A Christian Response to Immigration, Part One

    

    To understand a Christian model for thinking about immigration, we must take a step back from our preconceived ideas about one of the Bible’s greatest women--- one of only two women to have biblical books named after them--- Ruth. Ruth was an immigrant. Born in the land, language, and religion of Moab, she married an Israelite man, who himself was an immigrant. His family had migrated from Israel to Moab during one of Israel’s economic downturns looking for better work and economic opportunities. Once there, he and his brother both married Moabite women (Ruth and Orpah). Over time, all three men in the family died, leaving Ruth, Orpah, and their mother-in-law Naomi, alone. After hearing that the economy had improved in her hometown of Bethlehem, Naomi decided to return home. Orpah understandably decides to stay with her people and family in Moab, but Ruth vows to never leave Naomi and follows her back to Israel.

          When we think about the “right kind of immigrants,” Ruth is not one of them. She is a chain immigrant, getting into the country because she is related (by marriage) to an Israelite woman. She comes for better economic opportunities. She is poor. As a woman, she is almost certainly uneducated. Her language is different. Her traditions are different. Her race is different. As soon as she arrives in her new homeland, Ruth starts taking advantage of the charity available. Rather than food stamps and Medicaid, ancient Israel provided for their poor by allowing them to collect grain and other crops that the harvesters dropped. Ruth takes a place in line for these handouts with the native Israeli women because it is the only way she can feed herself and her mother-in-law.

          She then steals the heart of a wealthy man, Boaz, prompting an interracial and intercultural marriage that produced their son Jessie, who became the father of David, the King and Giant Slayer, and the many greats-grandfather of Jesus Christ. I often wonder what Ruth’s relationship with her grandson David was. If she were still alive, she would have been expected to help her undoubtedly overwhelmed daughter-in-law raise her eight sons. Did she tell him stories of her immigrant journey and how his grandfather had accepted and loved her despite her being a foreigner? While he was fleeing from Saul, David was forced to seek refuge in Philistine territory. During these dark days, did he identify with his grandmother’s journey in a strange land?  When he allowed a Hittite as a general in his Israelite army, did he reflect that he, the King of Israel, was mixed race?

          The Old Testament law and prophets have a lot to say about immigrants, but they have even more to say about the wrath of God that will be released on those who mistreat them. In the law, God dictates that “the stranger among you” should received the same protection and justice as an Israelite and that Israelites should treat them the same as “the native among you” (Ex. 12:49; Lev 19:34). It calls down curses on those who withhold justice from the foreigner (Lev 27:19). Like the United States, Israel was a land of immigrants. Abraham had not been native to Canaan; he migrated there from Mesopotamia. His descendants fled to Egypt to escape hunger and four hundred years later, migrated back to the land where their ancestors had been “strangers” and “wanderers” (Ps 105:12-13). God commands the Israelite people to never forget what it “feels like to be foreigners” (Ex 22:21; 23:9). 

It is in the Old Testament prophets that God really starts to get angry though. The prophets come because Israel and Judah have turned away from God and the prophets are calling them back to repentance. Chief among their many sins are oppressing three groups: the foreigner (immigrants), the orphan, and the widow (Ps 146:9, Jerm 7.:5-7, Zech 7:9-10).  Malachi identifies “depriving the foreigners of justice” is the opposite of fearing the Lord (Mal 3:5). Ultimately, God’s people persist in their oppression and God allows the consequences of their choices as first Israel and then Judah were attacked, and their people dragged away, now strangers in strange lands themselves. As they had turned a deaf ear to the cries of the poor and immigrants; God turned a deaf ear to their cries when they were scattered among the nations (Zech 7:8-14).  

In the Bible, God has an almost ironic obsession with immigrants. Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob, Rachel and Leah spent their entire lives migrated from one country to another. Daniel was an immigrant who refused to give up his language, religion, and cultural practices. Esther was the daughter of immigrants who kept her ancestral identity, language, and religion even though they had lived in Persia for generations. Ezra and Nehemiah led Jewish immigration caravans back to Palestine. The apostle Paul was a life-long immigrant. Born in Tarsus in modern Turkey to two immigrant parents (Roman and Jewish), as a young person, he immigrated to Judah to learn and work. As a Christian missionary, he was constantly immigrating--- living, and working for a few years in a place until God’s call or persecution forced him to move on.

One of the great promises that God makes to ancient Israel and fulfills in the racially diverse Church is that all nations will become the people of God (Ps 2:8, Romans 9:25, Hosea 2:23). In the late 1800’s, evangelical churches in the United States were convinced that this promise would be fulfilled in their lifetime for two reasons. First, they were the generation who sent missionaries out by the thousands and new Christian communities with new languages, dresses, cultures, and native translations of the Bible sprung up across the global by the tens of thousands. Second, the United States was experiencing one of its largest mass immigration waves in her history. Those immigrants were largely poor and uneducated and often violent, but pastors and church leaders were downright giddy that they were pouring into their cities and states. God had made their job of converting the nations so easy by bringing them right to their door. Doors that were open around the clock teaching job skills, reading, English, basketball, and the Bible.

There is an explicit contrast between these Christians and some modern “white evangelicals.” These “white evangelicals” would never had let Ruth into our country. They would have objected to giving David and his people refugee status. They would have pressured Daniel and Esther to give up their cultural identity and blend it. They would have railed about the tent-making jobs that Paul was stealing and the pasture lands that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob took from native workers. They would have built a wall to keep the immigrant caravans of Ezra and Nehemiah out.

To reject, marginalize, or mistreat immigrants is to court the judgement of God. To block immigrants who are not already wealthy, educated, and speak our weird English language would have blocked Ruth and many other biblical figures from fulfilling the destiny God had for them. The doors of our churches and our hearts should not be shut up and guarded by armed men because an unruly immigrant may enter it; they should be thrown open with joy that God has made our job of spreading his light to the nations so much easier by bringing the nations to us.