1. Faith experience, exodus experience is not only the astonishing loneliness of the desert (Dt 32,10), but a process that leads to a land flowing with milk and honey (Ex 3, 8). They know this well, those who have to leave their countries for political, racial, economic, cultural or religious reasons, and go to a foreign country, without friends, not knowing the language, not knowing where to go, perhaps with insufficient documentation and with scarce information about the customs of the new land.

2. There are many who suffer from the uprooting that defines emigration and exile. There are now, in our world, an estimated 28 million refugees. There are many who are obliged to pack up their suitcase: I have my suitcase ready. A big wooden suitcase. The one that my grandfather took to Havana; my father to Venezuela. I have it ready: four pictures, a white bowl, a tray... I have it closed and fastened with a cord. It has served for everything: as a seat for travelling on a ship’s deck, and as a table, and, if I go to the extreme, as a coffin for my burial (Pedro Lezcano).

3. But sometimes it is not bad to pack up a suitcase. In exile, which is a form of death, there is also a form of asylum, which in some way is also life. Leaving behind one’s own land can be a liberation and the discovery of a new horizon. Abraham’s story starts with leaving his own land: "Go forth from the land" (Gn 12,1) Abraham, faithful to God’s call, leaves his land, symbol of a dispersed mankind, to go to another land, where mankind has a future.

4. More than 3.500 years ago, a relatively big group of semites (Hebrews or Habiru) had to leave their land, seeking bread that was being offered, in that moment, by Egypt. They found bread but also social and religious slavery. The children of a God that made them feel free had to bow their heads in front of the new masters of power and money.

5. A clamour that reached heaven was heard from all Israeli homes. It would have been impossible to fight openly against Egypt. But here was another way out: for everyone to escape all together, to risk the hard journey through the desert, to thus seek freedom. They recognised God’s presence behind events. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is also the God of Exodus. God was with them, He was accompanying them in the adventure of freedom.

6. One memorable night the slaves of Egypt set out, despite economic risks, the desert’s insecurity and the Imperial police. As they had feared, the journeys was hard: Egyptian soldiers, the sea, the desert... everything seemed to be against them. But God was stronger than all their fears: I will sing to the Lord, for he is gloriously triumphant... "My strength and my courage is the Lord and he has been my saviour" (Ex 15).

7. In biblical experience, God protects the stranger, he listens to his clamour as he listened to the clamour of the Hebrews. That is why it is said in Exodus: "You shall not molest or oppress a stranger, for you were once strangers yourselves in the land of Egypt" (Ex 22,20). And in the psalm 146: The Lord protects the stranger.

8. As the Gospel says, Christ was born in Bethlehem as a homeless foreigner: there was no place (Lk 2,7). He was born in a family that first fled to Egypt looking for protection against Herod’s persecution (Mt 2,13-15) and then to Galilee, to Nazareth in the kingdom of Archelaus (Mt 2,22-23). In the passage of the Final Judgement, Christ appears as a stranger welcomed or rejected (Mt 25, 35 and 43). St. Peter urges Christians to live as strangers and foreigners in this world (1 Pt 2,11). S. John suffers exile to Patmos Island because he proclaimed God’s Word (Rv 1,9) and he waits for a new heaven and a new earth (21,1).

9. Let us see some lessons of history. In 1492 the Iberian peninsula territories occupied by Arabs for seven centuries were reconquered by the Spaniards. The Catholic Kings (in a not very Christian way) expelled the Jews and the Moors by decree. Whole towns had to emigrate. Most Moors went to the north of Africa. Jews escaped to Europe.

10. It was the last Sunday of September, 1992, Immigration Day. Newspapers are saying that more than 30 immigrants have died trying to cross the Strait of Gibraltar in makeshift rafts. The scriptures that are read that day in all the churches are impressive: the holy sites (Sion, Garizim) will not save us "if you do not suffer from Joseph’s disasters" (Am 6,1-7); the Lord "gives food to the hungry, protects the stranger" (Ps 146); poor Lazarus "was lying at the rich man’s door, covered with sores, ready to eat his fill of the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table, but nobody would give them to him" (Lk 16, 19-31). Immigrants from all of Africa try get close to the table of a rich Europe’s. They are looking for a little bite of bread and friendship. What shall we do?

11. According to a recent report of the United Nations Department on Population, Europe needs 159 million immigrants between now and the year 2005 to maintain an aging population at its present equilibrium: four or five active persons for every one retired ( La Vanguardia, 6-1-2000 ). This observation is based on the fertile rate of today’s population (1.4 children for each woman) and the inevitable aging of European society. The demographic consequence is that, without the presence of immigrants, within 50 years there will only be two active persons for every active one in Europe. So, whether we like it or not, we are a society obliged to show solidarity with immigrants: the sooner we become conscious of that, the better.

12. Western societies are evolving to an irreversible ethnical and cultural pluralism that represents for them not a problem but a solution. Of course, no emigration policy can be effective if the people oppose it with racist attitudes. It is possible that for identity reasons, no European country would risk receiving in the next 25 years millions of immigrants: 23M (France), 26M (Italy), 44M (Germany), 12M (Spain ). It is true that no country will be able to avoid them. According Sami Naïr, socialist member of the European Parliament, and professor in Paris: "It is necessary to organise contractual policies in the long term with labour provider countries, organise their flow, encourage temporal contracts, truly integrate - through school, culture, citizen participation - those who are already here; finally, do not alarm citizens of the receiving countries".

13. Europe is called to be a promised land flowing with milk and honey (Ex 3, 8) for many of those who "had lost their way in a barren desert, found no path toward a city to live in" (Ps 107,4). For this it is necessary to change our thinking and to recall that "we were once foreigners ourselves"(Ex 23,9), to lose fear, prepare (from now) the future, overcome the existing deficits in legal matters and social protection, face the situation with global planning (without excluding the necessary police, job and sanitary controls), keep this prophetic word: "In a favourable time I will listen to you, on the terrible day I will help you. I formed you and I set you as a covenant of the people, to lift up the land to allot the desolate heritages, saying to the prisoners: Come out! To those in darkness: Show yourselves!"(Is 49,8-9).

14. In the Gospel, ambition to subdue the earth is relative, it stays in a second level. The Kingdom of God does not come though power and force: Blessed are the peacemakers for they will inherit the land (Mt 5,4). Moreover those who give up lands (Mk 10,29), who renounce everything and receive much more: Now in this present age, houses and brothers and sisters, and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions; and eternal life in the age to come (10,30).

Dialogue: What can we do?