A migrant feeds her child during a pause on their journey toward the U.S. border, in Sayula de Aleman, Mexico, August 22, 2024. REUTERS/Angel Hernandez
God Isn't a Republican or a Democrat; God Is an Immigrant
Michael Woolf is the senior minister of Lake Street Church of Evanston, Ill., and the co-associate regional minister for white and multi-cultural churches at the American Baptist Churches of Metro Chicago.
Oct 17, 2024
If you want to understand who God is, then I think one of the foundational themes is the experience of migration.
God’s first house — the tabernacle — is movable, following the Israelites as they wander from Egypt to Canaan (Exodus 40:34; Numbers 1:47-53). The theme of migration continues into Jesus’ life, where Matthew’s gospel tells us that he fled political violence and spent much of his childhood in Egypt (Matthew 2:13-23). Even when he is back in his own country, he is unwelcome in his hometown and “has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20).
In election season, we sometime ask whether God is a Democrat or a Republican, but the truth is more obvious: God is an immigrant.
As the presidential election cycle nears its conclusion, one issue has stood out to me as perhaps the defining issue of the campaign: immigration. In a country that thinks of itself as Christian, some 55 percent of people want less immigration, according to a recent Gallup poll. That number has grown by 14 percent in just one year. Both candidates have worked tirelessly to show that if elected as president, they’ll be “tough” on the border. Former President Donald Trump has promised “mass deportations” and peddled Far-Right talking points like remigration, the idea that immigrants should be sent back to their countries of origin. Vice President Kamala Harris has argued that she would be harder on the border than Trump and recently released a plan to further restrict asylum processing.
Not long ago, the two parties presented very different visions for how to address immigration in general but undocumented immigrants specifically. In 2012, Benita Valiz became the first undocumented person to address a major party convention. The Obama administration had just used its executive authority to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy which was a program meant to prevent deportation of those who had been brought here unlawfully as children. A majority of Republicans opposed DACA, and so the two parties became entrenched in their positions. Now, in 2024, it is difficult to distinguish between the Democratic and Republican vision on immigration generally and undocumented immigrants specifically, as both parties are mainly focused on tightening border security.
Democrats’ rightward shift on the issue of immigration has come to a head during this election cycle. For example, in June, President Joe Biden’s executive action created a quota system for processing asylum claims which require that the asylum seeker be in fear of their life or afraid for their safety in order to claim asylum in the first place. Not only that, but the Biden administration urged the removal of environmental considerations in its rush to build more of Trump’s border wall that it once decried as “ineffective.”
Trump’s rhetoric and plans are even more brutal and promise to usher in a truly hellish chapter in the nation’s history. At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, he again repeated lies about the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, as the crowd chanted “send them back!” Stephen Miller, a former Trump political advisor and immigration hardliner, argued last year that the National Guard will play a prominent role in deporting people if Trump is elected, even if it means deploying the National Guard to invade “unfriendly state[s]” that provide sanctuary to undocumented persons.
The increasingly hardline stances of both the Democrats and Republicans suggests that U.S. citizens have run out of goodwill, and that the asylum laws — which require a judge to at least temporarily grant asylum status to a person if they provide a credible reason for why they fear for their safety in their country of origin — don’t matter when we’ve decided that we are not responsible for asylum seekers and immigrants.
But there’s a problem with that. When we close ourselves off from immigration, we pretend that we have nothing to do with creating the conditions that led to migration from Central and Latin America in the first place, or think that our comfort is more important than the lives of others, we are not just closing ourselves off to compassion; we are closing ourselves off from experiencing God.
For Christians, the truth is quite simple: God is not vaguely in solidarity with the vulnerable, but actually is the vulnerable. Matthew 25 insists that whatever we do, or do not do, for the sake of those who are experiencing hardship, we do the same for Jesus. An underappreciated aspect of that chapter is that we are offered a direct line to God. I would go as far to suggest that this immediate access is not available through Christian worship or even prayer, but through our treatment of those whom society has disregarded.
As a pastor of a church in the New Sanctuary Movement — a movement dedicated to immigration reform, housing undocumented immigrants, and giving them a platform to speak — it’s part of my calling to ask for compassion for immigrants and asylum seekers; it’s what I believe our faith calls us to do. But it’s also a little more personal for me. My wife is a naturalized citizen, and my daughter was born in another country. When Trump talks about sending people back to where they came from, I can’t help but feel uneasy.
