









































Communication, Society and Media 
ISSN 2576-5388 (Print) ISSN 2576-5396 (Online) 

Vol. 3, No. 2, 2020 
www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm 

79 
 

Original Paper 

Understanding Immigration Today: The Importance of Religious 

Literacy on Immigration and Refugee Crisis 
Cristian J. Mendoza1* 

1 Associated Professor of Catholic Social Doctrine, School of Theology and School of Church 

Communications, Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, Italy 
* Cristian J. Mendoza, Associated Professor of Catholic Social Doctrine, School of Theology and 

School of Church Communications, Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, Italy 

 

Received: March 26, 2020        Accepted: April 8, 2020         Online Published: April 14, 2020 

doi:10.22158/csm.v3n2p79                       URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/csm.v3n2p79 

 

Abstract 

This paper deals with the concept of immigrants and refugees when defining public policy. Public 

understanding of immigrants and refugees comes from political definitions and from secular and 

faith-based organizations. Most political definitions regarding immigrants and refugees are found in 

public policies: opening or closing borders, visa regulations, etc. These definitions include concepts 

regarding people who are object of the legislation under the mindset of people writing it. Sometimes the 

legislators don’t understand the world vision of immigrants and refugees. And those who respect the 

law don’t always know the mindset and motivations of the legislators. So a sort of common literacy is 

needed. This literacy is an essential part of this study. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, it 

aims to identify some of the general areas lacking research to adequately address the Refugee Crisis. 

Second, it aims to look forward for future research with representatives of key international entities 

helping immigrants and refugees. Its contents are organized in three parts: outlining the basic 

understanding of immigrants and refugees as it is found in contemporary academic literature, showing 

that without common concepts it is hard to reach agreements for social collaboration. making a call to 

action. 

Keywords 

immigrants, refugees, religious literacy, faith-based organizations, public policy 

 

 

 

 



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1. Introduction 

Social collaboration takes place when people know, like and trust others at least at a certain degree. For 

enhancing social collaboration it is essential to keep up mutual cooperation and mutual understanding 

between members in a given society.  

Political authorities are responsible for enhancing social collaboration. When dealing with immigration 

they have a twofold challenge for integrating people from different backgrounds into the culture of 

their new Country. First, with regards to the newcomers it is necessary to bridge somehow two worlds: 

The one that mobilized people are leaving and the one they are entering into. Second, for the people in 

the hosting country is necessary to understand their own behaviors with respect to the immigrants and 

refugees finding a way to not only interact with them, but also for making them flourish. For the 

citizens in the hosting countries it seems reasonable that being with people who think different may 

help them to understand better their own ideas, behavior and life style. It is not about changing what 

they usually do, say and believe, it is about deepening the meaning of it for themselves. And so, the 

challenge is cultural, but not only. 

The Center for International Development (CID) of Harvard University observes that in America there 

is an immigrant population of around 14 per cent of the total population. And considering only the 

entrepreneurial population of the United States, the percentage of immigrants raise to 20 per cent. 

Immigrants influence economic development. This observation is even more noticeable when focusing 

in specific parts of America. For instance in the Silicon Valley, 46 per cent of the workers were born 

outside of the United States. Moreover from all people working in that area, only 16 per cent were born 

in California. This state has around 40 million people, but the Silicon Valley attracts people from the 

whole world and benefits from that concentration of foreigners (Audrestch, Link, & Walshok, 2015, p. 

65). 

Public policy is needed for facing these challenges as it can foster social collaboration with immigrants 

and refugees. People move more easily now from one country to another, or from one region to another 

within the same country. Currently, people’s mobility makes the need for public policies more urgent, 

because it creates great social concerns: unemployment, lack of housing and education, etc. This 

concern grows especially when regards people’s movement across nations. 

Public policies regulating people’s mobility across national borders are often built upon economic 

reasoning: i.e., on the one hand increasing the number of workers might generate lower wages, but on 

the other hand if immigrants are unskilled workers they could represent higher expenses in social aid. 

Social research shows that public concern regards mostly cultural issues: immigrants have different 

beliefs and behaviors, they would not integrate with the local customs, etc. In a word, people’s mobility 

becomes a challenge to “the sense of us” (Alvarez & Hernandez, 2019, p. 7). 

In sum, mobility is a challenge for the common good of society. This common good is what Aristotle 



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already defined as the good of the individual citizen but projected to the whole of the polis. For the 

philosopher the good of the individual is health for the physical body and justice for the spiritual soul. 

