I listen to friends tell me our nation’s primary concern right now is keeping foreigners out of our country. I hear their worries about safety, even as I see actions that go beyond safety, hurting people and pushing against our nation’s long-held values.
The rhetoric speaks of “illegal” immigrants, hardened criminals, and border protection. But the actions stop law-abiding people from staying or coming.
Simplistic jargon about protecting the country from the worst offenders hides the real stories, stories I know well. Stories of how innocent people have been caught in legal traps, how legal processes are being shut down, how people obeying the law are being denied due process.
What concerns me most is the tens of thousands of highly vetted refugees long in the pipeline who’ve been turned away, even as they are enroute. Now the door to legitimate refugees is shutting tight, the very mechanisms by which they are successfully settled are being deconstructed, and a long-time partnership between faith communities and the government is being demolished.
For decades, our nation has welcomed refugees, people who have been forced to flee their country because of persecution, war, or violence. Many have spent years in refugee camps in a country other than their own. They have no home to return to. The longer they remain dislocated, the harder it will be to settle anywhere, leaving them and their kids effectively nationless.
I met one such young woman several years ago when she came to work for me. Her family were Christians who had fled persecution in Sudan. They found “temporary” shelter in a refugee camp in Kenya for several years, where she was born.
As a toddler, her entire family was approved to come as refugees to the US. My friend grew up in a healthy, wholesome environment in San Diego with a SoCal flair. She became a US Citizen, completed college, then volunteered with a ministry in Central Africa helping people in desperate need. When she returned to the US, she came to work for me, leading a program that provided housing for Oregonians without housing.
My friend was one of some 50,000 refugees the year she arrived – the number our nation settled annually for decades. Nine national nonprofit organizations nicknamed VOLAGs (voluntary agencies) did the settling. Most are faith-based. For a decade, I led a team that partnered with Church World Service. Now I volunteer with a team that partners with World Relief.
Generations of refugees like my friend kept coming until the government tried to shut off this highly respected work in 2017. Since then, our nation has engaged in a political tug-of-war over refugees and immigrants, while we have worked to keep local agencies viable, praying for more favorable times. This year the refugee ceiling is reportedly being set at 7,500, a historic low for our nation. Local agencies in many states are shuttering for good.
We are calling on our President to consult with Congress on this matter, as is required by law. We are asking our Senators and Representatives to do the work of advising the President. We are asking that persecuted Christians, like my friend, and others fleeing religious persecution, not be shut out of resettlement.
When I moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2007, I saw a city where religious influence was declining fast. Churches were closing in record numbers. The exception to that decline were the many – yes, many – churches established by refugees and immigrants, people who had fled persecution, war, and lives of desperation. They were boldly proclaiming God’s love in a city with a reputation for being anything but religious.
The decline of religion in our nation has been extensively reported. Immigrants, especially first-generation immigrants, are the exception to the rule. And where denominations are growing, such as the Assemblies of God, it is largely because of immigrant populations.
From an economic perspective, refugees and immigrants put food on our tables, open businesses at record rates, increase our GDP, and invest in our future. No, I’m not talking about wealthy immigrants. I’m talking about the kind of immigrants who have been building our nation’s economy for the past four centuries. Hardworking family-types like my friend’s family who just want their kids and grandkids to survive and succeed.
So don’t be surprised if I am confused by my Christian friends who agree with shutting our doors to new arrivals. I see these refugees and immigrants, not as threats, but as a means of spiritual and economic revitalization.
Others may speak of national self-preservation, but I grew up learning that obedience to God is my first priority and self-preservation is way down the list. I was taught that if we obey God, we will be secure.
I can’t expect my nation to put God’s priorities first anymore than I can expect a pluralistic society to prioritize my particular religious values. But I can expect our nation and society to put its own best interests first. That includes embracing the refugee and immigrant. Not always do national priorities and faith priorities line up, but in this case, understanding that we ourselves were once foreigners is where national and faith stories walk similar paths.
Long before I gained an adult perspective on what it meant to be an American, I was taught from a Bible that spoke extensively of being kind to foreigners in our midst because we once were aliens ourselves. Some would argue that the Old Testament doesn’t apply to today’s world. Our family did not take the front of the Bible so lightly. We saw this great biblical theme as seamless.
The New Testament also speaks extensively of breaking down ethnic and racial barriers and reaching across borders, reminding us how we who had been alienated from God are now reconcilers and ambassadors in our world. Again, while these New Testament verses don’t directly address national policy, they have taught me what our civic attitude should be, especially a nation founded on Christian principles, as many believe.
I grew up in a town that was provincial, meaning it had an isolated, localized feel to it. People were often barely aware of the world outside our community on the agrarian, tidal edge of New Jersey. And yet, many of its residents had migrated from distant places.
