There is so much talk about migrants these days. No one can pretend they didn’t know. I don’t know what we can do about it. It would be easy to fall into xenophobia. This is part of our sinful inclination. But I remind myself that my ancestors also migrated to escape war and persecution.
On my father side, my grandmother escaped the spanish civil war when she was a teenager. Her father was a republican. He took his family to safety and went back to fight. He never saw his family again and died later in a refugee camp in the south of France near Carcassone.
On my mother side, our ancestors left France for Switzerland. I am not sure when exactly but sometime at the beginning of the 18th Century. We believe they escaped persecution some years after the revocation of the edict of Nantes.
It helps me to keep the balance.
There’s nothing new about migrations because of war and economic trouble. I am convinced many of us have an ancestor who migrated at some point in their lives and had to find safety in a foreign land.