I’m wondering how Christians who favor the present US authorities’s struggle on immigrants can reconcile their stance with Leviticus 19:34, which reads (King James model):
However the stranger who dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born amongst you, and thou shalt love him as thyself, for ye had been strangers within the land of Egypt.
Would they reply that the Bible is merely epic poetry? Or are they CINOs—Christians In Title Solely?
One endearing attribute of the Catholic Church, which was the one Christian church for 15 centuries, was its universalism—globalism as we’d say at this time. This characteristic, in addition to its non secular message, offered multitudes of poor and exploited individuals, the majority of the inhabitants on earth, with the flexibility to really feel that they had been elsewhere, simply as tradition in its realized sense is a technique to be elsewhere.
American historical past is replete with testimonies to the openness of this nation. Hector Saint John de Crèvecoeur was a Frenchman (unique identify: Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur) who immigrated to colonial America within the early 1760s. Within the chapter “What Is An American” of his well-known Letters from an American Farmer (1782) celebrating America, he wrote:
We all know, correctly talking, no strangers; that is each particular person’s nation.
Regardless of my classical-liberal attraction for universalism, I additionally share Friedrich Hayek’s and James Buchanan’s arguments in opposition to completely free immigration: it might, at a sure level or degree, compromise the upkeep of a free society. My submit of June 19, 2018, “Immigration: A Confession and a Worth Judgment,” affords a skeleton of this kind of argument.
This argument in opposition to completely free immigration is what Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powel name “the brand new financial case in opposition to immigration” of their 2021 e-book Wretched Refuse? They declare it has no empirical assist. As for the argument that an immigrant who comes and works in America imposes a web value to “society,” it’s, in fact, economically invalid: if it had been legitimate, we also needs to blame a girl or a scholar who decides to affix the labor market.
My major level is that the remedy of immigrants, particularly very just lately, has change into tribal, irrational, and “un-American”—to the extent we are able to make sense of the final qualificative versus the best of a free society. The remedy of immigrants has additionally change into opposite to the rule of regulation and more and more barbaric. There might be no acceptable ideology and no free society with out human decency.
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Hector Saint John de Crèvecoeur on his farm, as considered by DALL-E
