People who hate the Bible and consider it to be a collection of primitive fairy tales will nonetheless use it to try and win the argument on immigration. Interestingly, these same people generally feel the same way about the Constitution but they will use it, too, when the discussion turns to immigration. Something about immigration seems to turn a Leftist into a very selective sort of Christian constitutionalist.
It feels rather pointless to engage in this debate with people who haven’t read the book and don’t care what it says, but the idea that Scripture is some kind of radical open borders screed is so prevalent that it must be addressed. And it won’t take long to address because, in fact, the Bible has very little to say about immigration one way or another.
Exodus 22:1 and 23:9 tell us not to oppress or mistreat foreigners, but it certainly doesn’t command us to make all foreigners into citizens of our country. Ezekiel, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Psalms and several other Old Testament texts repeat this injunction to act with compassion toward all people, including foreigners. Again, this does not mean that we aren’t allowed to have borders. One must make a gigantic leap across a deep logical abyss to get from “treat foreigners nicely” to “abolish all borders.” Indeed, the two ideas would seem to be mutually exclusive because there wouldn’t be any foreigner to treat nicely if you didn’t have borders.
There is only one verse in the whole Bible that, I think, seems to relate directly to the question of immigration policy, though it clearly wasn’t written with immigration policy in mind. Romans 13 says this:
“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended.”
This tells us that our governing authorities have been given their authority by God and we are called therefore to obey the laws they set forth. The maintaining of our borders and enforcement of immigration law would seem to obviously fall under the umbrella that St. Paul is describing. Those who flout these laws established and enforced by our God-ordained authorities are flouting the Bible. President Trump is not disobeying God by enforcing our immigration laws — the illegal immigrants are the ones in violation here.
Obviously the government’s God-given authority can be lost and the laws it passes can be morally illegitimate. A man in Nazi Germany who hid Jews in his attic was disobeying his government’s laws but doing so in service to a higher law. Nobody would claim that the Nazis were God-ordained. Hitler’s regime is a clear-cut case where Romans 13 no longer applies. There can be gray areas as you travel down the scale of evil governments. But American immigration laws are a clear-cut case on the other side of the spectrum. If God blesses a government’s authority at all, He must bless its authority to enforce the borders of its country. There can be no country and no government without borders. God clearly does not condemn the existence of governments and countries, thus He does not condemn borders, thus He does not condemn the act of enforcing those borders.
There can be plenty of discussion about the best ways to handle immigration. But we shouldn’t take seriously anyone who claims that Christians have some kind of moral duty to support unfettered illegal immigration. Anyone making that claim is simply lying.