One of the things that I learned in my long journey to bring my family to this country is that our system is broken beyond repair. We had every privilege imaginable — we are white, we could afford a lawyer, we all spoke fluent English, and it still took us 18 months to complete the process. For people without those advantages, it’s much more difficult.
As a country, we have developed a compassion deficit. What’s worse is our political system has seemingly converged on this issue to offer us few alternatives. Republicans and Democrats basically agree that telling asylum seekers they are out of luck is the right thing to do, and a majority of U.S. citizens think the same. It will take courageous action from people of faith to change that opinion, but it has been done before, even in similarly nativist times.
In my book Sanctuary and Subjectivity, I outline the ways that the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s took place in an atmosphere of similar rhetoric and antipathy toward immigrants, where society became obsessed with delineating between “economic migrants” and refugees. Times were bleak then too, with 49 percent of Americans saying they wanted less immigration according to Gallup. And yet, the movement won significant reforms in the asylum process, such as temporary protected status for Central American refugees, and it created a network of sanctuary cities, states, and campuses that remain active to this day.
People of faith have plenty on their plate this election cycle. My congregation has had a huge increase in election anxiety, for instance, but we cannot forget that our attention must be trained on God. In this case, that means pushing back against hateful rhetoric and the sorts of policies that have become commonplace from both parties this election cycle. When people speak poorly of immigrants, they are not talking about some distant other — they are talking about the God we purport to serve.
The collapse of bipartisan immigration reform: A guide for the perplexed
- The last comprehensive immigration reform was enacted almost four decades ago, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
- Encounters with migrants rose to 1.7 million in FY 2021, 2.4 million in FY 2022, and 2.5 million in FY 2023.
- Many Republicans are using the border security bill the House passed early last year, HR 2, as their benchmark.
- Republicans are prepared to wait until 2025 to address border security.
Last October, Senate Republicans made it clear that they would not back additional aid for Ukraine without a bill that would help secure the southern border of the United States. With the blessing of both Senator Chuck Schumer, the Majority Leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader, a bipartisan team of senators began negotiations to produce a bill that enough members of both parties could accept to overwhelm objections from progressive Democrats and America First Republicans.
The team negotiated for four months to produce this bill. It took less than four days for its support among Republicans to collapse. Why?
The easiest explanation is that Republicans in both the House and Senate yielded to objections from their all-but-certain presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump. Once the House Speaker stated publicly that he would not allow the Senate bill to reach the House floor for a vote, Republican senators were unwilling to run the political risk of supporting a measure that would not become law.
However, there are deeper reasons for the deadlock over immigration. The last comprehensive immigration reform was enacted almost four decades ago, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. This bill represented a grand bargain between elected officials who sought to extend legal protection to millions of migrants who had entered the U.S. illegally and officials who were most concerned about stemming the flow of such migrants. The bill accomplished the former but had no discernible impact on the latter, leading many conservatives to denounce it as an “amnesty” bill.
This history colored the next two decades of efforts to pass immigration reform legislation. In President George W. Bush’s second term, two such efforts failed after encountering a crossfire of objections from both the left and the right. The best chance to enact comprehensive reform came in 2013 during President Barack Obama’s second term, when a bipartisan group of senators dubbed the “Gang of Eight” agreed on a bill that would toughen security at the southern border and make it harder for employers to hire migrants who had entered the U.S. illegally while providing legal status and a path to citizenship for millions of such migrants who had resided in the U.S. for many years. The proposal passed the Senate 68 to 32 with strong bipartisan support. But because it did not enjoy the support of a majority of House Republicans, then-Speaker John Boehner refused to bring it to floor for a vote, and the measure died.
As partisan polarization deepened over the ensuing decade, the odds of agreement on meaningful immigration reform fell steadily. Donald Trump, whose campaign against illegal immigration helped him win the presidency in 2016, put in place through executive orders measures — such as separating children from their parents — that his administration defended as tough but necessary and Democrats denounced as cruel and inhumane. As the Covid-19 pandemic exploded in 2020, moreover, the Trump administration employed emergency public health measures to all but close the southern border to unauthorized border crossers. During the administration’s final year, encounters with migrants at the border fell to 458,000, an average of less than 40,000 per month.