In the same way society should aim for health and justice for all, reaching the good of all individuals, 

through public hospitals, the military and prisons. Public policies helping citizens to reach their 

common good should not only aim to economic goals. 

Keeping in mind the holistic good of society in this paper, I will try to integrate both the widely 

recognized public concern regarding immigrants and refugees that is mostly economic, with the public 

policies addressing immigrants and refugees, in a twofold way.  

First, I will argue that increased religious literacy could help citizens of hosting countries to see the 

newcomers as citizens like themselves. This because a society recognizing every individual having a 

dignity rooted in his human nature, regardless of his ethnicity or beliefs, thinks in a “more human” way. 

This society provides better conditions for the flourishing of its members. This is part of what religious 

believers try to foster: they attempt to bring people together with the divine, and with each other, 

without exclusion. Believing in a common Maker, could help people to understand their common 

nature and common call for being a community. In other words I argue that religious faith can expand 

our “sense of us”, making societies more socially inclusive. 

And second, specifically with regards to people’s mobility, I argue that religious literacy may help 

citizens of “the global north” to nuance the potential negative view of foreigners moving into their 

Countries. The name we give others makes a difference. Most of the newcomers are economic 

immigrants, not refugees, they are workers not burdens, people with potential not with problems.  

The conclusions I look forward are, on the one hand, 1) that economic migrants could actually foster 

economic development in their new nations. Especially when they are seen as someone with equal 

dignity to local citizens. I argue on the other hand 2) that migrants can develop cultural and human 

values in the hosting society, bringing in their own skills and increasing social responsibilities that are 

not measurable in economic terms. Legislation matters, and in this case it is built on concepts 

embedded in culture and religion. Most of the time we understand immigrants as competitors, or 

substitutes of our own economic activity. But we should see them as complements of what we already 

do. Immigrants—and perhaps also refugees—are like sugar and coffee: the more you have of one, the 

more you need of the other. The more migrants come to a nation, the more talent will bring with them. 

They are not substitutes of local talent, but additions to it. Religious literacy can help in the definition 

of immigrants and refugees as complements rather than as substitutes. I will next 1) explain the 

meaning of religious literacy 2) see how we use it for immigration policies and 3) compare the 

language of immigration policies to immigration public concern. Finally, in the discussion I aim to 

stress the differences between them for proposing a common language for public dialogue regarding 

this humanitarian crisis. 



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2. Method 

2.1 The Meaning of Religious Literacy 

Living in a global society is always easier to find people who believe and think in different ways. When 

entering in contact with religious people from India or Africa, where the sense of the sacred is deeply 

embedded in society, we could notice a lack of concepts for describing it, so finding a sort of religious 

illiteracy.  

In Western society this illiteracy could lead to confuse religious with irrational behaviors, or spiritual 

ideals with irreal desires, promoting prejudice and bigotry. On the contrary, better understanding of 

religion could give people more language and tools to understand others. This understanding—related 

for instance to immigrants and refugees—is important to create public policies and to communicate to 

the general audience. Religious literacy is not only necessary for policy makers but also for religious 

representatives, because they are not experts in every context and might also need updating in specific 

fields, and because they are not indifferent to the political and economics issues of society. At the end, 

improving religious literacy is especially important for political authorities and likewise for religious or 

humanitarian leaders. 

2.1.1 Religious Literacy for Public Authorities 

Governments need more a language for religions, than answers to religions. This language might 

require a fundamental optimism for human nature and the capacity to distinguish direct violence from 

cultural violence. The last limits some people for reaching goods and services necessary for a healthy, 

meaningful and safe existence. Cultural violence is translated in tacit discrimination based for instance 

on ethnicity, religion or family traditions. Other forms of cultural violence are discovered when looking 

historically to situations: The assumption that some people are different to us and that this othering is 

indefensible was the principle of the Nazis, the slave owners, etc. The answer to cultural violence is 

grounded on the consideration that embedded norms and assumptions seeming natural, right and 

inevitable are always constructed, although they are commonly accepted. Discovering the injustice 

behind this kind of social constructions allowed people to abolish slavery and to end the apartheid. 

In the case of cultural violence othering is the root of the problem. And othering is transmitted through 

embedded norms and assumptions where religion always takes part. Some religious groups in America 

argued moral legitimacy for slavery by preaching from the pulpits in the United States. But at the same 

time, abolitionist came out from religious believers, so the influence of religion could also be very 

positive for society. That is why Christians affirm that “when the individual is not recognized and loved 

in the person’s dignity as the living image of God (cf. Gen 1:26), the human being is exposed to more 

humiliating and degrading forms of ‘manipulation’, that most assuredly reduce the individual to a 

slavery to those who are stronger” (John Paul II, 1988, p. 5). 

