Walls, Welcome, Mercy, Law

On the road to Croatia, Stuart Sia, Save the Children

The world is on the move, with more migrants than ever before, crossing borders, deserts, seas in
search of safety, food, water, opportunity, or the chance to reunite their families.

While those journeys start far away, the causes of the journeys are often close at hand: agricultural policies that have shifted whole people groups from their ancestral lands or priced out small scale farmers; weapons sales escalating ancient conflicts; extractive industries forcing removal of villages; sea-level rise flooding island nations and coastal cities around the globe.

I listen with great sadness to the political posturing around deportation or the fabled wall to protect our southern border.  

This fear and hatred of the immigrant: will it ever end?

On this continent, WE are the immigrant. All of us except the tiny percentage of remaining pure-blood Native Americans.

We would do well to keep that reality in mind. As Exodus instructs: “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien; for you were aliens in the land ” (Exodus 22:21)

My own earliest US ancestor was a pre-Revolution Welsh shipping clerk who sold alcohol to native Americans in port cities from Philadelphia to New Amsterdam to Albany. Parts of the family continued on to Canada, not to return until sometime in the 20th century, traveling unchecked over the border in both directions.

Another ancestor arrived in Ellis Island in 1903, with no papers to his name (he was three) and no documentation beyond point of departure. Another arrived from Ireland in 1914. He married a Swedish girl born in North Dakota.

Legal immigrants? Given the laws of the time, that wasn’t hard to accomplish. Early laws excluded Chinese, “lunatics,” or those visibly contagious. Beyond that, the rules were loose until sometime after my relatives arrived. None of them had birth certificates, passports or other papers. None of them were deported, or made to wait months in detention camps.

Our current route to legal entry is very different: confusing, restrictive and in many ways far out of step with the dangerous realities so many migrants are fleeing.

A chart created by Reason magazine gives some idea of the daunting maze facing anyone hoping to join our great nation (click on the chart to read it in a new window). For most of our relatives, if they tried to enter now, the answer would be “Sorry, you’re out of luck.” Wait time? For some years, or decades. For others, “approaching infinity.”

According to Deuteronomy 10:18-19 “For the Lord your God...loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.  You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

The word translated “stranger” could also be foreigner, alien, sojourner. In Greek it's translated “xenos”, the root of our word “xenophobia”: fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or anything strange or foreign.

Read through the history of our immigration laws and trace our xenophobic roots. Outright bans on Chinese, then Asians, quotas for “less desirable” nationalities, even now discussion of different rules for people of certain backgrounds or religions. Attempts to reform inadequate laws have been stalled for decades, as farmers struggle to find seasonal workers and children seeking safety wait in limbo in crowded detention camps.

Christians have always wrestled with the challenge of unjust laws that oppose the demands of righteousness. Quakers smuggled escaped slaves; German Christians hid Jewish neighbors. Today, many congregations befriend and aide undocumented immigrants living in fear of deportation.

Child Migration Continues

Yes, we have laws. But when we balance law and mercy, which should win?

In puzzling over this, I came across a conversation hosted in 2010 by the Patheos Cross Examination series. Nine Christian leaders were invited to share their thoughts on illegal immigration and deportation. Unfortunately, links to the full conversation are no longer working. Mark D. Roberts, Presbyterian pastor and professor at Fuller Seminary, summarized posts by all participants, with his own observations and questions on each. 

The discussion, though long, is worth reading and considering, as is Roberts’ discussion, near the end, about how it’s possible for Christians to start from such different points of view and draw such conflicting conclusions.

If we start from loyalty to law, then deportation seems a reasonable solution. But we still might ask: have we ever broken a law? Does the punishment in this case fit the supposed crime?

If we start from a place of economic concern, then research might be the best response: economic analysis shows that immigrants, legal or not, help our economy thrive, and every immigrant, legal or not, pays taxes that exceed services gained.  The Economic Policy Institute offers a roundup of research and concludes

[t]o the extent there is something to fear, it stems from not providing legal status to unauthorized immigrants, and from guestworker programs where workers have limited rights and are tied to one employer. A useful framework for thinking about this is that any situation where workers’ individual bargaining power is reduced is going to put downward pressure on their wages, and therefore also on the wages of workers in similar occupations and industries. . . .

There is a fairly broad consensus that the present value of the long-run net fiscal impact of unauthorized immigration, at all levels of government combined, is small but positive—meaning that immigration reduces overall budget deficits. . . .

Unauthorized immigrants are a net positive for public budgets because they contribute more to the system than they take out.

If we start from a place of fear, would it help to read that economic policy report? Or would more information about the vetting process for refugees  or about crime rates for immigrants help put that fear in perspective? And what of instructions to “fear not”? If perfect love cast out fear, would love of the stranger quiet our concern?

