There is plenty of room for legitimate debate about immigration. Even professional economists don’t agree on its effects; some estimates suggest that immigration has reduced the wages of low-skilled workers and college graduates, while others find that immigration raises the wages of all U.S. workers. It is true that we are at a peak of our immigrant population. Over 13 percent of the population is foreign-born, which is nearing a historic high.
It’s not irrational to think that maybe there needs to be some re-balancing. But that has to be done with a respect for justice and due process of law, not by revoking visas that have already been issued, or by institutionalizing religious bigotry.
We are, as it is often said, a nation of immigrants. I am the great-grandson of Polish immigrants on Dad’s side, and descended from Irish famine refugees a little farther back on Mom’s. But so long as we have a system in which economic management is done by nation-states, it would seem necessary that those nation-states have to have some control over immigration.
I don’t think there are simple answers to the overall question of immigration.
But whatever fine points of policy we might debate, whatever political balance we might strike, there is an important spiritual principle involved. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Jehovah commands his people to welcome the stranger:
And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt… (Leviticus 19:33-34)
Jesus also had some thoughts on the topic. It’s been a long time since I called myself a Christian, but “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me” is still inarguable 2,000 years later.
In Celtic and Norse traditions, hospitality was a sacred obligation. A four hundred year old legend tells how the chief of Clan MacGregor honored an obligation to shelter his own son’s murderer, a man from the Clan Lamont, and was later given shelter himself by Lamont. The Havamal, part of the Poetic Edda attributed to Odin himself, says “Scoff not at guests nor to the gate chase them, But relieve the lonely and wretched”.
In Islam, Muhammad says “Let the believer in God and the Day of Judgment honor his guest.” Among the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the offering of hospitality is a point of tribal pride and honor. (Had the administration of Bush the Second understood the deep Pashtun commitment to the traditions of hospitality, they might have been able to get the Taliban to extradite bin Laden instead of resorting to an illegal invasion.)
Buddhism teaches sakkara, the duty to be “welcoming and helpful to guests, strangers and travelers”.
All these ancient traditions recognized that the world can be a cold and hostile place; and that if humanity was going to survive in it, this laid on us certain obligations of mutual care. Nothing elaborate, but if we have the means to provide them without great sacrifice, we owe the traveler a warm dry place to shelter from the storm, a plate of food, and a cup of water — the basic survival needs of Maslow’s hierarchy. Someday you or someone you love will be the one in need, so you pay it forward.
And the obligation to aid the stranger, the wanderer, the refugee, is only multiplied when your nation’s policies are the cause of their displacement, when your wars and invasions and bombing campaigns have driven someone’s homeland into chaos.
American policy choices have led to the current refugee crisis, and that lays on our nation a duty to see to the welfare of those refugees. And we owe a national obligation to those who worked with the American military as translators or in other roles.
Our legal traditions are rooted in the notion of equal treatment and due process. Once a visa or an immigration permit has been issued, it goes against the entire structure of Anglo-American law to arbitrarily revoke it. The Trump administration’s recent acts, leaving refugees and travelers and immigrants stranded, are a national disgrace — literally, a “dis-grace”, a failure to abide by the ethical grace of hospitality.
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