 



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2.1.2 Religious Literacy for Humanitarian Leaders 

Humanitarian leaders creating cultural values likewise become a key factor for facing cultural violence. 

Cultures are shaped by those who could be members of organized religions and relief associations. 

Looking at social changes, we usually find people who in an act of courage, imagination or faith 

stepped out of cultural assumptions. Humanitarian leaders have the conviction that personal action 

matters and that social changes start small—even from a negative point of view—moving later to 

positions of greater influence. On the contrary, hearing that our actions won’t matter is itself a form of 

cultural violence put in place for maintaining specific social conditions of injustice, and for keeping up 

with the status quo. 

The need for a public consideration of religious affairs is usually stressed when social issues raise. For 

instance, when governments aim to understand terrorism born out of religious fundamentalisms. 

Terrorist attacks reach different publics, like the US domestic political sphere and the international 

community. ISIS produces ninety thousand media contents a day and, despite that the United States’ 

Secretary of State or international humanitarian leaders do not have legitimacy in Islam theology, these 

media content need a public answer (Halverson, Corman, & Goodall, 2011, p. 100). And the needed 

answers should avoid fulfilling the narrative of ISIS, giving credit to the terrorists. Religious leaders 

likewise need to keep the right concepts especially when public language is complex and when the aim 

is to reach subgroups within large organizations. Not every religious believer is an extremist and not 

every extremist is a terrorist. 

In sum, there are three main reasons why every government should aim to interpret religion correctly:  

1) In terms of social, political and economic affairs, religions are powerful and consequential. So if part 

of diplomacy is trying to get social agreements, then religion is part of that because any time the 

government is involved in religious issues there are dynamics of power in place.  

2) Religious illiteracy can lead to great harm, because for example it should not be possible to impose 

democracy to societies, not mattering if people want it or not. The export of religious freedom should 

not be coercive. 

3) Religious illiteracy is about educating people so that in terms of public pronouncements the 

government should never refer to a specific religious group as being better than others.  

Religious literacy matters in social issues linked to immigration and refugee’s crisis, because the terms 

immigration, temporal resident and refugee could be mixed and confused in public policy. And 

understanding what does “mobilization of people” mean for society could help to enhance social 

inclusion. 

2.2 Immigration and Refugee’s Mobility as a Humanitarian Crisis 

We established a basic argument regarding the importance of religious literacy for defining public 

policy and for reaching better cultural understanding of others. Next, we would like to make the case 



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for religious literacy with regards to the immigration and refugee’s crisis.  

2.2.1 Economic Solutions for the Crisis 

North America is the region of the world receiving more people from abroad looking for a better life. 

Recent statistics show that since the year 2000, legal immigrants to the United States number 

approximately one million annually and 600.000 of them are just a change of status of people who were 

already living in America. Legal immigrants to the United States now are at their highest level ever, 

reaching over 37 million legal immigrants. Their arrival does not seem to be translated in economic 

betterment as “in Canada and the USA, the economic outcomes of immigrants have generally 

deteriorated over the past 40 years, while in many European countries, which have only recently begun 

to receive immigrants, immigrants have also had poor economic outcomes” (Warman et al., 2018, p. 

54). 

Europe presents a similar trend as “according to municipal registers (Padrón Continuo 2000-2016 in 

Spain and Anagrafe 2000-2016 in Italy), the foreign population increased from 1.12 million to 5.03 

million (78% non-European Union [EU]) in Italy, and from 0.92 million to 4.72 million (60% non-EU) 

in Spain from 2000 to 2016. The share of foreigners (based on citizenship) in the total population rose 

from 1.8 to 8.3% in Italy and 2.2 to 10.1% in Spain from 2000 to 2016” (Garha & Paparusso, 2018, p. 

1). North European countries have received even more immigrants than the south of Europe in the past 

years. The following figure shows the proportion of immigrants—in percent of the population—in Italy, 

Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, Germany and Sweden by 1 January 2016: 

 

Figure 1. Proportion of Immigrants in European Population by Country 

(IT: Italy, DK: Denmark, NL: Netherlands, ES: Spain, DE: Germany, SWE: Sweden) 

Source: Eurostat (online data code: migr_pop3ctb) 



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Like in the case of North America, the increase in number of people working in Europe does not 

guarantee that the new settlers reach a better life in economic terms, actually “more than a third of 

immigrant households live with less than 50 percent of a country’s median income” (Eugster, 2018, p. 

