GEORGE: Illegal immigration? What would Jesus do?

Published 9:00 am Tuesday, November 5, 2019

Missing from the current immigration “debate” are a few realities wealthy political pundits on Fox and MSNBC never bring up. And as a southerner raised in the Christian faith, illegal immigration also raises important moral questions that are rarely discussed.

First, there are roughly 15,000 murders each year in the U.S. (where legal citizens kill other legal citizens), in addition to scores of mass shootings (where legal citizens kill other legal citizens). Social research also shows that communities with high numbers of undocumented immigrants actually have lower levels of crime than communities that don’t (probably because the last thing undocumented immigrants want is the attention of law enforcement). So we are all far more likely to be victimized and/or killed by a legal American citizen than by an undocumented person.

Second, social research also shows that illegal immigration has actually been in an overall decline since 2008. This makes sense given the recession that started that year and the widespread impact of that economic crisis.

Third, and like today, a concerted effort to blame Mexican “immigrants” for American economic troubles also occurred during the Great Depression in the 1930’s (another economic catastrophe that was also caused by greedy stock brokers and American elites). As a consequence, over 1 million “legal” Mexican American citizens were illegally deported out of the country.

In sum, scapegoating immigrants, especially Brown ones, for America’s problems is not a new political tactic.

It has occurred before and has proven to be a great way to both divide and distract the public from the changes that actually have hurt most working Americans (conservative and liberal).

Some of those events include factors like the outsourcing of millions of American jobs to other countries, the rise of technology that either deskilled or totally did away with millions of jobs, and the fact that since the 1970’s the gap between the rich and middle class has grown astronomically as these changes occurred.

Immigration rhetoric also distracts us from the reality that immigrants (legal and undocumented) are the ones planting, tending to, picking, and packaging the majority of food we eat, work few people want to do (just see the recent VDT story “Farmers: Migrant Workers Needed 11/3/19). We can witness this reality for ourselves by simply taking a ride out in the country in Lowndes, Brooks, Echols, Cook, Berrien, and other surrounding counties.

In spite of all of these realities, as a Christian I struggle with a much more basic question about illegal immigration, one I hope others in my faith tradition are also thinking about? It seems to me that most of today’s undocumented immigrants are the “Samaritans” of our age (that is, people that are suffering, down trodden, wanting a better life for their families, and people who are often fleeing political cruelty). So how we think about them, talk about them, and how we treat them is a reflection of our faith, or lack there of. This forces me to ask myself,….what would Jesus do in this situation?…… Would he want us to refer to undocumented people with dehumanizing terms like “aliens” or “illegals”? Would Jesus want us to separate immigrant children from their families? Would Jesus want us to lock terrified immigrant children in cages? And finally, would Jesus encourage us to build a wall as a solution to this issue? Or……would Jesus want us to come together as a nation to develop a clear but compassionate immigration policy that is not driven by propaganda, irrational xenophobia, and blind nationalism?

Mark Patrick George, Mary Turner Project Coordinator