When the alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien.  The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land . . . . (Leviticus 19:33-34 and 24:22 )

Mark Roberts suggests we might start in Genesis: with the knowledge that we’re made in the image of God. Not just those who look most like us. Not just those who speak our language.

If all human beings bear the image of God and therefore are to be treated with dignity, then this surely includes those who are in the United States illegally. So called “illegal aliens” are, first and foremost, sacred beings created in God’s own image. Thus they, like all of humanity, should be regarded as sacred and treated with respect.

Another starting point, also from Genesis, is the vision of fruitfulness, or human flourishing.

Those who “take the side” of undocumented workers often speak as if they care mainly or exclusively about the fruitfulness of these people. Those who are concerned about the well-being of the United States often seem to care about the fruitfulness of our citizens to the exclusion of others. A biblical perspective, I believe, inspires us to shape a world in which all peoples in the Americas (and beyond) would have the opportunity to live truly fruitful lives.

Beyond these starting points stands the teaching of Jesus:

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me’” (Matt 25:31-40).

Notice who is included among those who received tangible acts of love: the stranger. The Greek word translated as “stranger” here is xenos, which can also mean “foreigner.” It denotes someone who is an outsider, who doesn’t belong. Jesus identifies with the xenos to such an extent that welcoming the xenos is welcoming Jesus himself.

In the parable we know as “The Good Samaritan,” Jesus paints a picture of the archetypal xenos (from the first-century Jewish point of view) who loves another xenos, and thus becomes a model for all who would follow Jesus. In the kingdom of God, that which divides people from people fall away, replaced by love that knows no national or ethnic boundaries.

Starting points shape our understanding.

So do end points.

What’s our goal?

Strong nation?

Robust economy?

Just society?

Obedience to the call of compassion?

When candidates offer to round up illegals, deport millions, build bigger walls, what grid do we use to evaluate the vision?

When we offer those words to God in prayer, what answer are we given?

Prayer (by Reverend Enock De Assis)

Dear God, our journey through life is long and hard.

We cannot make this trip alone; we must walk together on the journey.

You promised to send us a helper, your Spirit.

Help us to see your Spirit in those you send to journey with us.

In the refugee family, seeking safety from violence,

    Let us see your Spirit.

In the migrant worker, bringing food to our tables,

    Let us see your Spirit.

In the asylum-seeker, seeking justice for himself and his family,

    Let us see your Spirit.

In the unaccompanied child, traveling in a dangerous world,

    Let us see your Spirit.

Teach us to recognize that as we walk with each other, you are present.

Teach us to welcome not only the strangers in our midst

    but the gifts they bring as well:

    the invitation to conversion, communion, and solidarity.

This is the help you have sent: we are not alone.

We are together on the journey, and for this we give you thanks.

Amen.

This post is part of a series on What's Your Platform

Beyond the Party Platform July 24, 2016

A Different Way July 31, 2016 

Election Fraud and Rigged Elections, August 10, 2016 

How Long Will the Land Lie Parched? August 21, 2016 

Other posts on immigration: 

About that Banner Photo, November 11, 2011

Epiphany and Philoxenia: Entertaining Angels, January 4, 2015

Symptoms, Not Causes

Last week I spent three days in Washington, DC with 700 or so strong, outspoken women and a handful of men courageous enough to join the League of Women Voters. We were wrestling with issues of democracy: 

• Roll-back of voting rights in the wake of the Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act
• Vast infusions of undisclosed donations that followed the Supreme Court Citizen’s United decision declaring corporations are people.
• Erosion of public trust in the structures and systems of government.

We’ve heard the stories in the news: five hour waits to vote in poor communities in Arizona. 

Illegal purges of voter rolls in states like Georgia and Ohio.  

The speakers I heard brought the headlines alive with context and stories and troubling insight into underlying issues. 

Amanda Taub spoke on the rise of American authoritarianism, describing the way rapid social change can become an occasion for whole groups of people to look for scapegoats to blame. Powerful, punitive leaders can stir anxiety into fear and sweep laws aside with a promise of protection from encroaching others who bring unwanted social change.  

Jennifer Lawless focused on the dangerous dismantling of trust in public institutions and the undermined legitimacy of those institutions when the majority withdraws from engagement. 

Arturo Vargas, of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, spoke, in tears, of the obstacles put in the way of a growing Latino population. He insisted that his people care deeply about their communities, yet find it difficult to translate that concern into civic engagement when so much is done to ensure their votes don’t count.

Kristen Clarke, President of the National Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Christine Chen, of the Asian Pacific Islander American Vote, described new forms of voter suppression and ongoing barriers to full inclusion of minority voters. 

