Give Us Your Huddled Masses

Having decided I wouldn’t be hosting refugees from Ukraine, but very keen to do other things – and for our local churches to have a more coherent approach to supporting refugees in the future, not just in this particular geopolitical event – I was setting great store by yesterday's meeting hosted by Tophill church who are big and well-organised compared to humble Swanvale Halt, and came away from it little the wiser. Sam, the rector of Tophill, described getting daily phone calls asking whether he could help house refugees and the assumption his callers (who are they?) seem to have that a suburban Surrey church will know what’s happening in disputed areas of Ukraine. Nobody has phoned me up, I thought, perhaps they know better than to try. He and his family have signed up to take someone in, but he thought that ‘if we wait for official channels we’ll be waiting forever’ and pointed to the informal community groups which are already trying to organise matches between refugees and hosts and thought the Church could do that. The members of the group who’d actually had past experience dealing with refugees thought this was not a good idea, and church communities should focus on providing help to refugees and hosts, whether those hosts come from within their congregations or the community more widely, rather than being ‘introduction agencies’ which they thought carried more responsibility than just saying ‘you are a host, and you are someone who needs shelter, here you are, you do all the rest yourself’. What would actually happen when someone arrived at Lille or wherever, heading for the UK and needing a visa? It turned out nobody knew for sure. Sam described spending forty minutes on the phone to ‘a helpful lady from immigration who couldn’t tell me anything’. Not knowing anything, however, didn’t stop everyone in the meeting having an opinion. In fact, once I checked gov.uk this afternoon, it seemed pretty clear that this is the ‘official channel’, and it sort of makes sense, even if the initial stage in the Government guidelines – ‘sponsor and guest find each other’ – is almost mystical. Clear, perhaps – I’m not saying it’s easy.

It eventually became apparent that I wasn’t going to get any concrete pointers to help me in what I wanted to do at all. By the end of the gathering we’d agreed that we wanted to make and facilitate contact with official and unofficial groups and potential hosts; to support hosts and refugees; and to identify a range of tasks to help make this happen. These were all things I assumed were givens before we’d started, not the results of 90 minutes of to-ing and fro-ing. My task is to contact some of the relevant charities to find out the very things I thought the meeting might tell me.

Our lay reader Gisele, who has transferred her licence from Tophill to us, was taking part. She and her husband have signed up on the official system as ‘phase 2’ hosts. ‘I lost the will to live’, she admitted to me, ‘though it’s good to know there are people who want to do the right thing’.