461). 

Similar patterns are observed in Asia as immigration would grow along the economic development of 

China and Thailand. Immigration movements are therefore based on the expectation of economic 

growth and they produce economic outcomes, “a mass migration into Shanghai doubled its population 

from 1980 to 2010, so did Manchester from 1811 to 1841: movements that undoubtedly created 

socioeconomic opportunities for many, and yet they also accentuated inequalities” (Hackl, 2018, p. 

150). 

Immigration is based on economic aspirations while refugee movement happens due to political 

problems. Considering the amount of immigrants not reaching social and economic inclusion and the 

many refugees fleeing their countries in conflict, it is common today to speak about a humanitarian 

crisis. In the Middle East some nations are not anymore socially sustainable, for example Lebanon has 

4.5 million inhabitants and is hosting more than 1.2 million refugees; or Turkey receiving more than 

3.5 million refugees keeps in one zone of the country one million refugees (UN Migration Report, 2017; 

UNICEF Report, 2018). These crisis may not be resolved only on political grounds, they need cultural 

and religious actions. 

2.2.2 Cultural Solutions for the Crisis 

Both immigration and refugee movements are global problems to be addressed from economic, 

political and cultural standpoints. The solution of these crisis at their fundamental level is about 

reaching social inclusion and integration in the new countries. It requires though to understand human 

interchange with people coming from different places of the world, being part of different cultures, 

religions, ethnicity and ideas. And at the same time to understand that they have many valuable things 

to share with the citizens of the hosting nation. This understanding is not fruit of public policy, because 

“whilst these macro-level questions are of vital importance, they should not conceal the fact that 

migration is primarily experienced by individuals on a local level, or where the global factors that 

shape migration vary according to localized historical experiences and cultural factors” (Castles, 2010, 

2012).  

So the experience of the individual citizen living in the welcoming society counts a lot and “religious 

belief plays a key role in motivating many individuals towards social action, including the support of 

migrants” (Kessler & Arkush, 2008), therefore we argued for adequate concepts in public policies and 

in public expressions; both based on correct cultural and religious languages. Especially now that some 

Arabic nations—where Islam is the religion of the majority—are currently welcoming Catholic Filipino 

workers and now that an important part of the immigration to Europe are Muslims.  



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Religious literacy is important because sometimes religion could create views of mercy and 

compassion for mobilized people, as for instance “within the Judeo-Christian tradition, narratives of 

forced migration are a recurring theme in Scripture and are frequently used as reference points for 

discussing moral and spiritual challenges” (Artaud, 2018, p. 405). But some other times religion could 

also build walls and create distances with others. 

2.3 Immigration and its Economic Outcomes: Problems and Opportunities 

Both human phenomena: economic mobilization as being the principal cause of immigration, and the 

political crisis leading refugees to flee from their countries has existed for a long time. However, there 

is something new in the current refugee and immigration crisis. The current mobilization of people is 

considered by the scientific literature as a new humanitarian crisis for three principal reasons: 1) the 

rapidity with which it happens, which does not favor social inclusion and integration; 2) the political 

instability and violence it creates along with prejudices against others and, finally; 3) the issue of 

economic inequality that it brings about. 

2.3.1 Characteristics of the New Crisis 

First of all, in itself immigration is not a recent human phenomenon, what is new about immigration is 

the volume of people leaving their countries today and the speed with which it takes place. “The 

combined factors of population growth, ongoing political and economic instability, and the availability 

of modern communication and transportation technologies have changed the scale and rapidity of 

human migration. The number of people currently displaced by conflict or persecution throughout the 

world is at its highest since the Second World War” (Esthimer, 2014, p. 22). The immigration crisis 

raises debates and discussions in the global north regarding national and cultural identity, where 

religion usually plays a role in the definition of individuals. 

Second, the number of displaced people due to conflicts is also growing, making the possibility of 

social inclusion and integration more complex. “In general, immigrants who were selected based on 

their skills and labour demand might have fewer difficulties integrating into the market and society 

compared to those migrating for humanitarian or personal reasons, for example, refugees and family 

members” (Eugster, 2018, p. 457). 

