'God willing': Faith, not politics, guides migrants to the United States
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – Bishop Mark Seitz trembled as 300 migrant men stared at him in a Mexican shelter, anger and frustration written on their faces.
What earthly hope could he give them? It was 2020, the U.S. border was closed, asylum was suspended. The bishop from El Paso, Texas, was visiting and provided the men the only thing he could: a prayer.
Still, he worried. "Are they going to be mad? You offer nothing but Jesus? But there was kind of a rumble," he said, "and it grew into a roar. I realized it was a roar of approval. I invited them to pray the 'Our Father' with me, and that place shook."
Such devotion is typical of migrants who survive the dangerous overland journey to the U.S., according to a new study of asylum-seekers at the border.
The previously unpublished findings suggest that migrants' decision-making is influenced as much or more by their own religious faith as by U.S. messaging and policies, said Jeremy Slack, lead author of the 2023 study and professor of geography at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Nearly three-quarters reported seeing a "sign from God" along their journey to the U.S. that encouraged them to keep going. A majority reported praying daily.
"The study showed very high levels of faith that (immigration) is a process that will be decided by a higher power," Slack told Paste BN.
Migrants who make the journey overland face seemingly insurmountable obstacles: a dangerous jungle crossing; thousands of miles on foot; hostile authorities and organized crime; extortion, kidnapping and sexual assault; and detention or deportation.
"I don’t know how you take that journey, or how you survive that journey, without faith," said Bri Stensrud, executive director of the nonprofit Women of Welcome, which promotes compassion for migrants.
"These are people of faith," said Stensrud, who leads Christian women on trips to meet migrants, aid workers and Border Patrol at the border. "These are people who are saying, 'I am trusting in God to bring me to a place where there are brothers and sisters in Christ.'"
'God willing, I'll be one of the lucky ones'
At the U.S.-Mexico border, researchers sought to understand what migrants understood about the U.S. asylum system in early 2023 at a time when many Americans were becoming wary of the millions of people who were arriving in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tens of thousands of migrants were arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border each month, hoping to claim asylum. A reigning narrative at the time was that migrants were gaming the U.S. asylum system, making claims that wouldn't hold up in immigration court.
Many were never going to qualify, said Linda Dakin-Grimm, an immigration attorney who has represented asylum-seekers.
"Most people who come to the southern border and ask for asylum do so without knowing what is required to qualify for asylum," she told Paste BN. "People generally think asylum means: 'I'm having a really hard time where I am. I need help.' But it isn't what asylum means in the law."
Even if they met the usual, stringent criteria for asylum based on persecution, they were unlikely to make it across the U.S. border at the time the survey was done. Title 42 – the pandemic-era authority that let agents turn away asylum-seekers – was in still in place. Many migrants were stuck in Mexican border cities after the monthslong journey with little hope.
The researchers conducted the face-to-face surveys in Ciudad Juárez over four months at a government shelter, a border encampment, a Mexican immigration office and a downtown plaza.
Slack expected migrants knew less than Americans gave them credit for, but the results still surprised him.
The survey of 298 migrants found "extremely low knowledge of even the basic process of asylum," according to the forthcoming report. "For many, the process of asylum was perceived as too complex or even random and therefore they decided to place their efforts into faith and religion."
So many respondents fell back on faith and religion that researchers expanded the scope of their analysis, asking 146 respondents about the role of faith. "God willing, I'll be one of the lucky ones" is how people replied "almost word for word" at the end of every questionnaire, Slack said.
Among respondents, 45% said they attended evangelical services regularly, and 30% attended Catholic services.
About 32% said they didn't consider themselves "a religious person," yet still half of the non-religious respondents reported seeing a sign from God, Slack said.
Migration miracle
The "signs from God" migrants reported often came in the form of a single person offering an extraordinary act of kindness, Slack said.
He remembered a Honduran family forced to walk through Zacatecas state in northern Mexico when a man "appeared out of nowhere" and said he knew how to stop a freight train. The man jumped on a train, stopped it and allowed the family to board.
There was the Guatemalan woman who survived a brutal kidnapping attempt. A woman found her, took her in and nursed her back to health for a couple of months.
"Things like that where people view someone’s random kindness in this dark situation" are seen as signs, Slack said.
Slack's research isn't the first to establish a link to religion in contemporary migration.
In her book "Migration Miracle," published in 2000, sociologist Jacqueline Maria Hagan explored how migrants rely on faith and religious practices to make, and survive, the journey.
"It is precisely because of the psychological traumas of immigration that immigrants turn to religion – the familiar – for comfort," she wrote.
Kindness and gratitude
The shelter in Ciudad Juárez where Seitz said his prayer is housed in a sprawling former factory along a busy boulevard named for Mexican crooner Juan Gabriel.
Five years later, the shelter is still housing asylum-seekers, and asylum is once again suspended at the border.
But the experience of that collective "Our Father" still moves and surprises him, Seitz said.
"Given the stress of the situation, we found nothing but kindness and gratitude," he said. "I wish people could see that. Instead they just hear about violence when it happens, and it’s played over and over and over again on the news until people have a sense that this must be what happens every day."
Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.