Navigating the Challenge of Immigration

National solidarity, crime, racism, and everything else

Photo by Andrew Schultz on Unsplash

Two items last week brought my attention to the perverse and misguided ways we’re thinking about immigration in America. Both items brought to mind the complexity of immigration, the perverse way we speak about immigrants, and the lack of common sense thinking about addressing the border crisis. First was the following image, posted from the official “Trump War Room” Twitter campaign account:

The warning here is that under Kamala, we will continue to have a historic border crisis and our country will turn into a “third world” country crowded with black and brown people who will bring down our neighborhoods with crime and filth and drugs and their foreign cultures. We will lose our first world status.

There are a number of problems with this. The first of which is, despite Trump and Fox News’s constant promotions of stories of immigrant crimes, illegal immigrants don’t commit crimes at a higher rate than non-immigrants. They consistently commit them at a lower rate. See here, here, and here. But, you may say, even if the rate is lower, any crime committed by an illegal immigrant is preventable because by definition they aren’t supposed to be here!

All crime, especially violent crime is tragic and evil and should be prevented. But if illegal immigrants don’t commit crimes at a higher rate than citizens, reducing immigration isn’t going to reduce the rate of crime in America. It will reduce the raw number of crimes committed, but only because it will reduce the number of people in America. Because, again, immigrants don’t commit crimes at a greater rate than non-immigrants. So really, the idea that we can fight crime by reducing immigration is fighting crime by reducing the number of people who could possibly commit crimes, not reducing the rate of crimes, which is what we want. If your goal is to reduce the rate of people being victimized, reducing immigration isn’t going to help.

For example, right now we’re facing a population decline in America. If people started to reverse that decline and had four children on average, I hope you wouldn’t object when the raw number of crimes increased as the number of people increased even while the rate of crime stayed the same! Why? Because what’s more concerning than the raw number of crimes is the rate of crime.

None of this is to deny that immigrants with criminal records are crossing the border and continuing a life of crime here. We’ll address that problem later in this article. Neither am I denying that some places are seeing an uptick in crime related to immigration—that’s possible, particularly where it may be difficult to find work. But in the aggregate, the data appears to show that illegal immigrants simply do not commit crimes at a higher rate than natural born citizens. And that should shape the way we view the narrative sold to us about immigration and crime.

So that’s one problem with this image. Another problem is that it treats immigrants as sub-human, as a virus, as a plague, or disease. Trump described immigrants earlier this year, repeatedly, as “poisoning the blood of our country.” I’m ashamed to say that I have seen many, many Christians online parroting this view explicitly or implicitly. And their justification is that we either allow these “animals” to come into our country and “rape our women” or we stop them now. As

Brad Littlejohn

has noted, “An uncharitable and godless brand of nativism comes easily to fallen humans. Just as we are often subject to grasping greed that zealously guards our property, so we are liable to shut the door against every refugee on our national doorstep, keeping our wages up and our streets pristine.” In a fantastic analysis of the current dilemma facing social conservatives this election, Catholic professor Edward Feser outlined many of the problems with Donald Trump (and Harris!), but one point I wish he had stressed was the way Trump tends to cultivate sin in his uncritical followers. Not all his followers. I grant that it’s quite possible to vote for Trump as the lesser of two evils and not support his rhetoric about immigrants. But it does influence many. And that is lamentable.

Let me be clear, despite all the very real and terrible stories of crimes committed by illegal immigrants, there is no justification in the Christian life for dehumanizing illegal immigrants, particularly as a group of people. None. They are humans made in the image of God. If you cannot make your argument for a better immigration policy without demonizing immigrants, then you should remain quiet until you can.

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The second item that caught my attention last week was this widely shared article about the riots in England by

Joshua Treviño

. It’s a long read, and your mileage may vary, but many people found it insightful. The general thrust of the article is that England used to be united by a shared philia but because of mass immigration and progressive policies, it’s now a shell of its former self. The historical landmarks remain, but they have been colonized by Islam and queer ideology. I can’t speak to the conditions of England. I’ve been to Oxford once and found it delightfully British. But I haven’t been to London, which according to Treviño is quite different. I’ll take his word for it.

For most of the people sharing this article online last week, the subtext was that what’s happening in England is going to happen to America if we don’t stop mass immigration and the progressive agenda now.

Treviño makes a couple points that I’d like to push back on, however. The first is this: “its regime’s determination that the people of England be subjected and subsumed by the importation of millions of foreigners with whom no philia is possible.” This is quite a claim. I can understand claiming that it is difficult for immigrants to develop a love for a new nation. But to say it’s impossible? How would you even know that? And as it applies to America, is that even true? It seems to me that historically, after a few generations, most immigrant families come to understand and love America and its ideals, or at least as much of those ideals as they are taught—more on that at the end of this article. Perhaps America does a better job of helping people assimilate over time than England.