Many families had fled poverty and war-torn Europe before and after World War II. They were people who had escaped the persecutions and ravages of the Nazis and the Soviets. One couple had met in a concentration camp. Others had come even earlier through Ellis Island with barely more than the clothes on their backs. The original Northern European surnames of our community had mingled with foreign-sounding family names from eastern and southern Europe.
These migrants and their children and grandchildren filled our church and gave it a diverse and international flavor that greatly impacted me. Children of such immigrants became our civic officials and teachers and business leaders. And our hometown sports heroes.
They added to the flavor that made our community special. Provincial as we may have seemed, we were a community that embraced the foreigner. We had our own distinct South Jersey accent, an accent mixed with outside dialects and diction.
As I grew older, I came to understand our nation’s history. We were a nation of immigrants. Native Americans had gotten here first, way long before. But in the hallowed telling of that first Thanksgiving, the First Peoples had welcomed the refugee Pilgrims and helped them survive their first winters in this cold, new world.
The Statue of Liberty at the other end of our state reminded me that we were a nation that welcomed the world’s tired, poor, “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Though at times more myth than reality, it was a national identity that made me proud to be an American.
And then, in time, I learned of the darker side of our nation’s and my own faith’s history. Of the Klan, of exclusionary statutes, of racially-biased anti-immigration laws. Of slavery and segregation and red lines. Of the less than Christian ways of Christian people who ignored the Great Commission and kept their churches more like exclusive social clubs.
Something within me has never accepted this baser side of civics and faith. Nativism, whether in the pulpit or on the campaign trail, grates against my soul. I get the modern need for national boundaries and laws, as long as those laws are just and those boundaries are governed by due process. But when we – whether as church or society – develop a fortress mentality, we risk gaining temporal reward at the expense of losing our very soul.
For years, I lived overseas where I gained a fresh appreciation for the values I had been raised on. I learned what it meant to be a stranger in a strange land, what it felt like to be an outsider. I grew to understand those biblical passages from a fresh perspective. I appreciated my home country’s history through a whole new lens of experience.
When I returned to the US to stay, I quickly became involved in work that overwhelmingly embraced immigrants. At the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, I oversaw teams that were finding homes for refugees, and legal assistance, counselling, and tangible aid for immigrants.
And I worked side by side with people who had experienced alienation, dislocation, and forced migration. I may have been their leader, but they were my teachers. From them, I learned resilience, how a warm welcome does the heart good, and what it means to take the bad in life and turn it into blessing for others.
Two years ago, I retired from that work and moved to a new city. Once again, I’ve discovered my kind of people. No, I don’t mean my ethnicity or color or even necessarily my faith. I mean people who share my commitment to welcome and care for the outsider.
A year ago, I was invited to serve on the board of a nonprofit organization. I was thrilled, one to be able to use my organizational leadership skills for a good cause, two because this organization was devoted to welcoming “new neighbors,” as they call them. Salem for Refugees (SFR) and its twin, Corvallis for Refugees, partner with World Relief to settle refugees in the central region of Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
But SFR’s mission is being compromised as our nation closes its doors to new refugee arrivals. For the foreseeable future, there may be no arrivals. Meanwhile, we work to ensure that refugees, who have already arrived from disparate and desperate parts of the world, put down solid and sustainable roots.
Someday the children of these refugees will become our civic officials and teachers and business leaders. And our hometown sports heroes. They’ll add to the flavor that makes our community special. Eventually our local way of speaking English will mix with their dialects and diction, as the original Northern European surnames of our town mingle with foreign-sounding family names from eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Over and over, the scriptures press us to remember what it is like to be on the outside, whether culturally, legally, or spiritually. Far more than the Statue of Liberty ever could, our Savior welcomes the outsider, the vulnerable, the lost – and calls us to do the same.
Go ahead and set national policy independently of religious values, if you insist. This is a pluralistic nation after all. But do so with the nation’s good in mind. If you do, you’ll discover that what’s best for our nation will align with God’s preferred values.
If you are a person of faith, I pray you allow your faith values to influence your social and political values. I have a hunch your faith, whatever it is, calls you to welcome the stranger and embrace the foreigner.
For those of you in my part of Oregon, I have a special invite for you. Join me on November 6, 20, or 21 for a special Thrive event sponsored by Salem/Corvallis For Refugees. Be my guest at my table as we hear stories from refugees who are now our new neighbors and how they are being welcomed by the likes of you and me. If you’d like to be my guest, contact me here.
I don’t usually recommend books I haven’t yet read, but if you want to get a jump on a new book just out about refugees and the larger immigration crisis, I highly recommend the editor, Lois Olena, of this compendium of academic papers – I was a Stranger and You Took Me in: Pentecostal Responses to the Refugee Crisis. It’s already on my Christmas wish list.
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