The third outcome of immigration that literature indicates is economic inequality and it seems to be the 

greatest concern for some scholars. In general, the economic development of the world is increasing at 

an accelerated pace. But considering specific social categories the increase benefits more the most 

wealthy, “since 2015, the richest 1% has owned more wealth than everyone else (Oxfam, 2017); one 

ninth of the world’s population suffers from hunger (FAO, IFAD, & WFP, 2015), while 65.6 million 

people are forcibly displaced worldwide (UNHCR, 2017)” (Bojadžijev, 2018, p. 349). Economic gain 

by some groups is compared to mobility gain by others, making the case that mobilization is linked to 

poverty. 



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2.3.2 Mobilization and Economic Inequality 

The usual argument is that mobilization of people happens much faster and that it is more and more due 

to war conflicts or poverty, making global inequality worse. For some scholars inequality is a problem 

even in the global north, “Germany, where the wealthiest 10% of households own at least 63% of all 

wealth, exhibits the second-highest inequality levels of all Eurozone countries” (Bojadžijev, 2018, p. 

349). And these authors stress that “25% of the European population is categorized as at risk of falling 

below the poverty line, while 50 million already have. The poorest 40% of Europeans own a paltry 1% 

of total wealth” (Oxfam Deutschland, 2016). 

Inequality is a reality because “the world’s nation-states have per capita incomes that range from less 

than US$250 per person per year to more than US$50.000” (Kuptsch, 2015, p. 341), but not every 

economic inequality is fruit of social injustice. Other scholars therefore argue that the social issue to 

address in this crisis is not inequality but poverty. And poverty is not increased by immigration, but 

rather reduced. 

What generates wealth is the increase of labor, capital and ideas in terms of new products. Labor and 

capital require respectively an increase in education and technological investment, but new ideas 

require specific know-how that can be provided by people from outside. “In an ideal world, migrants 

would bring home accumulated knowledge, transfer expertise and skills, start businesses, or invest 

earnings into capacity back home. In a similar vein, temporary migrants may create benefits through 

‘‘brain circulation” even if they do not return permanently. Ideally, this contributes to an eventual return 

flow of expertise, knowledge, skills and manpower” (Battistella & Sun Liao, 2013, p. 16). 

In any case, the political agenda expressed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the United 

Nations seems to foster a struggle against inequality. Specifically, the United Nation’s global agenda 

put in place some sustainable development goals correlating mobility and inequality, ignoring the 

poverty issue. “There is surprising synergy between the SDGs recognition of inequality and mobility’s 

significance on the one hand, and the evolution of mobility as a core concept of global inequality. This 

evolution includes the critique of three long-held assumptions about mobility: the idea that there is 

increasing mobility globally; that mobility is a self-evident phenomenon; and that movement generates 

positive change and an improvement of oneself” (Salazar & Jayaram, 2016, pp. 2-3). 

2.3.3 Addressing Mobility Misinterpretations 

1) First, some authors show that mobility is not increasing globally precisely because it is a right 

reserved for the more skilled or wealthy members of society. Several scholars observe that “recent 

immigration statistics from the EU show that economic integration and equalization mainly happens 

among countries with a similar Human Development Index (HDI) rather than between the extremes of 

inequality” (Agafitei & Ivan, 2016), so producing more inequality. “While many from the world’s 

poorest or conflict-ridden areas are pushed into illegal immigration, selective immigration regimes 



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facilitate the inclusion of those who are deemed productive” (Hackl, 2018, p. 153). 

2) Second, the causes of inequality are not always related to the mobility of people. For example “in 

Germany, the Paritätischer Gesamtverband’s (2017) annual poverty report admits that the lower middle 

class has lost 8% of its income over the last 20 years, alongside the 35% of households considered poor 

(earning 60% of the median) and incomes entailing an hourly wage of between 7.55€ and 15.29€, and 

thus forced to rely on social security systems” (IAQ, Bosch, & Kalina, 2016, p. 2). What happens on 

the contrary its that building up the correlation helps some groups to set up public policies that 

privilege them. 

For example with this correlation between immigration and inequality, the government could raise 

taxes and expand its bureaucracy. Some of these correlations are constructed with figures that regard 

temporal migrants and refugees who are not actual citizens. Germany’s politics of inclusion gave 

Angela Merkel the title of Chancellor of the modern world by Time magazine. Her government pushed 

for repatriation policies of Syrian refugees, arguing that they would be better if going back home. The 

government made explicit the cultural and social need to go back. But it is also true that each refugee 

meant an economic burden of 50 euro per month in Germany, but only €50 cents in Syria. In other 

words, scholars argue that Germany owns a mechanism to mobilize its poverty outside of the Country 

when it is needed.  