Ari Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot, gave a masterful overview of the struggle that shaped the Voting Rights Act of 1963 and continues to play out in polling places and courthouses across the country.  As he said with passion: "It is fundamentally immoral to try to win elections by stopping people from voting.” 

The primary focus of the convention was democracy, voting rights, the forces undermining the ability to reach good solutions that serve the common good. But we also spent time looking at some of the fallout of our political dysfunction, acknowledging that every political decision has real-life human outcomes. 

My friend, Jennifer Levy-Tatum, presented insights from our year-long criminal justice study, demonstrating in tragic detail that little shifts in sentencing legislation can throw thousands of families in to poverty and ruin more lives than anyone imagined. Speaking to a room packed with men and women from other states she shared just a little of what we’ve learned, about county jails packed with people waiting trial for months. Defense lawyers with schedules so tight they meet clients just before a trial begins. Mentally ill men and women kept in solitary confinement rather than receive appropriate treatment. Pregnant women giving birth in shackles. Millions of tax dollars invested in building new prisons rather than putting money into teachers and schools to give poor communities a better path to the future. 

In the news between our meetings, like the rumble of thunder, we heard ongoing coverage of the Orlando shooting. 

In the days since, disruption on Capital Hill has captured the news, with civil rights hero John Lewis and others pleading for the House Speaker, Paul Ryan, to allow a vote on gun safety bills. 

 

The temptation to place blame runs high.

For some, President Obama is the cause of all our current woes.

Others point to the Republican Party.

Immigrants.  

Muslims.

Hillary and Bill Clinton. 

But what if people are symptoms, not causes? 

Donald Trump didn’t undermine our ability to weigh facts and fiction. That started long ago, with philosophical relativism, deconstructionist theory, the post-modern dismissal of objective reality and absolute truth.  A culture that still believed firmly in objective truth would have little patience with Trump’s obvious lies. 

Gays haven’t destroyed our families. That honor goes to a dizzying stew that could include slavery, pornography, birth control, growth of women’s rights and opportunities, loss of job security, oppressive work hours, addiction, abuse, a “me-first” philosophy endemic to our current culture.

Governmental dysfunction wasn’t invented by Paul Ryan or his fellow GOP representatives, or by President Barack Obama. It’s been built into the system, with steady intent, over long decades of determined self-interest by leaders from both sides eager to bolster their own standing. 

Hate, fear, suspicion, prejudice? We can’t pin those on any one group, religion, race. They’re our constant companions, held in check by compassion and self-control, or fanned into destructive fire by careless speech and lazy patterns of thought.

As Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus,  

we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in heavenly places. 

 What are principalities and powers? 

Are they spiritual forces? 

Oppressive systems? 

Embedded patterns of action and thought that hold whole continents captive? 

Scholars and theologians have written reams on the question. Walter Wink alone wrote five books on the topic: Naming the Powers (1984), Unmasking the Powers (1996), Engaging the Powers (1992), When the Powers Fall (1998), and The Powers that Be (1999). All address the disordered worldview that puts trust in violence rather than love and prioritizes wealth over justice.

There is much to learn about what it means to wrestle with principalities and powers,  but the meaning of the first part of Paul’s observation seems very clear. We aren’t doing battle with mere humans. Individuals aren’t the cause of our deep dilemmas.

Omar Mateen, the man who opened fire in the nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people and injuring 53 others, was certainly the immediate cause of death and injury.

Yet he himself was and is a symptom of complex forces: misguided notions about race, religion and power, conflicting ideas about gender and belonging, a cultural love-affair with weapons and violence.  He’s not the first American man to turn his inner agitation outward in an explosion of deadly power. Just the latest and most visible.

It’s always easiest to scapegoat.

And always dangerously wrong.

Any real solution to our current morass will involve attention to causes, courageous engagement, selfless service, a renewed willingness to seek and speak the truth, great wisdom and compassion. 

No one person, no one party can make that happen. 

Wisdom

I’ve been listening this week to the troubling story of unaccompanied minors detained at our southern border.

52,193 arrived between October 1, 2013, and June 15, 2014. More are stopped at the checkpoints every day.

As that story unfolds, with accompanying political posturing and pronouncements, I’ve been reading another text as well: the opening chapters of Proverbs, the daily readings from Scripture Union’s Encounter with God. 

Those chapters talk about wisdom: wisdom calling, building a house, offering protection, instruction, safe passage through the tangles of daily life.

from Jim Bridenstine, Oklahoma, bridenstine.house.gov

Those children desperately need that wisdom.

So do we all.

Last week I posted about the ancient agora of Greek democracy: the place where citizens gathered to discuss dilemmas and determine a course of action.

Our current political discussions take place in Facebook rants, accusatory sound bites, passionate harangues that fail to enlighten and leave us hostile and divided.

Impeach the President?

Bus the children home?

I find myself thirsty for wisdom.

