If you're an illegal or barely legal migrant worker (of the exact OPPOSITE kind of the other form of 'migrant worker', the expatriate), then you're an alien in a strange land. This isn't merely a geo-national fact, it's also a sociological problem (which Malaysia has elevated into an international human rights issue).

You also may not speak the language and you do the jobs the locals don't want. Because you can't communicate very well, your learning sputters along. Because your CV will hardly be top-notch, your future isn't exactly a shining star.

And you're far from home. Christmas, under these circumstances, may not feel very Christmas-sy.

Which is why the Christmas story, for sub-lower class migrants, may need to be heard for the hopeful-revolutionary potential it possesses.

Jesus was a heavenly baby of light sent down to embrace, redeem and heal those who would linger in the darkness. To those who didn't recognise nor receive Him, He was an alien - in a hostile land, sent to be a bringer of hope.

Jesus, like a migrant/exile, was far away from His true home (where His loved ones awaited).

If, in quiet and kind ways, migrants consciously seek the welfare (shalom of the city they live in, this could start off a sublime coup d'etat of grace.

Via hard but creative work, migrants can be living reminders to the locals of the need to embody hope, heal relationships, to forgive.

They could even exemplify recycling, reusing, reducing and by such action to plant a mirror to the national consciousness of how breath-taking the urban environment could be.

I recall here of Tom Hanks' character, an exile in an international airport, bringing new joy and new looks to the people and property.

Here was a stranger who sweetened his surroundings. There are many more strangers who could do the same for our country.

This revolution can start in the migrant churches we find sprinkled around the city. We just gotta keep reminding them of their role as 'revolutionary exiles' (pious and unrealistic language, I know, but if these are merely words, why not?) 

The Malaysian community enriched and blessed from a most unlikely source. That would be a good jab to the powers that be, eh? (It's also not an unprecedented occurence, as the recent news of migrant workers in rural Scotland reports)