3) And the third common assumption that is changing when understanding the correlation between 

immigration and inequality, is that mobility does not necessarily enhances positive changes and 

improvement of the self. Scholars evaluate its outcomes either in a positive or in a negative way. 

“Increased or reduced inequality is one possible outcome of human mobility, as the movement of 

people often creates or reinforces difference and inequality, as well as blending or erasing such 

differences” (Hackl ,2018, p. 150). 

Within countries mobilization raises new urban planning problems, creating social issues. Also in 

domestic policy “inequality is one of the driving forces behind mobility: a lack of opportunity pushes 

people out of rural areas into cities, from where they often move onwards and become international 

migrants” (Kuptsch, 2015, p. 343). Economic considerations do not fully explain the way forward for 

good government on immigration and refugee’s issues. 

In sum, the narrative of development is very important for establishing social solutions to certain issues. 

Believing that mobilized people are unskilled would not facilitate their social inclusion, while the truth 

is that most mobilized people today left their Countries of origin due to their skills, usually going to 

places where they can earn more, deciding not go back home. Those who stayed at home are usually 

those who most needed the social support and therefore were not able to leave their homeland in search 

for better conditions of life. All this creates a dynamic of inequality, because experts move to places 

where they earn more. While non-experts stay in their own homes where there is not development. So 



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the situation of the poor countries is that they do not have developers because they are undeveloped but 

they are undeveloped because developers left. And the situation of the rich countries is that they 

develop thanks to their own developers and to the developers coming from outside. While the narrative 

of immigration is that migrants take advantage of their new Countries, actually in many cases migrants 

give value to their new homelands. To face some of this social issues, it seems important to consider 

the need for a cultural change regarding people’s mobility.  

 

3. Cultural Languages for the Mobility of People 

As mentioned before, a migrant is someone mobilized for economic reasons, also inside of his 

homeland. The reasons for mobilization in current economic development are so complex that they do 

not mean the same for everybody. For instance, economic dynamism in some emerging nations reduces 

poverty but increases inequality, for instance “the top 1% income share rose from 7% to 22% in India, 

and 6% to 14% in China between 1980 and 2016” (Hackl, 2018, p. 152). This economic movement 

leads to further consequences, for the individual and for the political sphere. 

1) First of all, an immigrant is not necessarily a poor person today, “immigrants are not a homogenous 

group but that various forms or types of legal statuses of immigration exist” (Eugster, 2018, p. 453). 

Public policies look attentively at the language they use to call “an immigrant”, so “Sweden does not 

officially use the terms “immigrants” or “descendants”, while some countries do (for example Denmark) 

and others use terms such as “ethnic minorities” in addition to “immigrants” (UK), “allochthon” (i.e., 

non-autochthonous) (The Netherlands), or “migration background in Germany” (Andreß-Careja, 2018, 

p. 5). 

Moreover, most of these terms are new as “the concept of mobility has not always been part of the 

development vocabulary, mostly due to the prominence of migration” (Halck, 2018, p. 152), while it 

can be positive or negative, inequality is always criticized because is seen as manipulation for the 

possession of power. 

2) If an immigrant is not necessarily a poor person, then the second consideration to add is that 

inequality in a country should not immediately relate to social conflict and poverty. “This is not to say 

that people always decide to move for socio-economic reasons, considering forced exiles who have no 

choice, alongside those who seek freedom and a different life elsewhere without social upward mobility 

in mind” (Hackl, 2018, p. 151).  

Moreover “most discrimination studies show that a foreign sounding name or a darker skin are enough 

to trigger differential treatment in labor markets no matter how integrated the person might otherwise 

be” (for an overview see Kahanec & Zimmermann, 2011). 

My point is that immigration crisis are mitigated by cultural inclusion. And the last produces as a result 

economic inclusion. Cultural inclusion calls into action both faith based organizations and secular 



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projects that play an important role and, are more efficient when working together.  

For example, in a parish church in Paris, social action is enacted in a broader framework so there 

“volunteers refer to their activities as ‘action’ (action), ‘work’ (travail) or ‘volunteering’ (bénévolat), 

but not as charity (charité). Similarly, they explain that they are committed to or motivated by the 

values of solidarity (solidarité) or fraternity (fraternité), but never mention charity as a motivation; the 

same linguistic pattern is heard on behalf of the clergy on the pulpit. Finally, the migrants who receive 

services are either referred to as ‘les migrants’ (the migrants) or as ‘les accueillis’ (those who are 

hosted), not as recipients or beneficiaries or clients” (Artaud, 2018, p. 414). 