Hungry for voices that address the complexities of our current situation, that blend compassion, justice, righteousness, understanding.

As I read through Proverbs, I see two ways of thinking set in opposition: 

• Wisdom and its close counterpart, understanding, yield order, calm, humility, respect, integrity, patience, justice.

• Folly, with its mocking refusal to listen, yields dissension, strife, pride, deception, laziness, oppression.

That second list sounds depressingly familiar. The first is in short supply.

In a situation calling for great compassion, careful conversation, and deep discernment, we have politicians pointing fingers, positing ridiculous causes, offering politically-motivated non-solutions.

It’s not my purpose here to discuss the specifics of our immigration policies, or the impact of trade agreements and drug enforcement on our nearest neighbors, but to grieve the bombast, belligerence, and lack of understanding occasioned by the sad saga of small, unattended children crowded on our doorstep.

They aren’t here because of some nuanced change in our immigration law.

from Jason Chaffetz, Utah,, chaffetz.house.gov

Or because someone’s been fudging the numbers on our current deportation rates.

No parent sends a child, small or not so small, on a harrowing journey across mountains, rivers, deserts unless the reasons are compelling.

No child sets out on such a dangerous journey unless there's no safe haven more accessible.

The American Immigration Council offers a carefully worded evaluation of the situation in a June 10 report: “Children in Danger: A Guideto the Humanitarian Challenge at the Border.” 

Researchers consistently cite increased Northern Triangle violence as the primary recent motivation for migration, while identifying multiple causes including poverty and family reunification. A report by the Assessment Capacities Project (ACAPS), citing 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) data, highlighted that Honduras had a homicide rate of 90.4 per 100,000 people. El Salvador and Guatemala had homicide rates of 41.2 and 39.9, respectively. In comparison, the war-torn country of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from which nearly half a million refugees have fled, has a homicide rate of 28.3 per 100,000 people. 

Read that paragraph again and grieve.

To put it in perspective: Philadelphia's rate was 15.96 homicides per 100,000 residents in 2013; San Pedro Sula’s, in Honduras, was 187.14

The report assesses the outcry over changes in immigration law and angry calls for more border patrols and tougher enforcement: 

• Recent U.S. immigration enforcement policy does not appear to be a primary cause of the migration. . .
• There is little evidence to support the proposition that the border must be further fortified to deter an influx of children and families. . .  
• Treating the current situation as simply another wave of illegal immigration misses the broader policy and humanitarian concerns that are driving it. In fact, many children are turning themselves over to Border Patrol agents upon arrival and are not seeking to evade apprehension. 

Short term alternatives are challenging, long-term options are complex and incomplete, and the report doesn’t pretend to address the deeper, decades-old forces that have destabilized the agricultural economies of Central American, narrowing economic opportunity, uprooting whole communities, and plunging large sectors of affected countries into violence and despair.

Are solutions possible without wisdom?

Is democracy possible without wisdom?

Not just on the part of leaders, but on the part of citizens as well?

What happens when economic self-interest, rather than wisdom, defines our vote, our voice, our trade, our foreign policy?

Last week, I suggested the start of a new series: 

I want to dig more deeply into the possibility of being salt, light, or a voice of hope or wisdom in places mired in anger or confusion.

I want to suggest ways to engage, not just by signing a survey, or making a phone call, but by serving our communities in love while helping to renew a web of compassionate engagement. 

How do we sow seeds of wisdom in places mired in anger or confusion?

Four thoughts:

1. Learn before speaking.

We can’t all be experts on every issue that confronts us, but we can take time to learn before we voice opinions. If we haven’t taken time to look a little deeper, hear both sides of the story, understand the pros and cons,  maybe we should ask questions and listen rather than repeat accusations that stir our anger but not our understanding.

2. Evaluate ideas rather than judge people.

Too often we listen just long enough to label those around us: with us or against us. Socialist, Commie, Fascist, Feminazi. Narrow-minded Christian. Tree hugger. Bigot. Those labels deepen our divisions, keep us from exploring real solutions, and demonstrate our lack of wisdom.

3. Recognize folly and avoid it.

There are TV shows I choose not to watch because they promote a mocking spirit. There are radio broadcasts I don’t listen to because they deliberately stir division. I work hard to find sources that are balanced, thoughtful, more interested in finding solutions than fixing blame. If more of us chose our sources more wisely, maybe those sources would be easier to find.

4. Pray for wisdom, for yourself, our leaders, churches, communities, citizens.

Growing up, I saw more than my share of division, pride, anger, deception. I wanted something different. When I first read James 3, I caught of glimpse of what I hungered for. I’ve been praying for that, for myself and our world, for four decades now. Please pray with me!

 But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.  (James 3:17-18)   

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome. Just click on   __comments below to see the comment option.