My wife, Liza, and I and our two young daughters moved to Cyprus in 1990 to join a small group of like-minded Christians that would become Trinity Christian Community Fellowship, now Trinity Evangelical Church. Our minds were filled with the idealism of 20-something-year-old Christians. I want to be quite candid from the outset about the various influences on us and how our thinking was shaped as we were plunged into the world of illegal migration and asylum seekers.

We came to Cyprus prior to the first Gulf War. Saddam Hussein was the “bad guy” according to human rights groups but had not yet invaded Kuwait. Cypriots saw the results of his rule: a member of the Greek Evangelical Church (GEC) had found Iraqi Assyrian families searching through the dumpsters at the back of a market. There was no public provision for asylum seekers in pre-European Union Cyprus. The value of the Iraqi dinar was low. Their limited funds were exhausted, accelerated by an unscrupulous landlord. Liza and I were asked by the pastor of the GEC to help with the work for just a few weeks. These desperate families had seized onto a false hope that they would be relocated in the United States through the work of State Senator John Nimrod, a second-generation Assyrian in Chicago.

So here we were: would-be home schoolers, with strong Presbyterian convictions, reading thick theological tomes, and devouring R.J. Rushdoony with a sprinkling of the Tyler theonomists. We and the small Christian community in Larnaca, Cyprus, faced a steep learning curve.

Later that year Saddam Hussein would invade Kuwait, vindicating our friends’ horrific stories about life for Baghdad’s considerable ethnically Christian minority. Western media then seized onto the evils of Hussein and the atrocities against Kurds in the north of the country. We hadn’t even heard of Kurds. In later waves of migrants, we would make many Kurdish friends. To this very day we see an unusual openness among these people to our faith.

I once met behind two sets of locked steel doors with leaders of a terrorist group. A young Kurdish man had tried to elope with a Kurdish girl. They had driven off in his car and now the girl, having been alone with a man, had brought dishonor on her family. The unhelpful leaders immediately got involved. The man must be punished. A Kurdish man who had become a Christian took me to the leadership to discuss the issue, anticipating that they would be embarrassed to order an execution if a Westerner was involved. The friend explained that I was a Christian, and I was thanked for all that the Christian community had done for Kurdish people. All involved were only “fined.”

We have had some interesting experiences during our time here. Did I mention being accidentally locked in jail while visiting African migrants? Yes, the policeman with the key ended his shift and went home.

Yes, it has been quite a ride!

How did the Christian community respond to migrants? Wonderfully. God’s concern for the poor, the orphans, the widows is abundantly clear in Scripture. Suddenly you begin to see migration as an overarching theme of God’s story. Sin causes unwanted and traumatic migrations: Adam and Eve were thrown out of Eden and settled to the east; God’s judgment on Babel caused the 70 nations to form as they migrated into new territories; Noah and his descendants resettled the land destroyed by God’s judgment in the flood; Abraham was a sojourner in the land, unsettled, in faith looking forward to his descendants settled in a land promised him by God; the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, and God delivered His people in a migration comparable in size to the movements of people we are seeing in the same part of the world in our own times; God’s judgment led to a divided kingdom and later the destruction and relocation of the survivors by the Assyrians, our friends’ ancestors; the southern kingdom, with just a few godly kings, fared slightly better with some Jews returning from captivity under the Medes and Persians to live under Greek, and then Roman, occupation; and, Joseph took his wife, Mary, and baby Jesus back to Egypt to seek asylum from the mass-murdering tyrant Herod.

The early church can hardly be described as settled. It was through persecution that the gospel first spread from Jerusalem. Paul forsook the life of a well-to-do, highly educated, and respected Pharisee to embark on perilous trips around the eastern Mediterranean to spread his reworked Exodus story to the Jews first and then to the Gentiles. If we are in Christ, this is the story we have bought into or, more accurately, been brought into by the atoning work of Christ. His work is completed, but we are placed in a world where the kingdom is yet to come as we await the restoration of the heavens and the earth.

In this part of the world, it is very easy to see migration in directly biblical terms. The Medes and Persians are the Iranians and Kurds that we seek to assist. The Assyrians, where this story began for Liza and me, still exist as a distinct ethnic group. We still have Jews, Greeks, Philistines (called Palestinians in English but still Philistines in Arabic).

Dare I ask, as a non-American, if we transfer these lessons to North America whose populations were originally largely immigrant? People fled, and still flee, persecution, war, and economic hardship to seek a life in freer, more prosperous countries.

Something similar happened on my side of the Atlantic with huge movements of people in Europe after the Second World War. Then, as now, many people don’t migrate but stay and suffer in the lands of their birth. It is always a minority—with a heavy demographic toward the young, who can adapt and make a living—that move.

What has gone wrong?

The creation groans in the pains of childbirth (Rom. 8:22). The world is not as it should be. The sudden large movements of people, with immense suffering on their part, are part of this still fallen cosmos. If we have the Holy Spirit, we groan inwardly, longing for the renewed creation, Eden extended to the ends of the land, and God dwelling with His people. Our calling is not to intensify the sufferings of other human beings by refusing them refuge; instead, we are to extend assistance as our resources permit.

The conclusion that we have drawn, in our context, is that excessive government regulation is exacerbating migration issues. I have already put my hands up to our early Reconstructionist influences. I, hopefully older and wiser, would qualify this by saying emphatically that there is no political fix for a problem-free world. Any such idealism is false.

Asylum seekers in Cyprus are usually not allowed to work. Before European Union (EU) accession, things were less well defined. This policy has increased public spending and resentment in the community; it also reduces the likelihood of migrants becoming economically independent in the longer term. Commensurate with this, we have seen an increased sense of entitlement.

Migrants often remain illegal. This precludes access to education, legal employment, etc. Such migrants remain poorly paid and are regularly exploited.

EU policy causes clustering of migrants in certain countries. For example, Cyprus has the highest number of asylum seekers per capita in the EU. The math is obvious. Our little island is 50 miles from Syria and slightly closer to Turkey. Once migrants enter Cyprus and claim asylum they are trapped. They can only illegally travel to Europe and if caught will be returned to Cyprus as their first country of asylum. Should they make it to Europe, they must destroy all papers, including passports, to avoid being returned to Cyprus. Further, they often fabricate false stories and documents to explain how they arrived in that country, increasing their dependence on organized criminals that provide these services.

With less regulation, migrants would tend to move on from countries where there is no work. Other countries would benefit from needed workers. No public assistance would eliminate the “burden on society” claim. Yes, trapping migrants and not allowing them to work is a burden for our taxpayers. Assistance should only be private, so there would be no burden on those who do not want to help.

My wife and I often visit a nearby country. We love the place and its peoples. Our frustration in the past is that, with minimal foreign language proficiency on Liza’s part and none on mine, we could only pray for the beautiful but lost people around us. How will these people hear? Furthermore, as a man, it would be utterly inappropriate, language issues aside, to even talk with a woman. Fast forward: I now volunteer to teach English at a Christian organization called Oasis, which assists migrants in Larnaca. In my class I have a woman from this nearby country. Within the boundaries of a teacher-student relationship, a friendship has blossomed. I am now the Christian friend of the very type of person I stood in the street of that nearby land and prayed for many times.

Paul Burgess served as elder at TCCF, an RP congregation in Cyprus that is now Trinity Evangelical Church (TEC), and he is now elder at Larnaka Community Church. He is a teacher at American Academy Larnaca. He volunteers and serves on the board of Oasis, a Christian ministry to migrants in Larnaca that serves the local churches, including TEC and the Greek Evangelical Church.