Our life on earth, our temporal existence, should be seen as a kind of pilgrimage. The temporal order is transitory, even if what is in it and comes from it will be eternalized thanks to God’s deifying grace. That is, we know we will find ourselves coming to a new mode of being as we transition from temporality into eternity. That transition shows that we will be migrating, as it were, into the kingdom of God. This is why, as this is what our life is about, our life should be seen as if we are migrants or pilgrims on our way to heaven. Salvation history reflects this in the way many of the great saints, many of those representatives of the best of humanity and God’s engagement with humanity, were migrants, making their way throughout various countries and kingdoms of the world (often, without being welcomed there):
The experience of migration accompanies the history of the People of God. Abraham sets out without knowing where he is going; Moses leads the pilgrim people through the desert; Mary and Joseph flee with the child Jesus to Egypt. Christ himself, who “came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (Jn 1:11), lived among us as a stranger. For this reason, the Church has always recognized in migrants a living presence of the Lord who, on the day of judgment, will say to those on his right: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Mt 25:35).[1]
When we read of missionaries, like those missionaries who made their way to Japan after Japan banned Christian immigration, we see how Christians believed they must follow Christ instead of human (or positive) law. Missionaries, and other Christians, were often captured, tortured, and executed, all because they went into a land they were not welcome (or converted to Christianity when authorities said they were not allowed to be Christian). While they respected secular authorities, they recognized their authority was not unlimited. They knew that borders were a construct which should not be used to undermine human rights, including the right to migration.
Christian history, therefore, shows us how God worked with, and continues to work with, migrants. Christians must recognize this and not fight against God’s wishes. Any who would hate the strangers that come to live among them, anyone who thinks they can establish borders as absolute barriers, undermine the work of Christ in the world, for Christ means for us to break through all such barriers and come together as one.
Thus, while it is true, a country has a right to borders, they must control their borders with a just means and for a just end. They do not have absolute power or authority over their borders, which is why, when their actions, when their laws are unjust, Christians are called to resist them:
Yet the right to control borders can never stand as a right on its own. The right to control borders must face a variety of equally important human rights before it can parade itself as if it were the single and most important right. Indeed, border control can easily become a vehicle for abuse and injustice. Left to its own devices, border patrol can even lead to some of the worst of human atrocities (to cite but one tragic example, over seven hundred immigrants died on the US/Mexico border between 1997 and 2000, as reported in the Houston Chronicle, June 13, 2000, and these deaths continue today).[2]
Virtuous city-states in the past, which should be seen in countries today that want to be virtuous, recognized the value of migrants. Today, we must welcome strangers, showing them love and respect instead of using their needs against them (such as using their poverty as an excuse to deny them entry into our country). Alfarabi, discussing Plato, pointed out this expectation:
Then he explained that, if there is not a genuine and urgent need for something, then the matter will not be executed with the ultimate in precision. He gave as an example migration and poverty that can be made the foundation of a virtuous city on account of the migrants’ genuine need to settle and the genuine need of the poor for what assures their livelihood. [3]
Justice demands we embrace the preferential option for the poor; instead of denying the poor their right to immigrate, saying their poverty makes them worthless and a bad candidate for citizenship, we must promote them over the rich who think they can buy anything, including citizenship.
Love knows no boundaries, no borders; it looks to the neighbor, to the other, and seeks to lift them up; it is hate which has us attack the needy, denying them their human rights because they are needy. Christians, especially, must take this to heart. If human laws get in the way of what is just and true, we must do away with the laws, and resist them so long as they are in effect:
In his life, his death and his resurrection Jesus Christ shows that God, incarnate in him, is above law and reason, that he can do far more than immobilize evil by his strength or unmask it by his light; he is the Spirit of life and love, and he redeems and saves that nature which has fallen into rack and ruin, transforming its falsities into truth, its wickedness into goodness – and in this act of triumphant love God finds his own glory. [4]
Jesus, in his death, has shown what legalism leads to: death. Christians must choose who they will serve, Christ, and God’s promotion of migrants, or the law, if and when they law rejects and abuses migrants and their needs. How can we look up to Abraham and respect him, how can we look to Moses and not those who tried to stop him in his Exodus, how can we look up to the Holy Family, if, today, they came to us, we would imprison and torture them?
[1] Pope Leo XIV, Dilexi te. Vatican translation. ¶73.
[2] Terry A. Veling, Practical Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. 2005), 220..
[3] Alfarabi, “Summary of Plato’s Laws” in The Political Writings, Volume II. Trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 156.
[4] Vladimir Solovyey, God, Man & The Church. The Spiritual Foundations Of Life. Trans. Donald Attwater (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2016), 76.
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