Biblical Insights Into Immigration
The people of Israel started out as a family. Israel was the name of the father of the twelve sons who became twelve tribes.
The Book of Exodus describes how this family became a nation, in which the covenant that was the story of the family and its ancestors extended into a system of law and government.
Among the many topics the laws addressed was that of naturalization. A family expands through marriage and the births that follow. A nation expands through births as well, but also by naturalization, the process by which people not born as members of the nation become a part of it.
The laws embrace a simple principle of reciprocity: the would-be citizen accepts the laws of the adoptive country as binding while the nation binds itself to love the new citizen and treat him or her uniformly under the nation’s law:
There shall be one law for you and for the resident stranger; it shall be a law for all time throughout the ages. You and the stranger shall be alike before God.
-Numbers 15:15
When strangers reside with you in your land, you shall not wrong them.
The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens; you shall love each one as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
-Leviticus 19:33-34
The reciprocity described by these laws set up a paradigm of workable naturalization throughout time. Naturalized citizenship as a solemn covenant engages all parties in a pact of mutual responsibility.
American law is premised on the people having rights that no government may take away from them. “Nature and Nature’s God” bestows rights on each person that no government can take away, most obviously, the rights to life, liberty, and property. We can assert these God-given rights against any person or institution, no matter how powerful.
But the authority behind biblical law is that very same God who gives us those rights. We need no protection from God, and if we truly were to need protection, who could offer it? The key to understanding Biblical law, then, is that they describe responsibilities we have toward each other and toward God.
The biblical laws of naturalization do not, then, confer either a unilateral right to citizenship to would-be immigrants or a unilateral right to refuse it to the nation of Israel. All of creation is bound together in a network of interwoven responsibilities, and here is no exception. Israel must see themselves in the stranger: they are responsible to offer them equal status under the law since “you yourselves were strangers in the Land of Egypt.” The imagination of the other as the self is so powerful that it includes a responsibility unenforceable in any court yet nevertheless binding: one must love this [former] stranger, as the law tradition makes clear, both by dint of their now being the neighbor that one is already commanded to love and specifically as a stranger who has chosen to make himself one with us.
The immigrant, simultaneously, is obligated to act under the same laws as those already citizens, bound no more and no less by the duties of citizenship than those born as citizens.
The Bible offers a counterexample, which is amplified in oral traditions, that of the mixed multitude who joined Israel as they fled from Egypt. The Midrash Shemot Rabba, in a much-quoted passage, assigns much of the guilt for the sin of the Golden Calf to these people:
The Holy One blessed be He said to [Moses]: ‘They are your people. When they were still in Egypt I said to you: “I will take out My hosts, My people” (Exodus 7:4). I said to you not to mix the mixed multitude with them. You, who were humble and upright, said to Me: One always accepts penitents. But I knew what they were destined to do; I had said to you, no, but I performed your will. It is they who crafted the calf, as they were idolaters; it is they who crafted it and caused My people to sin.’
In this text, God is ascribing error to Moses for his humility and willingness to give second chances that were, here, not the main qualities the moment required. In this finite world, we must act clearly to establish the expectations of what a good and successful national life requires. Those not willing to accept the most basic allegiance to the source of the nation’s authority cannot be allowed into membership. The experiment has been done, says the text, and the result nearly destroyed the nation before it got started.
The positive counterexample is set out in the Book of Ruth. Ruth’s declaration to her mother-in-law is stunning in its grace and simplicity:
Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.
This small and exquisite book of the Bible does not shrink from telling what followed from Ruth’s acceptance into the people. At its end, it describes her line of descendants, which leads directly to King David and so ultimately to the Messiah. Israel is taught that its full glory came to be through accepting a humble and sincere stranger into its midst.
Our contemporary politics is polluted with the woeful concept of rights absent responsibilities. Responsibilities temper us to deal with the real world and not propose an imagined utopia as overriding the everyday concerns that are the fabric of our lives. Nations that work are nations that care for each other as we are by pulling together. That begins with acknowledging that we are bound together in our very nature by our very Maker, who challenges us to conceive of our mutual citizenship as binding us in loving responsibility.
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