The second point was Treviño’s comments on cultural takeover. He writes: “it is notable that a mosque is the only religious structure seen on the train from London to Oxford” and “We walked through an Underground station whose long dirty white corridors were decorated with easily hundreds of images of London’s ‘queer’ population.” It seems to me that we’ve already reached this point of cultural takeover in America, except the idols are not Islam, but expressive individualism, including progressive gender and sexuality ideology. Consider your experience driving down the interstate. In Oklahoma, I see images of gambling, weed, cars, houses, plastic surgery, etc. There are already idols in the land and they already demand our worship and they already call us away from our cultural heritage. We don’t have to worry about some foreign invasion perverting us to foreign idols. Those idols are already here.

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All this may give you the impression that I don’t think we have an immigration problem. I do. I think it is an objective fact that we have an immigration crisis. And I think that illegal immigration is unjust. It’s unjust for those immigrating who are violating our laws and it’s unjust by our government because we don’t have laws that make legal immigration and asylum seeking quick and easy enough and we don’t protect our borders enough to discourage illegal immigrants who often risk their lives to come here.

It’s my belief that we need to secure our borders, revise our laws, and create a pathway to citizenship for most of those already here. At a certain point, I believe we have to accept that we screwed up by not securing our border and making reasonable laws years ago, and so we need to deal with the consequences. I don’t know exactly what that looks like. My inclination is to say that people whose only serious crimes are being here illegally and working illegally to try and start a new life should be allowed to stay, especially families. I also think that prudence demands that we balance quickly processing refugees and immigrants with national security. When it is possible, we should screen for terrorists, gang members, violent criminals, and others who would be harmful to our citizens. Common sense vetting, not out of paranoia but out of a responsibility to care for the wellbeing of our citizens. These are my rough thoughts, but I grant that other, wise Christians have different views on the best strategies for dealing with this crisis.

My favorite article on this topic is from Brad Littlejohn at First Things. Littlejohn writes: “In my estimation, secure borders, national sovereignty, and limited immigration are affirmed by traditional Christian moral theology.” While I believe we need to simplify and improve our immigration laws to make it easier to allow for immigration, I don’t think we need to allow unlimited numbers in. Part of the benefit of securing the border is that we can set a reasonable limit, prioritizing those most in need. What those exact limits should be is hard to decide: “each nation must decide how many visitors or immigrants to admit, weighing its own need for security, prosperity, and cultural cohesion,” Littlejohn argues.

Littlejohn goes on to say, “Nations, like private property, exist for the benefit of all, not just for their own residents. Each nation is called to serve not only its own common good, but the common good of humanity.” This is why we should be prioritizing those in need, refugees and asylum seekers, not just those who are the best candidates for Making America Great Again—the highly educated and wealthy. We have a responsibility to seek the common good of humanity. But as Littlejohn notes elsewhere in the article, there are limits to those hospitality, just like in your own home, if your hospitality does not have a limit, you lose your home and will no longer be able to be hospitable!

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The last point I want to address is the question of national solidarity, and this reaches back to the question of what we teach immigrants about national identity. I’m in the middle of reading James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity, and in it he argues that America has always held together by “working through” various tensions while holding on to certain commitments to what he calls the hybrid-Enlightenment. But today, according to his analysis, we’ve ceased to work through our differences and instead have slipped into a kind of cultural nihilism, so that there is nothing really holding us together. It seems to me that one of the important questions about immigration and limits on immigration is how it will shape or reshape the cultural identity of the nation. I think it is right and good for a nation to have a heritage, as ugly and messy as it might be. It’s good to have roots. But part of a heritage is a set of shared beliefs, and setting aside the question of immigration, we don’t have a set of shared beliefs as a society. We don’t have solidarity.

So I suppose I’m saying that for America, the concern that immigrants will disrupt our cultural solidarity is sort of beside the point. We don’t have positive cultural solidarity to begin with. Or if we do, it is paper thin: expressive individualism and consumerism. This is not to say that it isn’t important for immigrants and native born Americans to learn our history and the English language; it is. But we need something deeper. And I’m not sure what that will be or how to bring that about. Hopefully when I finish reading the book I’ll write up some ideas.

Well, maybe that’s not entirely correct. Yes, Hunter notes that there’s no positive solidarity in America today. But there is of negative solidarity, and immigration is the perfect example. The demonization of immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our nation” unites many Americans behind a common enemy. So maybe the only form of solidarity we have left in America is negative; the belief that those people over there are an existential threat to our nation, whether that be immigrants or progressives or Trump supporters or conservative evangelicals. And we must unite to stop them, expel them, convert them, or worse.

In conclusion, we do have an immigration crisis and Christians of good faith can disagree on how to confront it. What we can’t do is dehumanize immigrants or pretend that there is no crisis. It is distressing to me that neither party seems to be willing to take this common sense approach to immigration, upholding the human dignity of the immigrant, accepting the responsibility to care for refugees and asylum seekers, while setting up reasonable limits, laws, and vetting processes for the good of those entering and the common good of the nation. I don’t think this is “Thirdwayism,” I think this is a model of what I wrote about a few weeks ago, an effort to follow God’s justice regardless of human group dynamics.¹

1. I was not paid by George Soros or anyone except you faithful readers to write this.