Welcoming Climate Refugees as Angels

I’VE WRITTEN ABOUT immigration in these pages before, so forgive me if I seem to be repeating myself. However, any of us who spend time with the Bible know that repetition is among its most important characteristics. We get the same message over and over, until it sinks in. Here’s Leviticus 19:34: “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” And here’s Leviticus five chapters later: “You shall have the same rule for the sojourner and for the native.” Everyone knows Matthew 25:35: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” But sometimes we forget the wonderfully hopeful verse from the letter to the Hebrews: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Bottom line: This is clearly important work for Christians, or at least it was 2,000 years ago.

I’ve been thinking about these verses as I read a remarkable recent book, Border and Rule, by a Canadian activist named Harsha Walia. I warn you: It’s a fierce book, which in some ways reminds me of the 1619 Project. It chronicles all the ways that in the last few hundred years the rich nations have used borders to further colonialism and conquest and to keep the stranger at bay. “Migrants and refugees don’t just appear at our borders; they are produced by systemic forces,” she writes.

Of all those forces, none will match the climate crisis. Depending on whose estimate you choose, the number of people forced from their homes by global warming over the next decades could range from 1 to 3 billion. Most of them will likely be poor and vulnerable (the other people singled out by the Bible for special protection), and very few will have done much to cause the crisis destroying their lives. The average Somalian, for instance, now suffering through the fifth-straight dry “rainy season,” produces 1/500th as much carbon dioxide as the average American. Our lives have turned their lives upside down.

Some Christians have reacted in the right ways. I have the honor of being an adviser at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. Its remarkable staff is able to help settle thousands of people in the U.S. each yea r— whomever the government lets in through its increasingly tight screens. But you can do the math; that is the tiniest fraction of the people who will need help in the decades ahead.

So, I guess the best way to look at it is: If you want a chance to show that Christianity means something real to you, you’re going to have an unprecedented opportunity in the years to come. And almost certainly you will meet some angels along the way.