On a hot February day in Australia, Tahira Sadaat, 26, and her mother, Najeeba, 53, waited in their minivan until their appointment with a community-care worker at 3216 Connect, a thrift store and community-services hub southwest of Melbourne. Even in the heat, Tahira and her mother wore dark-colored hijabs and long-sleeved dresses over loose pants.
Tahira and her mother know how to wait. They waited in Pakistan for 18 years, hoping to return home to Afghanistan. But war and family disagreements over land kept them away. When Pakistan’s government ordered them to leave in 2014, Tahira’s father, her twin brother, and an older brother went back to Afghanistan to see if it was safe for Najeeba and her eight other children to return. They haven’t been heard from since.
Najeeba applied to the UN for resettlement, and Australia agreed to allow her family in. But with refugee status, her family has few resources and minimal government assistance. Her family depends on the kindness of strangers to navigate the Australian language, online forms, and banks. Many of those strangers are Christians with no agenda except to obey God’s mandate to love the stranger and sojourner in word and in deed.
In 2023, foreign-born residents in Australia surpassed 30 percent for the first time since 1893, and the country will welcome its one millionth post–World War II refugee later this year.
Alexandra Mikelsons, the community-care worker Tahira and her mother waited for in their minivan, keeps Bibles in Farsi on her desk. Clients look at them and say, “That’s my language,” and open them up.
“It’s really important for people to be able to associate us and the care that they’re given, the smile they get, or a sympathetic ear with Jesus and with who God is,” Mikelsons said.
A volunteer from a local Lutheran church, Michelle Filipovic, helped the Sadaats find a house and understand and fill out papers for government funding. After Filipovic moved away, Mikelsons and another church member helped the Sadaats fill out the paperwork—three times—for citizenship. In September 2023, the two stood with Tahira at her ceremony to become an Australian citizen.
Not all Christians are so helpful. Hugh Mackay, a secular Australian social researcher, said the federal refugee policies of some professing Christian leaders are a stain on Australia’s national character. One policy some Christians support and Mackay condemns: turning back every boat of asylum seekers or transporting them to the desolate island of Nauru.
“Talk about mental or spiritual gymnastics, trying to justify something that runs completely counter to the spirit of Christianity, completely contradicts the message embedded in the parable of the Good Samaritan,” Mackay said.
He explained how desperation drives asylum seekers and refugees to take dangerous risks. Smugglers in boats carry Iranians, Chinese, Somalis, and Pakistanis from Indonesia. Almost 90 percent of those arriving in boats are legitimate refugees, while less than half of refugee status–seeking people arriving by airplane are actual refugees, the Refugee Council of Australia writes.
Yet the Australian government refuses to welcome a single one of the maritime asylum seekers. Instead, Mackay has found that “church groups often do the on-the-ground activism finding housing, clothing, and access to work.”
Church planter Sam Lim was looking for a way for his 80-member Flow Church to serve the Melbourne area.
“We’re pretty representative of the suburb we’re in. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of the people in our church were born overseas. For a lot of people, the memory of what it’s like to be a foreigner is still very fresh,” Lim said.
Nearly a quarter of Australia’s churches are considered multiethnic, where at least 20 percent of congregants come from ethnicities different from the majority population.
Lim’s mostly millennial-aged church answered the call to take part in the government’s new Community Refugee Integration and Settlement Program. In preparation for being matched with a refugee family still overseas, referred by the UN, Flow Church members raised $20,000. Then they invited friends and relatives to a jazz concert with an educational aspect about the needs of asylum seekers and refugees. Concertgoers raised another $5,000.
Lim worried that church donations would decrease as people shifted their giving to resettling the refugee family, “but our tithes and offerings actually went up,” he said. “There’s an appetite from within our churches to give if they feel like the church is providing leadership to make a difference in this world.”
The church has since been matched with a family of Afghans living in Iran, who hope to touch ground in Australia in April.
The needs are large. As of June 2024, 122.6 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced—double the number from ten years earlier. Nearly 8 million of the displaced were seeking asylum in other countries.
Since July 2013, though, Australia’s government has declared that asylum seekers who arrive by boat will never resettle in Australia. That same year, the government began granting refugee visas to just over 1,000 people a year who arrived by airplane while refusing visas to more than 100,000.
Australia welcomes a limited number of international students and skilled workers, but even the 446,000 immigrants who entered by airplane with visa in hand last year get blamed for infrastructure problems that existed before they arrived.
Researcher Mackay said, “Politicians know that they are in a more secure position if the population is scared of something—if you can talk about border protection as though we are under threat from hordes of boat people, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants [and as though] all this talk would have an effect on our jobs or our housing.”
To be continued Thursday.
Amy Lewis is a freelance journalist who lives in Geelong, Australia.
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