Immigration's Promise
How will the Church respond?by Paul Grant
Opportunities
like this don’t come around every decade. Let's not let this one pass
by talking past each other. The US congress is
discussing a subset of immigration called illegal - and not immigration in
general. This conversation is long overdue; let us not short-circuit the
discussion by conflating
immigration
and
illegal
immigration. There are good reasons to increase one and eliminate the other,
and the most important reasons are cultural, not political or economic.
Still, we haven’t had this honest of a conversation about national identity since Martin Luther King’s day. And just as in King’s day, the worst that could happen is not that a bad immigration law would be passed, but that we would fail to hear what God is saying to us through the world today. Ultimately, this debate is not about the here-and-now, nor about the economy, nor about national security. If it is a debate about immigration, it is a debate about the people we are becoming, about our very souls.
When the nations of the world meet, we all become different people from the contact. That’s a basic truth for all human interactions, from wars between nations to grade-school games on the playground. Whenever any people meet and mingle, we change and mature. Roommates expose us to alternate ways of approaching similar tasks, and alternate ways of tackling similar obstacles. We can learn from them, disagree with them, or negotiate with them, but we emerge from the relationship as slightly different people.
The changes are much bigger when culture and ethnicity come to play. To a degree rarely seen in world history, the United States and Canada are immigrant nations. Our respective national characters are constantly evolving as we live out this grand cross-cultural experiment. Even now, blood from the entire world pumps through our veins. In a very real sense, we are children of all the earth.
As Christians, we believe that cross-cultural relationships are a key component of heaven. The book of Revelation describes the New Jerusalem God will create one day:
On no day will [the New Jerusalem’s] gates ever be shut … The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it (21:25-26).
We will quite literally live with each other for eternity, smelling each others’ food, and hearing each others’ music throughout the ages. And we will love it, not because God will force us, but because God will ensure no harm comes to us as we become family across cultural backgrounds. With nothing to risk, we have everything to gain in learning to love one another.
When he created the church, God gave us a stunningly beautiful gift: he allowed us to experience a taste of heaven’s promises, right here, right now. When we as the church live the way we could, building God’s church in our neighborhoods and cities and throughout the world, we are, in very real terms, beginning to take on our heavenly character.
From an obscure mountain village in Europe after World War II, where he was the first black man to ever step foot, James Baldwin wrote:
The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger.
I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa.
Looking primarily from the lens of black and white in America, Baldwin understood that change is inevitable. But the cultural transformations taking place in America were for him also an opportunity of global significance:
It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today.
Baldwin wrote those words in 1955. The same year a local struggle over segregation in city buses in Alabama thrust a young Martin Luther King into the spotlight. God led King to put segregation before the nation, and to put it in moral, not political terms. In many respects, King was offering America the chance to undo our tragic decision, after the civil war, to become two different peoples, of two different grades of citizenship, rather than truly live with one another.
Did King’s vision prevail? It’s a mixed result. His moral leadership enabled government to put an end to Jim Crow laws. But a generation after his death, King’s vision of a unified American church remains a distant dream.
And now, fifty years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, we in the United States are having a fresh discussion on the nature of the people we want to be and become. Yes, a government needs to protect its citizens. Yes, a government needs to steward its economy. Republicans and Democrats both agree and disagree on the best legal devices, relative to immigration, to accomplish these two tasks.
But what about us? What about that community called the church? Immigration will continue to be a fact of life, no matter how we tweak the law. Of far greater consequence is how we will open our hearts. How will we become new people, as we welcome, minister to, and are ministered to by the people from other lands?
The year 2006 will mark a beginning, and not an end. Whatever laws Congress ultimately passes will be more or less relevant to the short-term economics of the country. But in the long run, we can become a bigger and more beautiful church, because we have loved and lived together in Christ’s name.
Discuss: What is the Church's role in the debate on immigration? How can the church bless both her neighbors and the governmental authorities? What is the relationship between immigration law and the culture of the people?
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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