An open letter to all my parishioners...
Dear friends,
I want to talk about something that has been gnawing at me for a while. Lately I’ve been hearing, in the media and sometimes even in casual conversation, phrases about migrants that make my heart sink. “They’re all criminals,” “all these young men are rapists” — that sort of thing. We’ve heard such labels stuck to different groups throughout history, and it has never ended well. I fear we’re at risk of letting fear and frustration drive out compassion and truth.
So let’s have a bit of perspective. Last year, around thirty-six thousand people came to the UK in small boats. Since last summer, the total is a little over fifty thousand. Now, in raw numbers, that sounds a lot… until you remember that our country has about seventy million people. Let's try a whimsical analogy...If you had a wedding reception for seventy guests, and half a person turned up uninvited, you wouldn’t start muttering about an “invasion.” You might just ask them if they fancied a sausage roll (assuming it was their top half that turned up!).
It’s true that some asylum seekers are living in hotels. At the height of things in 2023, there were about fifty-odd thousand of them in more than four hundred hotels. These days it’s nearer thirty-two thousand people in around two hundred hotels — which is still a lot of people, but nowhere near the entire hotel industry. If you tried to book a weekend in Blackpool and found your favourite place full, it’s much more likely that a stag do is to blame than the Home Office.
The pressure on housing and services is real, but it’s not only about migration. It’s also about politics and planning — or the lack of them. We voted ourselves out of the EU system which allowed us to return irregular arrivals to other European countries. That was a political choice, and it means we now handle all these cases ourselves. (It is ironic in the extreme that those who called most loudly for Brexit are now the ones demanding action over one of the awful consequences of that decision). And for decades we’ve been building fewer homes than we need, so there’s already a housing squeeze before anyone arrives on a dinghy. If your bathtub is already nearly overflowing because you’ve left the tap running for years, you can’t entirely blame the extra teaspoon of water that just got added.
We shouldn’t forget the good that migrants bring. Many work, pay taxes, and help run the NHS, our care homes, our farms, our cafés. In purely financial terms, a migrant arriving at age twenty-five and earning the UK average wage can contribute around £340,000 more in taxes than they take out in public services over their lifetime. Between 2000 and 2011, European migrants as a group contributed some £20 billion more to the UK economy than they received in benefits. And those are just the balance sheets — the cultural ledger is even richer, with the music, food, ideas, and stories they weave into our common life. Britain’s story — and the Church’s story — has always been one of people coming and going, and of the blessings and challenges that come with that.
The Bible is crystal clear about how God’s people should treat “the stranger.” “When a foreigner resides among you in your land,” says Leviticus, “do not mistreat them. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” Hebrews urges us not to forget to show hospitality to strangers, “for by so doing some have entertained angels without knowing it.” That last bit always makes me wonder how many angels I’ve walked past in the Co-op.
Of course, no one is pretending the asylum system is perfect or that we can welcome everyone who might like to come. But it seems to me that our Christian calling is to start from compassion, not suspicion; to speak truth, not stoke fear. We can have serious debates about policy without turning neighbours into enemies. We can hold our leaders accountable for the choices that shape the pressures we face. And we can still look the stranger in the eye and see not a threat, but a fellow child of God.
So, my friends, let’s be careful with our words, generous with our hearts, and just occasionally ready to share our sausage rolls. We might discover that, in welcoming the stranger, we are welcoming something holy into our midst.
Yours in hope,
Canon Tom Kennar
Rector of Havant
