Migration

Immigration is high on the list of American voters’ concerns and maybe is Donald Trump’s number one issue. He inaugurated his successful campaign for president in 2016 when he descended the golden elevators at Trump with an attack on Mexican immigrants.

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Why does immigration have such a powerful appeal?

Humans are migratory animals. It’s in our genes. Homo sapiens is a single species which means that we have continuously interbred. Had we been isolated for long periods, we would have speciated.

Before the last ice age, the Meadowlark population in North America was a single species. But at the end of ice age, the Meadowlark had become two distinct species, because the ice had divided the Meadowlark species for more than 75,000 years into two breeding populations. Now we have the Eastern Meadowlark and the Western Meadowlark. In all human history, despite an extensive migration out of ancestral Africa and settlement over the whole world, we never became two or more separate species. We have become races, tribes, and nations, all non-biological distinctions, but never have we divided into separate species, a testament to our continuous interbreeding.

Despite our differences, biologically we are the same. Based on different evidence, evolutionary biology and Genesis reached the same conclusion—we are fundamentally the same. Genesis concludes this because all are created in God’s image. Evolutionary biology says it is because we have continuously interbred.

Despite our fundamental unity, we have a difficult time overcoming our perceived differences. We are drawn to the familial and tribal. That too is in our genes and evolution. We evolved to protect and care for those to whom we are related.

In the King James Bible’s elegant language, Deuteronomy 10:18 claims: “He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment.” “The stranger,” in Hebrew gēr, is someone who has left family and home, frequently because of some disaster, to seek shelter in a foreign place. The Hebrew word is traditionally translated as sojourner or alien, but in today’s English, the Common English Bible’s choice of the word immigrant is an excellent translation. “He enacts justice for orphans and widows, and he loves immigrants, giving them food and clothing.”

This triad of orphan, widow, and immigrant occurs often in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Deut 24:17–9; 27:19; Zech 7:10; Ps 146:9; Mal 3:5; Jer 22:3, Exod 23:9). The triad’s frequent repetition in numerous Hebrew Bible books indicates a persistent problem. The mistreatment of widows, orphans, and immigrants was common, and the problem never solved. These three groups are vulnerable, because they have no protectors in society. If G-d does not come to their rescue, their situation is desperate.  

G-d’s judgment in Deuteronomy 10:18 is followed with a command: “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deut 10:19). Or as the CEB has it in more contemporary English, “That means you must also love immigrants because you were immigrants in Egypt.”

Immigration forms a major element in Israel’s story. They were immigrants in Egypt, forced into Egypt because of a famine in Canaan. They were climate migrants, a common phenomenon throughout history and on the rise today. While in Egypt they experienced the fate of many migrants. They were enslaved. According to the command in Deuteronomy 10:19, this should engender compassion in them for other immigrants. But the frequency of the triad of orphan, widow, and immigrant indicates that it did not.

Abraham, the ancestor of all Israel, at G-d’s direction left Ur, his father’s land, for the land G-d promised him, Canaan. He became an immigrant. But somehow, he had to make the new land his own since it was already settled by Canaanites. This is the problem of all immigrants. How to make the land their own when it is already settled? In Abraham’s case, the land was his by G-d's promise. Eventually his descendants would be commanded by G-d to destroy the Canaanites and make the land their own. In Deuteronomy 7:1-2 Moses announces,

“When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy and he clears away many nations before you—the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you—and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.” (NRSVUE)

By modern standards, this is genocide. The most powerful justification for taking over another’s land is God’s command. And we should always critique it.

Israel’s story encapsulates the immigrant’s dilemma. People most often migrate to escape catastrophe and their experience in their new land is difficult, enslavement in the case of the Hebrews, or often something like that for most migrants. On the other hand, migrants are threatening because the native population perceives them as potentially replacing them. We are drawn and pushed in both directions.

What starts as immigration can become colonialism. Israel’s story presents both aspects of immigration. Their experience in Egypt represents the first form of immigration, flight to a new land in the face of catastrophe and enslavement there. Yet their takeover of Canaan was a colonialist project in G-d’s name. 

The USA has experience with both aspects of immigration. This country was settled by waves of immigrates fleeing persecution, famine, and war in Europe. The Statue of Liberty testifies to these immigrants’ experience. Yet notwithstanding the welcome in the harbor, the immigrants often experienced severe discrimination, metaphorical enslavement. The Americans’ immigration story exposes a dark undertow.

Africans were also forced immigrants and enslaved in the United States, an aspect of immigration often ignored in our story of immigration. No Statue of Liberty awaited them in the harbor.

On Thanksgiving Day, Americans celebrate the first Puritan immigrants to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Without the food and experience provided by the Wampanoag people, their colony would not have succeeded. Yet soon the colonists turned against the natives, attempted to eliminate them, to usurp their land, and declare it empty. The North American continent was not empty, nor did it belong the English king to settle as he willed. It was inhabited and settled by many nations of Indigenous peoples with long histories, established cultures and languages, and civilizations. But to the immigrant/colonists the land was empty, being wasted, given to them by God, Manifest Destiny. Their task was to civilize the natives, convert them to Christianity, or eliminate them.

Immigration is a multi-sided story, never simple. Our evolutionary history leads us to immigrate—we are migratory animals—and to resist the immigrant as not part of our family or tribe. It is easy to see past the immigrant’s common humanity, to demonize the immigrant as the other, not one of us.

Such a multi-sided and conflicted story requires critical thinking, which is difficult when passions run high.

I suggest that a place to start this critical thinking is with our own history. It’s a complex and often dark history. But seeing it as dark can teach us much. Should we not remember that we were once immigrants? Is the colonialist enterprise ever justified? Certainly, the claim that God justifies it is bogus.  

As politically incorrect as it is to say, there are no truly Indigenous peoples except perhaps in parts of Africa. We have all migrated out of Africa. Everyone arrived from somewhere else at some time or other. We are migratory animals. Therefore, all stories of God-given land should be resisted. Ethics requires us to at times resist or rethink our history and evolutionary heritage. It is difficult. We must find some way to reconcile based on our common humanity and common status as immigrants or unending conflict is inevitable.

The demagogue must be rejected, but finding a way forward is even more difficult and requires conversion, seeing ourselves in the place of the other: “That means you must also love immigrants because you were immigrants in Egypt” (Deut 10:18).

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