President Trump’s policies aroused vehement opposition from many Democrats, and the party’s presidential nominee pledged to end them. When Joe Biden took office, he was as good as his word. Unfortunately, the policies with which he replaced Trump’s measures failed to manage the southern border effectively. Encounters with migrants at the southwestern border rose to 1.7 million in FY 2021, 2.4 million in FY 2022, and 2.5 million in FY 2023. (In addition, an estimated 600,000 entered the U.S. undetected, without encountering border agents, in FY 2023.) During the first quarter of FY 2024 (October 1, 2023-December 31, 2023) encounters totaled 785,000, putting the United States on pace for 3.1 million encounters during the current fiscal year.
Further complicating the task of managing the southern border was an historic change in the nature and sources of unauthorized border crossers. During the final decades of the 20th century, most of such crossers were working-age young Mexican men. But during the current century, the mix shifted to families from Central America and beyond who sought asylum in the United States by claiming a “reasonable fear of persecution” in their country of origin.1
The evidence suggests that most asylum seekers were fleeing poverty, lack of economic mobility, crime, and political disorder — all good reasons for leaving but these do not meet the standard for being granted asylum. Nevertheless, the law requires that asylum claims be assessed on a case-by-case basis, and as the number of cases rose sharply, the institutions responsible for adjudicating them were overwhelmed. During the past decade, the share of immigration cases resolved each year has fallen by half, and the backlog of pending cases rose from about 400,000 in 2013 to more than 3.1 million by the end of 2023. Few were held in detention for long periods; most were released into the U.S. with court dates far in the future, a policy that critics denounced as “catch and release.”
In an effort to relieve the pressure at the border, President Biden dramatically expanded the use of his “parole” authority in January 2023 to permit up to 30,000 individuals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to legally enter the United States each month and to remain here for up to two years. This authority does not provide a pathway for parole recipients to remain in the country permanently, and immigration officials may revoke parole status at any time. A coalition of 20 Republican-led states is suing the Biden administration to end this program, which they see as an abuse of the president’s authority designed to increase the flow of migrants into the country.
Led by the Republican governors of Florida and Texas, opponents of Biden’s approach helped transport these migrants to big cities controlled by Democrats thousands of miles from the border. As the costs mounted for these cities, it did not take long for Democratic mayors to press the White House for relief. By last week, President Biden promised that he would shut the border if Congress gave him to legal authority to do so.
It’s not hard to see why. Public concern about immigration is high and rising, and Biden receives lower marks for his handling of immigration — 35% approval — than for any other issue.
By the fall of 2023, Democrats were willing in principle to support a bill that focused entirely on border security without provisions to legalize the status of any migrants who had entered the country illegally, not even the “Dreamers” brought to the United States by their parents while they were infants and children and who knew no other country. The Senate team produced such a bill, but it did not meet Republican demands, for substantive as well as political reasons.
In the first place, many Republicans believe that the president already has all the legal authority he needs to do what needs to be done, including closing the border, and they view the Senate bill as limiting rather than enhancing executive authority. Second, many Republicans are using the border security bill the House passed early last year, HR 2, as their benchmark. Among other provisions, this bill would end President Biden’s parole program, dramatically reduce the grounds for claiming asylum, reinstate the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, and force Biden to resume building President Trump’s border wall. Measured against this standard, the Senate bill’s compromises on asylum and border closure are bound to appear timid half-measures that will not get the job done.
Finally, many Republicans are prepared to wait until 2025 to address border security. If Donald Trump defeats President Biden and reenters the Oval Office, they believe that they will get everything they want without enacting compromise legislation that would limit Trump’s powers. In the meantime, they believe, the issue is damaging Biden, and they do not see why they should help him during an election year.
We will never know what would have happened if compromise legislation had been put on the table last year while it was uncertain whether Trump would be the Republican nominee for the third consecutive time. Now that we know that he will be, no compromise on immigration is possible. The remaining question is whether aid for Ukraine can be continued without such a compromise. If not, Donald Trump’s gain will also be Vladimir Putin’s.
U.S. Immigration Policy Kills. Where Is the Church?
Sandy Ovalle Martínez, a native of Mexico City, is director of campaigns and mobilizing at Sojourners.
At least 38 migrants were consumed by a fire — reportedly started by some of the migrants in protest — at a government-run immigrant detention facility in Ciudad Juárez, México late night Monday; nearly 30 more were injured. These deaths are the human cost of U.S. immigration policies primarily intended to deter people seeking asylum from ever reaching our borders. Bad policy kills.
