I’m wondering how Christians who favor the present US authorities’s warfare 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 have 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 in the present day. This characteristic, in addition to its religious message, supplied multitudes of poor and exploited individuals, the majority of the inhabitants on earth, with the flexibility to really feel that they have been elsewhere, simply as tradition in its realized sense is a method to be elsewhere.
American historical past is replete with testimonies to the openness of this nation. Hector Saint John de Crèvecoeur was a Frenchman (authentic 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 towards completely free immigration: it may, at a sure level or stage, compromise the upkeep of a free society. My publish of June 19, 2018, “Immigration: A Confession and a Value Judgment,” supplied a skeleton of this kind of argument.
This argument towards completely free immigration is what Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powel name “the new economic case against immigration” of their 2021 guide 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, after all, economically invalid: if it have been legitimate, we must also blame a lady or a pupil who decides to affix the labor market.
My foremost level is that the therapy of immigrants, particularly very not too long ago, has change into tribal, irrational, and “un-American”—to the extent we will make sense of the final qualificative versus the best of a free society. The therapy of immigrants has additionally change into opposite to the rule of regulation and more and more barbaric. There will 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
