By Santosh Digal
Yangon: Churches in Asia need to accompany migrants, trafficked, stateless and indigenous peoples and communities and give them hope in situations of despair, a woman theologian from Australia has told the ongoing Asian Mission Congress.
The Church has to address migrant’s loneliness, isolation and various forms of injustice that plague those on the move and their families, communities and countries of origin,” asserted Gemma Tulux Cruz, senior lecturer in Theology at Australian Catholic University, on October 14 while addressing the congress on “Shining a light on hope: embracing and accompanying migrants.”
The Church has a moral and pastoral obligation to accept and accompany migrants as a missionary imperative, she told a plenary session on October 14, the third of the congress at Yangon, Myanmar.
More than 600 delegates representing various Churches from around the world are attending the congress organized by the Christian Conference of Asia. The theme of the event named, AMC-2017, is “Journeying Together: Prophetic Witness to the Truth and Light, in Asia.” This is the second mission congress of the Asian Church.
The search for greater opportunities and a better life binds all people on the move. This quest for well-being is the enduring theme of wave after wave, generation after generation, of migrants worldwide,” said Crux, a migrant from the Philippines to Netherland, America, Australia and Arabia.
“My father was a migrant worker to Saudi Arabia. Migration is a part of my life. I know what it means to be a migrant,” the Catholic theologian said.
According to a UN report, Asians represented the largest diaspora residing outside their country o of birth in 2013. About 19 million Asian migrants lived in Europe, some 16 million in Northern America and about 3 million in Oceania.
The same report says that Asians are moving overwhelming in search of work. Compared to other regions of destination, Asia saw the largest increase of international migrants since 2000, adding some 20 million migrants in 13 years, and this growth was mainly fueled by the demand for foreign labor in the oil-producing countries of Western Asia and in South-Eastern Asian countries with rapidly growing economics such as Malaysia and Thailand.
In 2012, more than 1 million Filipinos left the country to work in a country of the Gulf Cooperation Council, in Singapore, or in Hong Kong.
An Asian Development Bank Institute report, meanwhile noted that more than 250,000 workers from Sri Lanka and 100,000 from Thailand have also been leaving their country every year since 2008.
Two factors that contribute for people’s migration: oil boom of the mid 1970s which induced the immense investment in infrastructures by the Middle Eastern countries and the emergency and expansion of countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, Thailand and Malaysia, besides Japan and Western countries.
This prompted a pool of workers to a high level of aging population and low level of fertility rates, resulting a demand for labor which Asian workers readily filled. Their work is deemed as cheap. Sometimes, they are considered as slaves and face numerous struggles, physical and sexual abuse and trafficking.
In this age of migration, 200 million migrants are in need of the Church’s support and solidarity, Cruz said.
Churches have to network with governments, people of god will and civil society groups to work for the migrant workers across Asia and the globe at large, she added.