The Refugee Crisis and the Lie at the Heart of the Modern State

The prophetic tradition has always drawn a sharp distinction between charity and justice: charity addresses suffering, and justice addresses its causes.

Ironically and most likely inadvertently for many people of good will, when we appeal to empathy and good will on behalf of refugees — when we share photographs of suffering families, platform first-person accounts of harrowing journeys, and remind audiences that refugees are “people just like us” — we have implicitly conceded that they do not possess real rights.

We are asking for charity, not demanding justice. We are treating refugees as objects of pity who might deserve our help, rather than as political subjects — bearers of the divine image — who possess inalienable rights that no state created and no state may revoke.

This distinction matters urgently now as Western democracies are moving on multiple fronts to ensure that certain people have no true home.

The United Kingdom has made refugee status temporary and revocable: refugees must now wait twenty years rather than five for settled status, and family reunification rights have been sharply curtailed.

The United States has cut refugee admissions to 7,500, the lowest since the modern resettlement program began in 1980, after suspending the program entirely and canceling flights for over 10,000 already-approved refugees. The current administration is actively exploring the revocation of naturalized citizenship, a move that would manufacture statelessness for people who were formally welcomed into the body politic and made solemn promises to it in return.

Together, these developments reveal something that the humanitarian tradition — and the faith traditions that undergird it – has always warned about: that when rights are attached to legal status rather than to the human person, they can always be taken away.

What Faith Traditions Know That States Have Forgotten

The Hebrew Bible does not wait for Enlightenment philosophy to articulate universal human dignity. It grounds that dignity in something prior to any political arrangement: the imago Dei, the insistence in Genesis 1:26-27 that every human being is made in the image of God. This is not a grant from the state. It cannot be conferred by government and it cannot be revoked by one.

From this foundation flows one of Scripture’s most repeated ethical demands.

The Torah commands protection of the stranger — the ger, the sojourner without citizenship or legal standing — no fewer than thirty-six times, more than any other moral injunction. Leviticus 19:34 is unambiguous: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love them as yourself.”

Crucially, the motivation given is never merely compassion. It is covenant memory: “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Israel’s own experience of displacement, of being a people without a home state and therefore without rights, is precisely what grounds the obligation. This is not a call to charity. It is a demand for justice rooted in memory and in God’s own character as the defender of the vulnerable.

The New Testament deepens this. In Matthew 25, Jesus identifies himself with the xenos — the stranger, the foreigner — and makes caring for that person one of the defining marks of faithfulness. Matthew 2 reminds us that Jesus himself became a refugee child when his family fled state violence into Egypt. The one in whom Christians locate the fullness of human dignity spent his early years as a displaced person dependent on the hospitality of a foreign land.

Islamic tradition holds the Hijra, the migration of the Prophet and his community from persecution is so sacred that the Islamic calendar begins with it. The muhajirun, those who were forced to flee, are honored figures. The Quran addresses those compelled to leave their homes and affirms God’s provision and care for them. It stands near the center of the faith’s founding memory.

Catholic Social Teaching speaks of the universal destination of goods, that is, that the earth’s resources belong in their original purpose to all of humanity, and that the borders that human beings draw are legitimate only insofar as they serve, rather than negate, this more fundamental claim. Human dignity, in this framework, is not a gift of the state. It precedes the state, judges the state, and sets limits on what the state may do.

Across these traditions, the convergence is striking. Right, real rights, the kind that cannot be revoked, are attached to persons, not to papers. They flow from the human being’s relationship to God and to the human community, not from a government’s willingness to recognize them.

The Fiction Liberal Democracy Has Never Resolved

Liberal democracies, that is, states founded on the principle that individuals possess rights prior to and independent of government, have long proclaimed their alignment with this vision. We have signed international conventions, built humanitarian organizations, and constructed our shared moral identity around the idea that certain rights are inalienable: they belong to you simply because you are human. The refugee, stripped of citizenship and fleeing persecution, should be the ultimate test and vindication of this principle. Here is someone with nothing but their humanity. Surely, this is the moment when universal rights prove real.

Instead, refugees expose the fiction at the heart of the system.

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt saw this clearly in the aftermath of World War II, when millions of displaced persons revealed a disturbing truth: “The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable — even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them — whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state.”

