Immigration Ethics

Don’t let the immigrant
who has joined with the LORD say,
“The LORD will exclude me
from the people.” Is 56:3

A brief comment upon the immigration questions before U.S. citizens:

We are faced with two irreconcilable concerns when we consider the problem of the massive migrations that occurred and continue from Central America.

One of the judgments we must make is what level of immigration we can sustain without producing disintegration of an economic or moral kind. We must make a judgment about order. As Europeans are learning all too well as they struggle with the influx of Syrian refugees, there is a level of immigration above which our order becomes disorder, a point at which chaos reigns, a level of immigration at which our social fabric disintegrates so much that our common life no longer reflects the godly order to which we are called.

Such is the result of the undocumented immigration we encouraged in last few decades of the 20th century in order to provide our communities a constant supply of commodity labor. Eleven million undocumented immigrants put tremendous economic pressure on local communities, and our social institutions struggle to balance order and justice.

However, making this judgment about how much immigration to allow and what to do about those here without due process necessarily brings us headlong into another concern: our decision about who is welcome and who is not results in us, the well-off, benefitting at the expense of our neighbors who are worse-off. Saying “No!” to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” can be a failure to love our neighbor as ourselves (Matt 22:37–40)

As I recall, Jesus said a word or two about our duty to the stranger (Matt 25:35).

We are faced with a paradox: the laws that are just for us to implement because of our duty to preserve our social fabric may be unjust for our poorer neighbors to suffer. We have two irreconcilable concerns.

Jesus taught us to pray “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done” (Matt 6:9–13). If we mean what we pray, how might our prayer shape our perspective of this paradox? How are we to think of the resident alien in our midst?

The primary task assigned our government is to provide the order that we as a people believe reflects the justice God calls us to perform (Amos 5:24). There is a secondary role, however. The U.S. Constitution talks about it in terms of preserving our domestic tranquility and defending us against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Both of these are about protecting our identity as a people capable of justice, which arises from our commitment to freedom as non-domination.

Notice that these secondary purposes for our government exist entirely for the primary goal of justice. When faced with a paradox such as the one immigration presents, our imperative is not to preserve our abstract notions of American identity, but to do justice (Micah 6:8).

That suggests a way to rank competing values when we evaluate the proposed immigration policies of our politicians: the only legitimate reason for us to restrict our neighbor’s access to the blessings God has given us is that we conclude that restricting access is the only way we can do justice.

The only way we can justify building a wall between ourselves and our Mexican neighbors or deporting millions of undocumented immigrants en masse is if we conclude that we are unable to imagine justice any other way.

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