Refugees

According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), more than one person is forcibly displaced every two seconds. By the end of 2023, there were 110 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. Sixty-two million of them are internally displaced people, 36.4 million are refugees, and 6.1 million are asylum seekers. The average length of displacement is 17 years. There are also an estimated 10 million stateless people.

Here are some definitions:

• Migrants are people who move to another country, regardless of whether it is voluntary or forced.
  Refugees are forced to leave their home country because of conflict or persecution.
• Internally displaced people (IDPs) are those who are forced to leave their homes but who have not left their country. Unlike refugees, they are not protected by international law.
• Asylum seekers are refugees who seek sanctuary, legal protection, and material assistance in another country.
• Stateless people are citizens of no country, which means that no country has any legal obligation to protect or care for them.

There are three often inter-related reasons that people are forcibly displaced.

Persecution

Persecution is the systematic mistreatment of an individual or a group by another individual or group. This can take on many forms, including religious, national, social, ethnic, or political. Religious persecution is the biggest category.

War

Most of history’s refugees have been direct and indirect victims of war. Wherever there is armed conflict, people seek to escape death and conscription into armies by fleeing the conflict zone. Afghanistan had the largest number of refugees of any country in the world from 1981-2013, when it was eclipsed by people fleeing civil war in Syria.

Hunger and Climate 

When a region faces extreme, prolonged drought, people flee to avoid starvation. Most of the 17 million refugees within Africa are fleeing starvation. The damage done by drought is made worse by war, making it impossible for farmers to farm. Some analysts fear that the number of refugees from droughts and other weather disasters is going to skyrocket to as many as one billion by 2050.

Refugees are prominent throughout the Bible, and have long been both an object of God’s love and a prominent part of redemptive history:

• Adam and his family were forcibly displaced by God from their garden home (Gen 3:23-24).
• Noah and his family were refugees who lost all to a natural disaster (Gen 6-9).
• Jacob and his family fled the land of Canaan because of a drought (Gen 42-50).
• Moses fled for his life from Egypt and lived as a refugee in the land of Midian (Ex 2:11-25).
• The Israelites were driven out of Egypt, and escaped genocide by Pharaoh’s army (Ex 13-15).
• Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi, fled the land of Judah for Moab due to a famine (Ruth 1:1-7).
• David lived as a refugee outside of Israel fleeing Saul’s assassination attempts (I Sam 20-31).
• Esther’s people were war refugees after the destruction of the land of Judah by the Medes and Persians.
• While an asylum seeker in the land of Persia, Esther became their queen (Esther).
• Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt with Jesus. They lived there as refugees before moving to Nazareth as displaced people (Matt 2:13-23).

In his sermon to the men of Athens at the Areopagus, the Apostle Paul suggested that the reason God allows people to be moved about the earth is so that they will seek and find God:

“And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him” (Acts 17:26-27).