Rights, it turned out, were not actually attached to humans. They were attached to citizens. When you lost your citizenship, you lost your rights — all of them.

The new wave of restrictive policies makes this logic explicit. The United Kingdom is not saying: We recognize your universal human dignity and will integrate you as an equal member of our political community. Rather, it is saying: We will tolerate your temporary presence under conditions we can revoke. Refugees are not joining the polity. They are inhabiting a permanent state of exception, their status renewable at our discretion, their families kept apart, and their futures perpetually uncertain.

And the proposed revocation of naturalized citizenship in the United States goes further still.

When a nation extends citizenship, it makes a solemn pledge — a covenant, to use the language that faith traditions would reach for naturally. To revoke that pledge, particularly along racial or ethnic lines, is not merely a policy error.

It is covenant-breaking. It is the state declaring that its promises were never real, and that the belonging it extended was always provisional, that certain people can be retroactively cast into the statelessness that makes rights unenforceable.

The Perverse Honesty of the New Policies

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls the refugee a “limit-concept” — a figure who brings the nation-state system to crisis by exposing its fundamental contradiction. We claim universal rights while operating a system where rights flow from particular, national memberships. Refugees illuminate this fiction by appearing as humans without citizenship, and in response, we do not extend them full rights. We put them in camps, create special categories, offer temporary status, and hope they will eventually go home.

The new policies in the United Kingdom and the United States are, in a perverse way, more honest than the humanitarian rhetoric they will provoke. They admit what has always been true: in the nation-state system, rights follow citizenship, not humanity.

A refugee is not temporarily inconvenienced while we process their claim to join our community. They are indefinitely suspended in a legal limbo where their very presence poses a question we would rather not answer: whether our stated principles mean anything at all.

The humanitarian response to such policies — the outrage, the photographs, the celebrity advocates — is not wrong, exactly. But it is insufficient, and it risks perpetuating what it intends to challenge.

When you must appeal to empathy rather than invoke rights, you have already lost the argument on the terms that matter most. Worse, humanitarian discourse tends to reinscribe the very categories it contests: authentic versus inauthentic refugees, deserving versus undeserving, us versus them.

Every appeal to see refugees as “people like us” implicitly marks them as people who are not — as outsiders who might, with sufficient proof of their worthiness, earn temporary inclusion. This is charity. It is not justice.

Toward a Politics Worthy of the Vision

What would an actual solution require? At minimum, it would require rethinking the automatic link between birthplace, citizenship, and rights.

It would mean imagining political communities not organized around the fiction that birth on one side of a border rather than another determines your fundamental human standing. Some theorists have proposed post-territorial models in which rights and belonging are not tied to geographic sovereignty — communities that relate to each other through reciprocal arrangements rather than hard exclusions.

These ideas may sound utopian. But the faith traditions surveyed here have always insisted that the prophetic vision is, by definition, not yet fully realized, and that this compels us to move toward it. The Hebrew prophets did not moderate their demands because full justice was politically inconvenient. They named what was required and held it before the community as both judgment and invitation.

Continuing to address the refugee crisis through temporary fixes and humanitarian appeals is magical thinking. It assumes that we can preserve a system built on the primacy of citizenship while somehow also honoring the universal human dignity that every major faith tradition — and the founding logic of liberal democracy itself — declares inalienable.

The growing restrictiveness of refugee policy, and the emerging willingness to revoke citizenship already granted, suggest that when these principles conflict, the state’s interest in managing its membership wins. Every time.

Until we are willing to interrogate the structures that produce refugees and stateless persons in the first place, we are only arguing about how generous our exceptions should be.  That is not justice. It is, at best, a more comfortable charity.

The new policies emerging in the United Kingdom and the United States are not aberrations from democratic principles. They are the logical conclusion of a system that was never as universal as it claimed to be, and a test of conscience on whether we are willing to make it so.

Craig A. Phillips, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in Theology at St. Anselm College in Manchester, NH, and an Episcopal priest. He writes on a variety of topics on his blogsite, craigphillips.co, and on his free Substack page, craigphillips.substack.com.

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This piece is an expansion of his article, “The Refugee as ‘Limit-Concept’ in the Modern Nation-State,” in Dias, Skira, Attridge, and Mannion (eds.), The Church, Migration and Global (In)Difference? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 185–199.