I am not sure what else needs to happen so the entire U.S. church wakes up to the realities of the evils entrenched in our immigration system. Honoring the dignity of all people is our calling as Christians; no other entity is tasked with recognizing the image of God in every person. Our Latine brothers and sisters are leading the way, but the whole church should be outraged; we should be demonstrating without ceasing. We should not let people sleep until they see the humanity of every migrant.
If you are having trouble following all the policies that will or could impact immigrant communities, you are in good company; there’s seemingly no end to the ways this nation is trying to hurt immigrants. But one thing is clear: No matter who is in office, Democrats and Republicans alike fail to deliver policies and protections that honor the dignity of immigrant people.
Under former President Barack Obama, the U.S. reached record highs in deportations, disrupting community life and separating families. Under former President Donald Trump, children were ripped off their parents’ arms as they arrived at the southern border; many remain separated.
Now, under President Joe Biden, a proposed rule would make it harder for people facing persecution to apply for asylum; only those who can arrive by plane or apply through a smartphone app will have a chance to obtain one of the very limited number of daily spots. The Biden administration is also considering reviving the use of family detention — a baffling and immoral strategy, especially given how images of families in cages characterized the use of this policy under Trump.
State policies aren’t much better: In Florida, a Senate bill would make it a third-degree felony to knowingly transport an undocumented immigrant; it would also require certain hospitals to collect patients’ immigration status, resulting in an unthinkable health crisis. Meanwhile, Texas led a coalition of eight states seeking to strip current recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, their protection from deportation and work permits; Texas is also considering prohibiting children without lawful immigration status from accessing its public education system. There is nothing that exposes the state of our nation’s soul more than the way we treat children.
I am tired of writing the same thing over and over: Immigrants are people — people made in the image of God with inherent dignity and worth. Immigrants have rights to migrate and to seek protection. Immigrants have a right to seek asylum within our borders, that is U.S. law!
Yet members of Congress continue to speak of migrants as animals and infestations, dehumanizing language that casts immigrants as scapegoats for this nation’s problems. I find myself once again saying: We immigrants are not animals; we are people!
After 18 years working for just immigration policies, I’m tired of fighting to justify our humanity. So let politicians believe what they want to believe; instead of trying to justify our humanity, we must work to uproot — ¡echar fuera! — the entrenched evils of the U.S. immigration system. My Pentecostal roots say this type of wickedness only comes out with prayer and fasting and casting out the very forces of evil that seek to annihilate people, to kill, steal, and destroy. ¡Fuera! Bad policies kill, but the way of God revives. We will continue to fight until we see others respect what is ours, the image of God in us, our joy and ganas de vivir. And yet, we need support. We need policies that will give migrants a chance at life — and a dignified life at that.
We’ve got work to do. Our immigration system is bound up in all the old ways of this nation: colonialism; Indigenous extermination; the enslavement and lynching of Black people; disregard for the care of creation; dehumanization and fear of immigrants. These old ways must die and, in their place, new ways must be born: a sense that we are bound together so that your wellbeing is my wellbeing; recognition that every person is made in the image of God; a care for the land as our common home; and a commitment to distribute the earth’s abundant resources equitably.
Can we commit to building and fighting for life-giving systems and rejecting death-making ones? Could we do this in such a way that we are willing to die to our privilege and our old ways of living so that all may live well? This is my prayer:
May the dominant Western ways of viewing migration die. May we rid ourselves of colonial logic that raped and exterminated native people, forced them to adopt new cultures, extracted their resources, and condemned their medicine as evil. ¡Fuera!
We rebuke the dominant Western ways that kidnapped African people, illegally transported them treating them as merchandise, and enslaved them in a new land that consumed their bodies. ¡Fuera!
We condemn the dominant Western way that seeks to own, is voracious in consumption, and is rampant in its pursuit of material wealth and social status at the expense of migrant labor forces including children. ¡Fuera!
We pray for a restored common human family in harmony with the rest of creation that recognizes our wellbeing is bound to one another and the earth. Lord, hear our prayer.
We pray for a framework that recognizes each person is inherently worthy of dignity and respect and centers life. Lord, hear our prayer.
We pray for an insatiable appetite for justice, always recognizing your abundant provision so that we may feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and afford everyone a dignified life. Lord, hear our prayer.
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