2017-2018

Demographers generally classify two basic types of migration: internal within national boundaries and international over those boundaries; immigrants are described as legal, illegal, and refugees escaping persecution (often political). The causes of migration are economic, cultural, and environmental. But whatever the reason, migration is a major step not taken lightly. And it has a long global history.

In the 19th century, European immigrants to North America expected to find streets paved with gold (a perception that continues to draw people from Latin America and Asia to the United States and Canada). In the late 1940s, Eastern Europeans fled Communism for the democracies of Western Europe and North America. During the 1930s Dust Bowl, thousands of Oklahomans abandoned their farms and migrated 1,000 miles west to California. Hurricane Katrina forced several hundred thousand from their homes and hundreds of thousands have been forced to move from the Sahel region of northern Africa because of drought.

According to the 2017 United Nations International Migration Report, there has been an increase in recent years––approximately 258 million in 2017, up from 220 million in 2010 and 173 million in 2000.

CTI’s first of a five-year series of workshops focused on “Religion and Global Concerns,” looked at “Religion and Migration” with scholars from across the globe researching historical and contemporary migrations in terms of origin and systemic causes. Demonstrating the tangled web that is migration, many of their projects fell under multiple categories. Some had a religious aspect such as narratives of origin and migration in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible; the forced migration of Russian Orthodox Christians at the time of the First World War; the 6th century BCE period of Exile; Christian migrants in Japan since the middle of the twentieth century. Some were historical––post-war and post-colonial movements of peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; church independence in South Africa circa 1900. Others bore contemporary significance––sanctuary movements; unaccompanied minors; exclusion politics; urban transformation; climate change and disappearing islands of the Pacific.