, in the age of globalization, literally has the “the world on the move.”
John Haywood, The Great Migrations: From the Earliest Humans to the Age of Globalization (London: Quercus, 2009), 244–249.
International Organization for Migration, World Migration Report 2010: The Future of Migration: Building Capacities for Change (Geneva: IOM, 2010), 3. The 2011report still puts the number of migrants worldwide to 214 million. This is still significant, IOM maintains, because the total number of migrants has not fallen despite the global economic crisis.
International Organization for Migration, World Migration Report 2011: Communicating Effectively About Migration (Geneva: IOM, 2011), 49.
At times this generic description of migrants is made more specific by including a more definite time frame for residence in another country, that is, for one year or more. In view of ministry, however, the Catholic Church has a broader and evolving understanding of migrants. De Pastorali Migratorum Cura, for instance, defines migrant people as “all those who live outside their homeland or their own ethnic community and need special attention because of real necessity” (DPCM, no. 15). In the circular letter “Church and Human Mobility” the parameters were widened to include not just immigrants, migrant workers, exiles and refugees but also sailors, travelers by air, airport personnel, nomadic peoples and tourists (CHM, 2). The Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People then added the following categories to the list: displaced people, fishermen, circus and fairground people, travelers for reasons of piety and study, land transport workers and other similar categories. As cited in Fabio Baggio, “The Migrant Ministry: A Constant Concern for the Catholic Church,” Asian Christian Review Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter 2010): 47.
These rights or privileges also include those laid out in the 1951 Geneva Convention and its 1967 Protocol as well as international humanitarian law based on the Geneva Conventions 1949 and the 1977 Protocols. Elspeth Guild, Security and Migration in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 71–72.
John Allen, The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 274.
See, for example, Dianne Scullion, “Gender Perspectives on Child Trafficking: A Case Study of Child Domestic Workers,” in Gender and Migration in 21st Century Europe, ed. Helen Stalford, Samantha Currie and Samantha Velucci (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009): 45–60.
Germany is, in fact, known for this with its gasterbeiter. David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), 238–243.
Not surprisingly, the program is much criticized. Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis, No One Is Illegal (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006), 139–147, for example, considers the bracero program as “a twentieth-century caste system.”
“STEP OUT” is an acronym which stands for Scientific, Technical, and Educated Professionals Out of Underdeveloped Territories. It is a new term proposed in Michelle R. Pistone and John J. Hoeffner, Stepping Out of the Brain Drain: Applying Catholic Social Teaching in a New Era of Migration (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 3.
Samuel Munzele Maimbo, et al. Migrant Labor Remittances in South Asia (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2005), 4. The authors also attribute the increased attention on the impact of remittances on economic development in the development debate in migration literature to the steady decline in the volume of overseas development assistance (ODA).
Dilip Ratha, Sanket Mohapatra and Ani Silwal, “World Bank: Migration and Development Brief No. 10,” <http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPROSPECTS/Resources/334934–1110315015165/Migration&DevelopmentBrief10.pdf> accessed January 9, 2013.
David Bacon, Illegal People, 23–26. See also Pav Jordan, “Mexican Farmers See Death Sentence in NAFTA,” <http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1228–07.htm> accessed January 24, 2013.
David Grant, “Deportations of Illegal Immigrants in 2012 Reach New US Record,” <http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2012/1224/Deportations-of-illegal-immigrants-in-2012-reach-new-US-record> accessed January 23, 2013.
Neomi De Anda, “Border Cuentos: Sources for Reflections on Migration,” New Theology Review Vol. 20, No. 3 (August 2007): 28, for instance, talks about the case of a pregnant woman who does not receive proper nutrition resulting to her unborn child being underweight according to her doctors.
Carmem Lussi explicitly points this out in “Human Mobility as a Theological Consideration” in Migration in a Global World, ed. Solange Lefebvre and Luis Carlos Susin, Concilium (London: SCM Press, 2008/5): 50. One could speak of migration, in other words, as a “signs of the times” or those events of history through which God continues to speak to us and summon us to respond for the sake of the reign of God’s love and justice throughout the whole of creation.
Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 95.
See Timothy Smith, “Religion and Ethnicity in America,” American Historical Review 83: 1155–1185 as quoted in Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, “Introduction” in Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations, ed. Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltman Chafetz (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2000): 18.
Jon Sobrino, Witnesses of the Kingdom: The Martyrs of El Salvador and the Crucified Peoples (New York: Orbis, 2003), 13.
Anselm Min, “Migration and Christian Hope,” in Faith on the Move: Towards a Theology of Migration in Asia, ed. Fabio Baggio and Agnes Brazal (Quezon City, Phils: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008): 187.
One could see this lack or dearth of attention to migration from a religious or theological perspective in a supposedly interdisciplinary book on migration. See James Hollifield and Caroline Brettell, eds. Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines (New York: Routledge, 2000).
There are essays from the discipline of history, demography, economics, law, politics, sociology and anthropology but not a single essay on theology, not even religious studies. As of this writing there is one book that explicitly tackles migration from a Christian systematic theological perspective, that of Daniel Groody and Gioacchino Campese, eds. A Promised Land, A Perilous Journey: Theological Perspectives on Migration (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008) while there are a few that engage the issue from an ethical perspective such as
Kristin Heyer, Kinship Across Borders: A Christian Ethic of Immigration (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012);
Sussana Snyder, Asylum-Seeking, Migration and Church (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012);
Arsene Brice Bado, Dignity Across Borders: Forced Migration and Christian Social Ethics (Denver, CO: Outskirts Press, 2011) and;
David Hollenbach, S.J., ed. Driven from Home: Protecting the Rights of Forced Migrants (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2010).
Other related books include Glenda Tibe Bonifacio and Vivienne S.M. Angeles, eds. Gender, Religion and Migration: Pathways to Integration (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010);
Donald Kerwin and Jill Marie Gerschutz, And You Welcomed Me: Migration and Catholic Social Teaching (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009);
Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo, God’s Heart Has No Borders: How Religious Activists Are Working for Immigrant Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008);
Michele Pistone and John Hoeffner, Stepping Out of the Brain Drain: Applying Catholic Social Teaching in a New Era of Migration (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007);
Gioacchino Campese and Pietro Ciallella, eds. Migration, Religious Experience and Globalization (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 2003) and;
Daniel G. Groody, Border of Death, Valley of Life: An Immigrant Journey of Heart and Spirit (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). Special issues of reputable journals on migration are also noteworthy to be mentioned here.
These include Solange Lefebvre and Luis Carlos Susin, eds. Migration in a Global World (London: SCM Press, 2008) and
Dietmar Mieth and Lisa Sowle Cahill, eds. Migrants and Refugees Concilium 1993/4, (London: SCM Press, 1993). Daniel Groody calls this theological lacuna the “migration-theology divide,” which does not only need to be filled but, first and foremost, crossed and bridged. In fact Groody identifies this gap as the first divide that needs to be crossed toward the articulation and systematic development of a theology on migration.
Daniel Groody, “Crossing the Divide: Foundations of a Theology of Migration and Refugees,” Theological Studies Vol. 70, No. 3 (September 2009): 640–642.
For a more detailed discussion on the attention that migration has gotten, so far, in the field of theology see Gioacchino Campese, “The Irruption of Migrants: Theology of Migration in the 21st Century,” Theological Studies Vol. 73, No. 1 (March 2012): 3–32.
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© 2014 Gemma Tulud Cruz
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Cruz, G.T. (2014). Introduction: Migration as a Locus for Theological Reflection. In: Toward a Theology of Migration. Content and Context in Theological Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375513_1
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