My all-time favorite unintended satire on lousy thinking is still the in-your-face bumper sticker proclamation, “God said it; I believe it; that settles it.” Moving rapidly up to second place on my list, though, is the widely disseminating coup de grace conversation-stopper on our country’s struggles to formulate a fair and workable immigration policy: “Illegal is illegal.” All well-formed tautologies are true, but not all are helpful.
Yes, “illegals” are people who are within our borders ill-legal-ly. Perhaps if they had been raised right and had come to possess a more law-abiding character, they wouldn’t have been so mean-spirited as to take advantage of porous borders and employers all too willing to hide and exploit them. How awful of these “aliens.” Well, now we will just have to take things into our own not-so-porous hands, and give these people the backs of them. Perhaps we could bring in consultants from Israel to show us how to replicate a wall that will keep our own version of the West Bank from overrunning God-given land. We could call it the Great Wall of the Rio Grande.
It is always an interesting question, and one that is never easy to decide, just how many immigants any one nation can welcome and assimilate without compromising its own future. Since the State of Israel has already been dragged into this discussion in a facile way, it might be appropriate to use another facet of her current condition to make a more serious point. During my several visits to that country over the past thirty years, I have noted with mounting anxiety two especially telling signs of population overload. One is declining water levels in the Sea of Galilee to the North as the water flowing into it from Mount Hermon is siphoned off to meet ever-expanding human needs elsewhere. The second is a further degradation of the Dead Sea to the south as the Jordan River is diverted away from it for more and more agricultural projects. Israel now has an altogether unwanted problem: she can no longer continue welcoming Jews from everywhere else with open arms, and survive.
It may very well be that our country, too, is rapidly reaching the point beyond which we can no longer absorb many more newcomers.Whether we are at that point or not, it certainly makes sense in the here and now to work on protecting our borders more effectively. I have to wonder, though, just how to pull off what the illegals-are-illegal-ists insist is the necessary first step. Sending eleven million unwanted people into Exile in one swoop will make the Exodus and the Babylonian Captivity seem like moving a wedding party from the Sanctuary to the Fellowship Hall.
It also makes sense to work on bringing the employment of immigrant workers under more effective law enforcement. 1200 illegal workers for a single company getting arrested across 26 states in one series of raids deserves the front page headline that this particular story got. More than likely, though, their employers will suffer far less than these workers will, to our collective shame. As raids like these continue, we can only hope that others from whose labors we benefit are equitably compensated, including being afforded all of the benefits due them. There is nothing in either of these imperatives that requires for its validation any principle other than that of applying the law fairly.
Biblical faith, though, makes all of these issues more complicated. Strangers, sojurners, and aliens --- not to mention slaves --- have always been of special concern to Jews and Christians alike, because they have been so evidently of special concern to God. God’s guidelines for dealing with them could hardly be clearer: hospitality, not rejection; respect, not exploitation; inclusion, not exclusion; love, not suspicion. What got the new settlers of the Promised Land to give even slaves a day off from work was the remembrance of their own enslavement in Egypt (Deuteronomy 5:15); what got them to be welcolming toward strangers was the remembrance of Abraham’s hospitality to men who turned out to be angels in his midst (Genesis 18:2-5). The author of I Peter addresses his readers as “aliens in a foreign land” (2:11) just after he has reminded them that they are now God’s people, not the “no people” they once were, and that they will never be outside God’s mercy again.
This land is your land; this land is my land. If it is ever to be “their” land, then “they” are going to have to work for it, and not have it just handed to “them.” Right? Or, as one Canaanite said to another…
Finding Answers to Hard Questions About Faith is online