I wonder how Christians who favor the current US government’s war on immigrants can reconcile their stance with Leviticus 19:34, which reads (King James version):
But the stranger who dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Would they reply that the Bible is merely epic poetry? Or are they CINOs—Christians In Name Only?
One endearing characteristic of the Catholic Church, which was the only Christian church for 15 centuries, was its universalism—globalism as we would say today. This feature, as well as its spiritual message, provided multitudes of poor and exploited people, the bulk of the population on earth, with the ability to feel that they were elsewhere, just as culture in its learned sense is a way to be elsewhere.
American history is replete with testimonies to the openness of this country. Hector Saint John de Crèvecoeur was a Frenchman (original name: Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur) who immigrated to colonial America in the early 1760s. In the chapter “What Is An American” of his famous Letters from an American Farmer (1782) celebrating America, he wrote:
We know, properly speaking, no strangers; this is every person’s country.
Despite my classical-liberal attraction for universalism, I also share Friedrich Hayek’s and James Buchanan’s arguments against totally free immigration: it could, at a certain point or level, compromise the maintenance of a free society. My post of June 19, 2018, “Immigration: A Confession and a Value Judgment,” offers a skeleton of this sort of argument.
This argument against totally free immigration is what Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powel call “the new economic case against immigration” in their 2021 book Wretched Refuse? They claim it has no empirical support. As for the argument that an immigrant who comes and works in America imposes a net cost to “society,” it is, of course, economically invalid: if it were valid, we should also blame a woman or a student who decides to join the labor market.
My main point is that the treatment of immigrants, especially very recently, has become tribal, irrational, and “un-American”—to the extent we can make sense of the last qualificative as opposed to the ideal of a free society. The treatment of immigrants has also become contrary to the rule of law and increasingly barbaric. There can be no acceptable ideology and no free society without human decency.
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Hector Saint John de Crèvecoeur on his farm, as viewed by DALL-E