According to Artaud, when volunteers reject the language of charity, this is partly an indication that 

they view charity as social condescension, a vision of charity that John Paul II describes as a “mentality 

in which the poor—as individuals and as peoples—are considered a burden, as irksome intruders trying 

to consume what others have produced” (John Paul II, 1991, p. 28). 

The same for the public discourse in general, “speaking of mobility rather than migration integrates 

social mobility into the wider framework, instead of seeing it as a separate issue” (Hackl, 2018, p. 151). 

But the political sphere sometimes finds difficult to detach from the economic perspective, at least the 

United Nations language does not arrive to do it: mobility is only directly addressed by two targets of 

the sustainable development goals n.10: ‘‘facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and 

mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration 

policies”, and ‘‘reduce (...) transaction costs of migrant remittances”. 

The humanitarian crisis in place regarding immigration and refugees’ displacement—that results from 

the speed of global changes and conflicts, generating inequality—needs to get rid of political 

discourses that appropriate concepts and master narratives about the mobilized people. 

This is a cultural change exercise because we need to stop and consider why we think in the way we do 

about immigrants. “If we take a quick inventory of previously used and familiar concepts that do 

describe and operationalize immigration societies in the public field: they have either been politically 

contested if not defeated (such as multiculturalism), or are considered too vague for political 

purposes —such as diversity—, or belong to a more academic discursive field—such as 

cosmopolitanism—” (Bojadžijev, 2018, p. 337). In sum, we need a new language for a more effective 

social inclusion. 

 

4. Discussion: Social Inclusion for Immigrants and Refugees 

Most of the authors considering the situation of immigrants and refugees in the world today, indicate 

that one way to solve the immigration crisis is to stress the human right to dignified mobility. “This 

necessarily includes people’s freedom to choose whether or not to move, alongside the establishment of 

fair regimes that govern mobility in inclusive ways without undermining people’s agency and freedom” 



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(Hackl, 2018, p. 151). These authors stress that migrants are not competitors against the citizens of 

their new countries but a significant element for cultural development. But in order to foster social 

inclusion of migrants and refugees, the authors stand for some elements that we will describe in the 

following points.  

1) Dignified mobility means that migrants should be considered as complements to cultural growth. If 

immigrants are described as competitors, then the human right to immigrate would not stand in front to 

the rights of others and so “mobility and immobility thus have an intimate relationship, as the freedom 

to move for some builds on the unfreedom and immobility of others; the mobility of ‘qualified’ 

travelers stands vis-à-vis the mobility of ‘unqualified’ travelers” (Abram, Feldman Bianco, Khosravi, 

Salazar, & de Genova, 2017, p. 132).  

2) For dignifying mobility there is a need of public policies using inclusive language that could grant 

full access to foreigners in a welcoming society. Social inclusion of immigrants can therefore start from 

overcoming “the post-9/11 ‘paradigm of suspicion’ that classified freedom of movement primarily as a 

risk” (Shamir, 2005, p. 153). That process usually takes time because “permanent residence comes 

along with almost unrestricted access to the labour market, education, business, social programs and 

civil rights, if not necessarily political rights” (Eugster, 2018, p. 456).  

3) Religion plays a special role in the social inclusion of migrants and refugees. This is because it leads 

people to understand others in non-economic terms and builds a mentality for including refugees in 

society. “Hannah Arendt pointed out in ‘We Refugees’ (Arendt, 1996) that refugees not only symbolize 

suffering, but also reveal the close proximity in which civilization and barbarism truly find themselves. 

Refugees can tell stories of the risks of losing everything in an instant, of being thrown into an 

existence bereft of legal protection and social security. By underscoring the tight interrelations between 

prosperity and loss and destruction, they hold up a mirror to the still-privileged, exposing their own 

fatal life strategies and grand delusions” (Bojadžijev, 2018, p. 347). 

4) In the case of a humanitarian crisis, poor people and refugees should not wait, they deserve the help 

of others. The refugee crisis has reached significant levels in Europe, as “fleeing the war in Syria and 

other global conflict zones, a large number of refugees arrived in Europe in the summer and fall of 

2015, of which roughly 1.3 million requested asylum in the European Union and approximately 40% of 

them in Germany” (Eurostat, 2017). This point is in discussion. 

On the one hand some scholars argue that this is not an unprecedented situation as it “hardly exceeded 

the post-reunification years of the early 1990s, when masses of people fleeing the Yugoslav wars, the 

first Iraq War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union arrived in Germany” (Bojadžijev, 2018, p. 339).  

