By Martha Simmons
Correspondent, The Alabama Baptist
Recent immigration controversies notwithstanding, the United States not only receives more migrants than any other country in the world, it also is 1 of the 20 countries most likely to welcome them.
A recent Gallup World Poll in 2016–2017 asked citizens of 139 countries to say whether they would view the following as “a good thing,” “a bad thing” or “it depends/don’t know”:
• Immigrants living in your country.
• An immigrant becoming your neighbor.
• An immigrant marrying one of your close relatives.
Europe’s migrant crisis
The resulting Migrant Acceptance Index reported that polar opposites Iceland and New Zealand were the most accepting countries on the globe for migrants, while Macedonia and Montenegro were the least likely to throw out the welcome mat.
“Many countries on the front lines of the recent migrant crisis in Europe are among the least-accepting countries in the world for migrants, according to Gallup’s new Migrant Acceptance Index,” Gallup reported. “Nine of the 10 countries that score a 2.39 or lower (out of a possible 9.0) on the index are former Soviet bloc countries — with most located along the Balkan route that once channeled asylum seekers from Greece to Germany.
“Israel, which has dealt with its own influx of asylum seekers from Africa in the past decade, is the only non-European country with scores this low,” Gallup reported. Israel ranked as the 6th least-welcoming country for migrants with a score of 1.87, compared with the United States, the 18th most-welcoming country, whose score was 7.27.
Immigrants and their U.S.-born children now represent 27 percent of the overall U.S. population, according to the 2016 Current Population Survey (CPS).
Top 10 countries
According to the CPS, the top 10 countries of origin for U.S. immigrants in 2015 were:
1. Mexico — 27 percent
2. India — 6 percent
3. China (including Hong Kong but not Taiwan) — 5 percent
4. Philippines — 5 percent
5. El Salvador — 3 percent
6. Vietnam — 3 percent
7. Cuba — 3 percent
8. Dominican Republic — 2 percent
9. Korea — 2 percent
10. Guatemala — 2 percent
So how do these statistics square with recent immigration controversies, Judeo-Christian traditions and Christians’ obligations to welcome the sojourner? In an article published in the fall of 2016, the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board (IMB) called for “opening the borders of the U.S. church” and serving “the immigrants among us.”
The article’s authors are Kara Blakeley and Thi Mitsamphanh. Blakeley lives in Southeast Asia where she works with local believers to make disciples and mobilize missionaries. Mitsamphanh came to the United States in 1986 with his Buddhist family and now has a doctorate in missions, focusing on diaspora missiology, from Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary in Cordova, Tennessee.
Top destination
“The United States is the top destination for the world’s migrant population,” Blakeley and Mitsamphanh wrote. “In 2015 it was home to 46.6 million foreign-born residents, while Russia ranked a distant second with 11.6 million immigrants. With an increasingly diverse population, experts predict that by 2055 the United States will not have a single racial or ethnic majority.
“Now more than ever, the U.S. church has the incredible opportunity to welcome people from many backgrounds,” they wrote. “The end goal, though, is not to just welcome them into our congregations but also to empower them with the gospel and mobilize them to make disciples of the nations themselves.”
The U.S. represents the third largest number of unreached people behind China and India, according to missiologist J.D. Payne, who serves as pastor for church multiplication for The Church at Brook Hills, Birmingham.
“Migration and mission converge to create a new frontier in Kingdom expansion,” Payne wrote in promoting the conference “Reaching the Nations in North America” in Tennessee in 2016. “For most of us, the peoples next door are strangers. There is something missionally malignant if we are willing to make great sacrifices to travel the world but unwilling to cross the street.
“If the Divine Maestro has orchestrated the movement of the nations to our communities, then we should know how to respond (Acts 17:26–27).”
Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism at Wheaton College, said at the conference that while there’s room for disagreement on issues like border security and immigration, there can be no doubt as to Christians’ marching orders with regard to the strangers among us.
Staying on mission
“We might differ on that,” he said of current immigration controversies, “but you can’t differ and be a Christian on the call of Jesus to reach all kinds of people from different nations.
“Our task is to be about the mission that Jesus has given us,” Stetzer said. “In the midst of the politics we’re called to be prophetic.”
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