By Mark Sells
In this election season, immigration is shaping up to be one of our more contentious issues. How we respond to this challenge will be important to all of us as Americans. However, this issue has special relevance for Christian voters.
First, Sacred Scripture is very clear that nations will be judged by how they treat the alien among them. Here is one representative verse among numerous others: “You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt. I, the LORD, am your God.” Leviticus 19:34 (NAB). See also Exodus 20:20-22, 22:21, 23:9 for just the tip of the iceberg of this pervasive teaching.
Second, we are, after all, a nation of immigrants. If you are not Cherokee or Crow or a descendent of some other Native American tribe, you are a child of immigrants. Ironically, the pattern in the U.S. has been that each wave of immigrants arrives, faces persecution and prejudice, acclimatizes, and then persecutes the next wave of immigrants. The Irish were mercilessly exploited and mistreated upon their arrival, but they prospered to the point where they could one day loudly lament the latest influx of Italians. The Italians, in their turn, lived to declaim that their cities were being overrun by Poles. Catholic immigrants, then, have always faced persecution from all sides, even from their fellow Catholics. Now, it is our Catholic brothers and sisters from Latin America who are receiving the brunt of this old assault.
In Welcoming the Stranger Among Us, the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reminds us that the Church has, in accordance with Sacred Scripture, historically aligned herself with the plight of immigrants. This has been true from the first century Church to the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 to Exsul Familia of 1952 to the Second Vatican Council of 1965, to the present. Pope John Paul II, in his Message for World Migration Day in 2000, challenged us to work “so that every person’s dignity is respected, the immigrant is welcomed as a brother or sister, and all humanity forms a united family which knows how to appreciate with discernment the different cultures which comprise it.”
Finally, Americans ought to consider what our highest ideal as a nation has always been despite the prejudices of some and despite our selective indifference to Scripture. The following is from the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
There’s nothing in there about only welcoming white professionals who arrive here with the proper papers. We are asking specifically for “huddled masses” and “wretched refuse,” phrases to make any xenophobe swoon in terror. The language of the tired and the poor and the homeless is, in fact, in striking harmony with the language of the Beatitudes (Matthew 5 and Luke 6) and with the language of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25). There is no conflict, then, between our obligation as citizens and our obligation as Christians to live up to the promise of these words.
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Mark Sells is a teacher at West Middle School.
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