Before I move on with the catechumen series, I wanted to write a quick note on the illegal-immigrant controversy. There’s been a lot of discussion in the Christian blogosphere about it lately, most of it pitting the biblical commandments about loving one’s neighbor and welcoming the stranger against the Romans 13 commandment to obey the laws.
One other biblical analogy occurred to me, though, which I haven’t seen anyone else bring up: Paul’s letter to Philemon. The note is accompanying a slave, Onesimus, whom Paul is sending back to his master, Philemon. Exactly why Onesimus has been staying with Paul isn’t clear; he might have run away from Philemon, or Philemon might have sent him to Paul to serve Paul in his place (Paul says something to this effect).
What’s striking about this is how Paul obeys the letter of the law, but subverts the spirit of the law. Onesimus is Philemon’s property, so Paul sends him back to his owner. But the letter makes it clear that Onesimus is anything but property — Paul calls him “my child” and “my heart” and urges Philemon to accept him “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother.” Paul says that he could order Philemon to do the right thing, but he would rather “appeal to you on the basis of love” and let Philemon choose to do the right thing. He adds that “If he has wronged you in any way, or owes you anything, charge that to my account.”
The analogy I see with immigration is this. Most illegal immigrants come from a bad situation. You don’t take those sorts of risks just for the hell of it. But the American mentality that the best way to deal with a bad situation is to pick up stakes and move is not really biblical. (Yes, there was Exodus, but that was because God had a specific plan for the Hebrews.) Also, I have the same worry here that I expressed in my post on Appalachia, that American Christians sometimes take the commandment to help the poor as encouraging the poor to scramble up the ladder by hook or by crook.
Paul, I think, recognizes that Philemon’s house is Onesimus’ home, and that things are not really going to be set right until the two of them are reconciled. However we feel about the immigrants being here, we shouldn’t forget that they left a home behind them, and that, all things being equal, they’d probably rather be there. We Americans like to romanticize the aspiring immigrant looking for a new life, but in reality immigration is often simply the lesser evil in a fallen world.
Since the “master” here is usually a whole society rather than an individual, our task isn’t as simple as Paul’s gently admonishing letter to Philemon. There’s a limit to how much we can affect conditions in another country, and such changes as we can make are politically difficult. (If you want to scare a senator, sneak up and yell, “Kill farm subsidies!”) However, it seems to me that the Philemon epistle at least provides an attitude to approach ministry to illegal aliens with. So far the talk I’ve seen seems to be polarized between, “You’re welcome here, to hell with the unjust law,” and “You lawbreaker, get back to your own country.” But a better long-term goal would be to equip immigrants to create alternatives back in their homes. Bert likes to tell stories about Latin Americans who have created nonviolent Christian communities even under hostile conditions, like civil war and economic exploitation. Such models may provide a better solution in the long run than mass migration to a foreign land.
A lovely and thought-provoking post. Mind if I link to it?
Comment by Kizmet — April 3, 2006 @ 6:42 pm
Not at all, I figure everything here is linkable by anybody. Thanks.
Comment by Camassia — April 3, 2006 @ 7:01 pm
Great thought-provoking post — the analogy between immigration and Philemon was one that hadn’t even crossed my mind. Here’s one problem I have with it, though. If we were to use this story as an analogy for a social problem 150 years ago, namely slavery here in the U.S., it would seem that those working on the underground railroad should have sent runaway slaves back, albeit with a letter attempting to persuade their owner to free them. And I just can’t stomach that. The rejoinder to that argument might be “well immigration laws aren’t unjust or morally wrong — they’re just about defining a nation-state’s borders.” That may be so, I haven’t researched the current immigration laws to know if that’s the case.
Comment by Jason — April 4, 2006 @ 1:10 pm
Yeah, like I said there are obviously problems with scaling the example up — there are certain things Paul could do when talking to a Christian brother in a then-small church, that would be tough to translate to an entire divided society where everybody thinks they’re doing the Christian thing. However, it should be said that the American method of dealing with slavery wasn’t exactly ideal either. J.H. Yoder defended the Philemon approach by pointing out that, “American experience since 1865 has demonstrated that summary release from chattel slavery is not necessarily an improvement in the status of the slave if not accompanied with a new and honorable relationship to the former master and the relevant social structure.” Of course, it’s easy to say that, and another thing to do it, but I think he has a point that the type of absolutism that led to ending slavery by conquest left wounds that are still haunting us.
Also, I should add that I don’t advocate sending immigrants home in every single case. Sometimes that would amount to certain death, which is what asylum laws are for (though alas they don’t always work properly). I was thinking mostly of people who are escaping run-of-the-mill poverty, which seems to be the case with most illegals.
Comment by Camassia — April 4, 2006 @ 1:47 pm
It’s probably wrong to talk about you behind your back, so I thought I’d point this out:
http://clawoftheconciliator.blogspot.com/2006/04/camassia-high-castle.html
Comment by Elliot — April 4, 2006 @ 3:05 pm
Thank you for an insightful and sensitive post, Camassia. I don’t know how interested you are in more academic discourse, but you may be interested in the work of Henry Shue, e.g. Basic Rights http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691029296/sr=8-2/qid=1144189724/ref=sr_1_2/104-2338015-2679155?%5Fencoding=UTF8 which proposes this argument from a platform that appeals to non-religious people as well.
Comment by Anna — April 4, 2006 @ 3:32 pm
Immigration and War
Reading something like this just drives me nuts:
The U.S. spent a staggering $783 billion in 2005 on the military.
As a result, 42 cents out of every dollar you’re paying in taxes this year is going to the military.
Friends Committee on Nati…
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