Think carefully. They came from a backwards, war-torn region to the East, fleeing violence like what has torn up Syria and Yemen of late, much of it religiously-based. They were themselves quite religious, but in ways that seemed alien, even threatening, to the people among whom they would settle. For the next 250 years, these refugees from the East would remain curiously and stubbornly attached to the alien and unbending religion, the language, the customs and even the clothing with which they had come. But they were given some space and freedom to pursue their own ways in the borderlands between their host country and the war-torn, impoverished and unstable lands to the east, from which they had come. They proved useful at least for reclaiming marginal, war-ravaged and abandoned lands in the rugged hills of the borderlands.
The religious, ethnic and linguistic gulfs between these immigrants and their host country remained in place despite the efforts of their host country to impose a unifying national identity, standardize their nation’s language, even to repress and replace all religion with a modern secular democratic state and society. As they sought, by war, to take those reforms to their neighboring countries, or as neighboring countries sought, also by war, to thwart those reforms, the host country instituted another modern invention: universal conscription, or the military draft. But the young men of this tenacious religious minority resisted that call to modernity and national solidarity as well. It did not help that their ancestors, their language, and their customs, came from the land with which their host country was at war.
The draft, and a rising tide of frustration against this non-assimilating minority, had them looking elsewhere again for refuge. Many of them sailed west across the ocean to a new land, where they might continue to practice their nonconformist, minority religion, in spite of strong secularizing pressures there as well. Even there, many of them would even keep the language, the customs and the clothing of their ancestors’ native lands.
Within a few decades, when their new host country was riven by war, their religiously-based refusal to fight and fit in again brought them under suspicion. One hundred years later, that suspicion broke out into violence, as their host country went to war with the very country of their ancestors. Not only did they refuse to fight at all, let alone against the land of their ethnic ancestors, many of them still spoke the language of that enemy nation. Some of their worship sites were torched; some of their leaders tarred and feathered; many of their young men were imprisoned, beaten and tortured; some were even killed.
That just goes to show how careful we must be about letting some people into our country; some people will just never assimilate. Like the pacifist Christian Amish and the Mennonites, whose story I just related above. Religious turmoil, civil war, the false charge of terrorism and revolution, and persecution drove them, nearly five hundred years ago, out of South Germany and Switzerland, into the borderlands of France, in the region of Strasbourg, and the French provinces of Alsace and Loraine. The long-simmering frustration of their hosts over their failure to become French, Catholic, and then secular citizens of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, drove some of France’s most peaceful and productive people to North America. Under the guidelines of the most recent White House Executive Orders on immigration from countries with a record of terrorism (even for people who had not participated in it), the Amish and Mennonites should not have been allowed into the United States.
The same could be said for most other groups who came to America, like the Scots-Irish of the 18th Century. They came after having been on the wrong side of the English wars of succession, and were stubborn dissenters from the established church. They often gave the native Cherokee and Shawnee, and even their newly adopted national government, a rough time, with their legendary independent streak and their code of honor. In fact, it’s hard to think of any group of immigrants who did not come to America with cultures and beliefs that were at odd with the mainstream culture in some way or another, and who did not come from settings where conflict, war and terrorism were rife. And it’s just as true that they affected and influenced mainstream American culture, as that mainstream American culture affected and influenced them. But it’s a sorry truism, that the last ones off the boat become the scapegoats of those who just got off the boats which came before them.
What a far cry this is from the Biblical values and commands about welcoming the stranger, the alien and the exile. ““Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt. (Ex. 23:9). And such are all of Christ’s disciples. Peter’s second letter refers to us several times as “aliens, sojourners and exiles.” How personally God takes the treatment of the sojourner and the refugee we see in Jesus’ parable about the goats and the sheep in Matthew 25: “ I was a stranger and you did not invite me in…Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’” The plagues and defeats which God brought upon Egypt and Pharaoh’s army show the moral and spiritual consequences of oppressing the alien and the foreigner, of demanding ever more bricks of them, while withholding straw, food, dignity and security.
One can understand the need and duty of a government to protect its citizens from violence, crime and terrorism. If most of the people seeking to cross our borders, legally or not, were drug runners, gang members and hit men, that’s what the governmental sword of Romans 13 is about. But the vast majority of the people seeking to come here do so for the same reason that the majority of us or our ancestors came: freedom, safety, survival, and a job, food and shelter. The vast majority of them are women, children, and families, traumatized by war and violence, seeking only safety and a chance to start over. It’s fine and well to tell them to do the paperwork in their home country, then line up, follow the rules and wait their turn to come legally. The people being turned back at our airports and borders this weekend did just that, and it took them as many as three years. Any threat they may have conceivably posed to our nation’s security is vastly overwhelmed by the threat now posed by the sheer propaganda bonanza that we have just handed to ISIS and Al Qaeda. Any negative influence we might fear from their presence is matched or exceeded by the positive potential influence of our hospitality on the people and the country whom they have left behind.
But the legal immigration system has long been so underfunded, understaffed and overloaded that simple procedures that should only take days or months now take years, if they happen at all. I have personally known people whose asylum cases were actually lost and forgotten in the backlog. Another was told to expect a decision on his request for asylum in three months. He actually waited three years to hear anything. The rejection he received showed at best a perfunctory review of the case and very little knowledge of the reality in his home country.
Geopolitics play an unfair role, too. Two applicants for asylum can present identical cases of torture and of reasonable fear for their lives. If one of those applicants should come from a country that is officially designated as “friendly” or “an ally” by the State Department, however corrupt or brutal that government may be, it is too embarrassing to admit that the applicant has a case for asylum. His or her fear is then labelled not as one of “persecution” but as fear of “harassment.” “Persecution,” or the fear of it, strengthens your case. “Harassment” does not. In practice, the main difference between persecution and harassment is not what happens to the victim, but whether a U.S. ally does it, or an enemy. In either case, the time it takes to file the papers, stand in line, follow the procedures and wait your turn to enter the country is a moot point. Whether one is suffering harassment or persecution, the applicant may well be long dead before getting word back that one’s paperwork has been received, let alone processed.
For those fleeing persecution, or harassment, it is well known that one can get a visitor’s visa into the U.S. much more quickly than you can for France, Belgium, Canada, or the United Kingdom. That’s one way in which people fleeing persecution, or harassment, arrive here. One the other hand, turning that visitor’s visa into an asylum process takes much longer, and is much harder and more chancy in the U.S. than in the other countries mentioned above. That’s the dilemma that the world’s persecuted face. It’s also an open invitation to overstaying a legal visitor’s visa, especially if returning to your country is effectively a death sentence. And that is how much of our illegal immigration occurs.
The chaos today at our airports, where even valid visa holders are being detained or turned back, is partly the result of a long delay in reforming our immigration laws and system. Laudable and politically costly attempts at reform were made in the past two presidential administrations, but they ran into too much opposition from Congress. Immigrants and asylum seekers are now being punished for the shambles into which our immigration system has fallen since it was last reformed in any meaningful way, over fifty years ago. They are being punished again as we scapegoat them for our fears of the same evils and disasters that are driving them from their homes.