The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has remained largely suspended since a January 2025 executive order, with the State Department citing "certain exceptions." One of those exceptions, created in May by an emergency presidential determination, opened a pathway specifically for Afrikaners from South Africa, whom the administration has described as victims of unjust racial discrimination. No comparable pathway exists for Christians fleeing the countries atop Open Doors' 2026 World Watch List, which again names North Korea and Somalia as the two most dangerous places on earth to follow Christ.
"This year, that door slammed shut, closing off hope for religious minorities around the world — and their family members in the U.S.," said Myal Greene, president and CEO of World Relief, in comments accompanying the report.
The number itself sits inside a larger, sobering count. Open Doors estimates that 388 million Christians worldwide now face high levels of persecution or discrimination for their faith, an increase of eight million over the prior year. The organization recorded 4,849 Christians killed for their faith in the reporting period, with 4,491 of those deaths — 93 percent — occurring in sub-Saharan Africa. Fifteen countries now carry Open Doors' "extreme" persecution rating, up from thirteen the year before.
Set those numbers side by side and a plain question rises up: what happens to the stranger at the gate when the gate does not open? Scripture has never treated that question as abstract policy. It has always been personal, and it has always fallen first on the people of God to answer.
A People Who Were Once Strangers Themselves
Long before there was a nation called Israel, there was a family of refugees in Egypt, fed by a brother they had once sold into slavery. That memory never left the law God gave them. Moses did not tell Israel to welcome the stranger because it was polite. He told them to remember what it felt like to be one.
"Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." (Deuteronomy 10:19)
That command was not aimed at Pharaoh's court or at Caesar's. It was aimed at the tents of God's own people, and it still is. No government on earth is bound by that verse, and no reader of this page should expect one to run its immigration policy from Deuteronomy. Nations have borders to keep, and keeping them is not sin. But the church has no such excuse. The church was never granted the option of closing a door that Christ Himself walked through as a refugee child carried into Egypt by Joseph and Mary in the night, fleeing a king who wanted Him dead.
Jesus made the standard even harder to dodge when He described the final judgment. He did not ask the nations whether their refugee ceilings were generous. He asked whether His people had recognized Him in the face of the one who had nowhere else to go.
"I was a stranger, and ye took me in." (Matthew 25:35)
My friend, a Christian in a jail cell in Eritrea or a widow hiding her Bible in a village in Nigeria does not read State Department cable traffic. She reads promises. And whatever a government does or does not do this fiscal year, the church still holds the keys Christ actually gave it — a door, a table, a letter, a wired dollar, a prayer meeting that names her by name. Those keys were never taken from us. No executive order can suspend them.
The comfort in all this is not that Washington will eventually get the numbers right. It may, or it may not, and men of good conscience will keep arguing over how a nation balances mercy with order. The comfort is that the Lord who counted every one of the 4,849 does not lose track of a single soul while paperwork sits on a desk. He has never once needed a visa to find His own.