When bishops and archbishops speak about migration it always hits the headlines—and never ends well.
In 2016, Justin Welby got into trouble when he said that it was quite reasonable to ‘fear’ the consequences of mass migration.
There is a tendency to say ‘those people are racist’, which is just outrageous, absolutely outrageous.
But in 2023, he got into trouble in the opposite direction, when he said that Government plan to crack down on illegal immigration were ‘morally unacceptable and politically impractical.’ Different comment; same result. (Incidentally, it is fascinating to note the quite radical change in his position on this in a ‘liberal’ direction over the same time period of his change in his views on same-sex marriage.)
Stephen Cottrell, the archbishop of York, has dived into the issue, as has Steven Croft, bishop of Oxford, with criticisms of Nigel Farage’s plans to deport illegal migrants.
In an interview with Trevor Phillips on Sky News, Stephen called Farage’s approach a ‘isolationist, knee-jerk response’ which ‘will not solve the problem’. The first part of the interview focused on child poverty, but it then moved to the question of migration, and the Reform policy, and Cottrell seemed happy to talk about it.
And this, I think, it where the problems began.
The gospel is not political, in the sense that it is not merely about changes or challenges to politics or policy—but it has clear political implications. So it should not surprise us when Christian leaders comment on political issues. But when they do, I look for three things: that they are well informed; that they are theologically grounded; and that they are pastorally helpful. I am not sure that Stephen Cottrell’s comments met any of these tests.
Migration is a massive issue in Britain, and has been for many years. Legal migration has been at very high levels for at least the last 20 years, reaching the unprecedented record of over 900,000 in 2023. One in six people in England and Wales was not born here, and as migrants tend to be younger and have more children, the impact on schools is massive. 40% of primary age children have at least one foreign-born parent; for 20%, English is not their first language. (Note that these statistics are easily accessible from official sources, but they are rarely aired in the debate—or when they are, those who mention them are often criticised as being ‘right wing’. It is odd to think that the citing of facts should have a political identity.)
You cannot have that level of change in a country without it having an impact. And successive governments have failed to address the issues it raises. It has been claimed that this has been necessary because of a skills gap—but that gap has been created by a failure of policy. 26% of NHS doctors are trained abroad, because the government has, for years, set a cap on university places for medicine which is too low to meet the training needs of the NHS.
From my experience as a governor of the secondary school that our children attended, it seems to me that our schools’ education policy appears to be ‘Do whatever you want’ rather than ‘Train to do the jobs that need doing’. This is both a serious issue in terms of policy—but it is also something into which Christian theology speaks, because it makes assumptions about what education is for, and what it means to be a mature adult in the world, that is, it makes large assumptions about anthropology, what is means to be human.
The main values in education appears to be ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’ in the context of a competitive jobs market—and so universities are under pressure to calculate the monetary value of their degrees in terms of career earnings. These things assume that humans are autonomous units of consumption in a competitive world, rather than people in community, made by God with gifts and abilities to be used in the service of others. And a key missing piece here is the Christian idea of ‘vocation’, that the gifts and abilities we have might be used to develop skills which will serve others and contribute to social well-being.
This might sound like a deviation from the question of migration—but it cannot be detached from it, since ‘skills shortages’ or ‘job vacancies’ are both the reason given for justifying migration in the debate, and also offer the formal basis for criteria in assessing qualifications for legal migration.
The question of legal and ‘planned’ migration is the backdrop to the two other forms of migration—asylum seekers, and illegal migrants. To comment on any of these three issues, we need both to disentangle from the others, but also be aware of the impact each issue has on the other. People whose lives have been changed by ‘planned’ migration—and resent it—are going to respond to illegal migration in the light of that.
And illegal migration appears to be out of control. It has ballooned since 2020, so that there were as many illegal migrants in the last year (44,000) as there were total migrants in each year in the 1990s. For a political leader like Nigel Farage to say something drastic needs to be done can hardly be ‘knee jerk’.
And as the population has grown by 20% through legal migration, we have not built 20% more homes, we have not built 20% more hospitals, and we have not built 20% more schools. The policy has been uncoordinated and ill thought through.
And is it really moral to draw skilled and motivated workers from poorer countries that need them more? If Christian leaders have not considered this complexity of issues, commenting on specific political is walking into a minefield.
If Stephen’s analysis was thin, so was his theology. He reached for Jesus’ command ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’, but we need to ask the same question Jesus was asked: who is my neighbour? How do we love our neighbour in our own street who is struggling to afford a home, and whose wages are depressed, because of the changes that mass migration has brought? This is not a question of narrow nationalism, and is not a ‘zero sum game’ in relation to the needs of others.
But it does require us to think about the role of government, and what is ‘the problem’ that Stephen thinks needs to be solved. Yes, there is a global crisis about migration, and our government needs to work with others to address that. But the first responsibility of any government is the security, safety, and welfare of its own citizens.
The vast majority of those crossing the channel by boats young men, motivated by the economic opportunities in the West, who have enough energy and resources to make the journey. And migrants are disproportionately represented in crime figures. You cannot love your neighbour without facing these challenging realities.
Underlying this (though it is not often made explicit) is the question: what does it mean for us to love those who live in other countries who do not enjoy the levels of material prosperity that we do? In answering that, we need to face at least three realities.
The first is that the assumption that what those in the developing world need more than anything else is more money and more things is to buy into the materialist and consumerist mindset of our culture. Visiting many of these places can offer a salutary lesson: many of them have great riches of culture, community, and tradition which makes the UK look distinctly impoverished.
The second is: to assume what others need is what we have, is a return to colonialism, and an impoverished version at that. There is, embedded in this, an inherent belief that Western lifestyles are not only what everyone wants but what everyone needs.
The third is a failure to think about what an economically unequal world actually needs. If we do have a desire to see wealth equality across different parts of the world, and we want that out of a love for our neighbour, rather than a mere imposition of our own values on them (and we think that this is economically and environmentally sustainable), how might that be attained? The evidence is that it is actually undermined by our sucking out of the talented, trained, and energetic from those countries—and it is helped by good trade relations. One of the things which is an embarrassment to tradition Christian ethics is that the thing which has reduced poverty in the developing world more than any other has not been development aid, but free-market economics and global trade networks.
What Stephen Cottrell appears to be confusing is the love that we might have for an individual from another country and culture, whom we meet as a neighbour as this person has already migrated here, and the love for the millions of others who have remained in their own country. The two issues are quite separate, and to suggest that ‘love for neighbour’ leads to a ‘liberal’ migration policy is to confuse these two issues, and to fail to engage with the real issues around global migration.
It is perfectly possible to commend love for our migrant neighbour whilst still arguing for a more restricted migration policy. I wonder why we have not heard that from any Christian leaders so far.
This lack of clear thinking here is illustrated by the actual causes of migration. Ten years ago, Fraser Nelson predicted that migration is going to become a big and long term issue for the West because of what is driving it—and his comments have been confirmed by events since then. The surprising thing is that the growth in migration is a result of the reduction in global poverty:
When a poor country becomes richer, its emigration rate rises until it becomes as wealthy as Albania or Armenia are today. This process usually takes decades, and only afterwards does wealth subdue emigration. War is a catalyst. If conflict strikes, and the country isn’t quite as poor as it once was, more of those affected now have the means to cross the world. The digital age means they also have the information.
What is remarkable, then, is that successive governments have so signally failed to respond to this challenge, and it is unsurprising that Nigel Farage’s comments suggesting radical action is needed have actually been welcomed by many.
The theological poverty of the responses of so many Christian leaders is illustrated in two comments I received from friends in previous discussion of these issues.
Read it all in Psephizo