On the other hand, critics to the idea of a humanitarian crisis would observe that immigration figures 

represent a stable trend, “438.000 individuals applied for asylum in 1992, 442.000 did so in 2015” 

(Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, 2016). It seems almost like if “some people are in charge of 



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mobility, while others some are effectively imprisoned by it” (Massey, 1993, p. 61). Public policy in 

any case ought to preserve the human right of mobility.  

5) To judge about the specific human good that mobility implies it seems important to consider specific 

human situations. It is not possible to claim an abstract human right for mobility. That right should 

always depend on the specific situation of those aiming for autonomy and freedom. That because a 

human right is not only built upon economic growth and development considerations. This duality of 

mobility as freedom and imprisonment “hints at a key component of mobility equity that is not 

self-evident: it cannot merely be about having the opportunity to move, but must include the freedom to 

choose whether or not to move” (Sager, 2006, p. 465). 

6) The importance and attraction of economic growth makes that refugees become more a political 

problem that should only interest the State. This idea puts refugees out of the debates around social 

mobility and inequality that are mostly built on economic approaches, hiding the dimensions of the 

current humanitarian crisis due to forced mobility. “65.3 million people were displaced globally at the 

time of writing, or one person in every 113. To overcome their economically immobile positions” 

(Hackl, 2018, p. 113), as Paul Collier and Alexander Betts argue, refugees must become autonomous 

economic agents. So refugees should not become part of a humanitarian problem but an element for 

development: it is ‘‘about restoring people’s autonomy through jobs and education” (Betts & Collier, 

2017, p. 10). 

Aiming for social inclusion with regards to refugees requires to fight against prejudice, because “the 

social problems experienced by citizens have existed far longer than the refugees, have nothing to do 

with refugees, and thus will not disappear should isolationism succeed in keeping refugees out” 

(Bojadžijev, 2018, p. 347). 

The mobility crisis has political consequences that the private sphere faces on subsidiarity—or the 

international relations on solidarity—when the government does not have the capacity to fix the 

problem. For example, “in the Gulf States powerful brokerage systems restrict workers’ rights and 

pressure them into compliance” (Hertog, 2010; Khalaf, AlShehabi, & Hanieh, 2014). 

In an effort to combat such disempowering regimes, “international collaboration has recently allowed 

improved rights and bargaining power in some cases of migrant labour. One example is the 

cross-border cooperation among trade unions through the Union Network International (UNI) Passport, 

which allows a unionized migrant to be ‘hosted’ by an UNI-affiliated union in the destination country” 

(Kuptsch, 2015, p. 347). The passport “offers a number of important benefits that would otherwise 

remain inaccessible to the migrants, such as information on working conditions and tax regulations, 

training courses, and legal support” (Hackel, 2018, p. 157). 

The International Organization for Migration put forward one important approach that aims to connect 

policies across national and international levels with the help of norms. “IOM designed a Migration 



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Governance Index (MGI) that was taken up as part of a list of SDG indicators (UNSDSN, 2015). The 

MGI builds on the premise that well-governed migration brings profound benefits to receiving and 

sending countries, while poorly managed migration causes harm and represents missed development 

opportunities” (Hackel, 2018, p. 159). 

7) In sum, not only at the personal level but also at the political level, the solution does not seem to be 

about measuring quantitatively the number of immigrants. Italy does not enforce immigrants to register 

creating a risk of under-coverage, but in any case “compared to the risk of under-coverage, 

over-coverage seems to be the larger problem because there are hardly any incentives for 

de-registration if individuals leave their place of residence and this risk is especially high for mobile 

persons such as immigrants” (Careja, 2018, p. 12). 

We conclude that having more refugees and immigrants is not a problem in itself. The real issue is that 

people in welcoming societies do not know how to act with immigrants and refugees. There is 

moreover the risk of setting up public policies for migrants and refugees designed for them, but neither 

counting on them nor putting the policies in act through them. Public policies could become more 

inclusive and so cultural actors—including faith based organizations—would help to overcome 

marginalization. Then people arriving to the global north will become one among others despite their 

differences in ethnicity, education and religious backgrounds. 

The question at the end is how to establish a social dialogue with others aiming not only to economic 

development but for resching cultural flourishing as well. According to a good part of the academia, 

without the active efforts of NGO’s and organized religions, the social inclusion of immigrants and 

refugees would not be possible in the world today. 

 

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