Understanding Immigration Today: The Importance of Religious Literacy on Immigration and Refugee Crisis

This paper deals with the concept of immigrants and refugees when defining public policy. Public understanding of immigrants and refugees comes from political definitions and from secular and faith-based organizations. Most political definitions regarding immigrants and refugees are found in public policies: opening or closing borders, visa regulations, etc. These definitions include concepts regarding people who are object of the legislation under the mindset of people writing it. Sometimes the legislators don’t understand the world vision of immigrants and refugees. And those who respect the law don’t always know the mindset and motivations of the legislators. So a sort of common literacy is needed. This literacy is an essential part of this study. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to identify some of the general areas lacking research to adequately address the Refugee Crisis. Second, it aims to look forward for future research with representatives of key international entities helping immigrants and refugees. Its contents are organized in three parts: outlining the basic understanding of immigrants and refugees as it is found in contemporary academic literature, showing that without common concepts it is hard to reach agreements for social collaboration. making a call to action.