Mass Immigration & the Christian Conscience
Wrestling with compassion, culture, and community
To anyone paying attention to the political situation in America and the rest of the Western world, it has become clear that mass immigration is one of, if not the, most important and divisive political issues of our times.
It’s an issue that I’m actually deeply conflicted on. Growing up, I was very liberal, even identifying as an anarcho-communist at one point. That being said, as I’ve gotten older and converted to Orthodox Christianity, my political views have unsurprisingly become much more conservative. However, mass immigration—specifically that of mostly third-world immigrants into Western countries like Europe and America—does not seem to have a clear consensus from the conservative Christian perspective. I want to dive into why that’s the case and how we can potentially think through different positions on it.
The Christian Call to Charity
On its face, I think most people on the left and most progressive or Protestant Christians would try to make a very clear-cut case that Christ loved the poor and called us to minister to them, and so it’s obvious that a good Christian should promote immigration and care deeply about poor immigrants from other countries. In fact, if you actually look at immigration numbers—especially in the United States—the majority of charitable efforts to bring in immigrants actually come from Protestant Christian NGOs.
In fact, you could make a strong argument that mass immigration was only possible in a Christian society, given that Christianity is historically the first major religious or cultural belief system that actually tried to transcend racial, geographical, and ancestral bounds in a radical way. As Saint Paul says:
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
These are great points! When it comes to our day to day lives as Christians, I think the answers here are clear cut. If you run into a immigrant or someone from a different culture in your day to day life, you should be kind to them. Love them, don’t hate them or call them racial slurs or whatever. That part is obvious.
But it’s more complicated when it comes to entire communities, and nations. Do we throw open borders and allow anyone and everyone to come through? How do we filter for who we want in our communities?
These aren’t questions that have easy answers.
The Crisis of Community
The biggest issue with trying to throw open the gates to anyone and everyone is that you can’t have a community with no boundaries whatsoever. A large part of community is gatekeeping and exclusion. If you don’t have some rules around who is allowed in… you’re basically just including every single human in the world, at which point, there is no community anyway.
Even if you DO have strict rules, you have to be careful your group doesn’t get taken over by sociopaths, as often happens sadly.
See, because nowadays people don’t want to be exclusionary, we have this big issue in the modern world where community has completely collapsed. Friendships aren’t nearly as deep as they were in the past, marriage rates are plummeting, and divorce rates are rising. People are hyper-mobile and move constantly for jobs or even just because they want a change of scenery. Familial bonds are increasingly being called toxic, and all “community bonds” are being destroyed.
There have been endless articles and books and podcasts on this topic from the conservative side of things over the last few decades. The most famous and prophetic writing on this was the book Bowling Alone.
Either way, I think there’s a very real sense in which, in order to truly embody the spirit of Christ, you need to have a deep community that is informed by the sacraments and the beauty of the Church—again, at least from a Christian perspective.
There’s a great quote from the book Letters to Father Aristotle that explains this in much more detail:
When ascetic struggle and sacramental participation go hand in hand with warmth, compassion, and social activities (yes, including food festivals, bake sales, clergy–laity bashes, basketball leagues, and dances), a wonderful thing happens: the social aspects of our church life become imbued with transcendent, sacramental light.
When the hospitality of old-country village life is unleashed to warm our frozen, utilitarian North American hearts, a beautiful spirit of Christian love is created. This is a great treasure.
When it comes to the appropriateness of our beloved social activities, it is all a question of priorities. For instance, there is nothing wrong with the coffee hour—so long as it follows a liturgy in which everyone has truly participated from the heart. A problem arises only when the coffee hour effectively becomes the liturgy, in that it’s the only part of the service everyone shows up for on time and stays until the end of! It is then that our social activities threaten to eclipse the heart of the Church’s authentic life.
The essence of the Church’s life is supposed to be communion with God. It seems to me that this communion gives beautiful meaning to our communion with one another—at coffee hour, food festivals, dances, and other exuberant social activities. It is all a matter of perspective, priorities, and proportion.
Now, if you haven’t actually experienced the deep and loving community at an Orthodox parish, you may not understand what the author is getting at here, but I have to say—it’s so true. The sense of community and deep love and compassion and care in social events within Christian Orthodoxy are incredible and completely different from anything else I’ve experienced in decades of secular life.
And there’s a deep hunger for this type of thing. I recently wrote about polyamory and some of the issues that come up in that, but I have to admit that I think the urge toward polyamorous setups is coming from a good place. People who want to become polyamorous, I would assume by and large, just want a deeper and tighter-knit community. And that’s not a bad thing at all. I don’t blame them—I want the exact same thing. I just think that replacing deep friendships with romantic entanglements is not the way to go about it.
Going back to the immigration point, the best argument I have heard against mass immigration from a Christian perspective is that while you are helping people in a purely material sense by bringing them into the West, you’re also fracturing cultural and communal bonds—both in third-world countries and in America, Europe, or other first-world countries that are bringing in immigrants.
And if we accept that one of the biggest societal problems in the modern world is this breakdown of community, and that immigration makes this worse, then that’s a pretty strong argument against it—even keeping in mind that we want to come from a perspective of love and care.
Balancing Compassion and Cohesion
So ultimately, a lot of this comes down to the place of culture—how important it is, whether it matters more than pure material circumstances like material wealth, and whether or not immigration builds up culture or tears it down.
I still don’t have a strong answer one way or the other, and it’s something I’m deeply conflicted on. But I’m leaning more and more toward the idea that mass immigration is actually bad unless we have a strong, healthy, loving culture that helps people live good lives and brings them closer to God. If, as I think is the case in the modern world, we have instead a culture that breaks people down and causes them a lot of pain, and we just keep bringing in immigrants to continue breaking down our societal and cultural bonds, we’re actually harming pretty much everyone in the exchange—even though it seems like we’re doing a lot of good on the surface.
Ultimately this idea can be summed up in the old flight safety adage - secure your own oxygen mask, before you try helping others.
I’m very curious for other thoughts though, and this is certainly not something that I’m settled on or have a firm conclusion about one way or another. Please let me know in the comments if you think I’m full of crap or if you’d like to ask me a question or add some nuance to what I’ve said here.
Thanks for this article; this is also something with which I have trouble contending. We are called to care for our neighbors, and every human is made in the imago dei, and worthy of our consideration. This means that we must also consider the literal neighbor next door, and not merely the next country over, and the effects of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
If you’ll remember as late as the mid 2000s, we can find democrats decrying illegal immigration for its wage suppressing effects and how it harms working class people who must now compete with people willing to undercut the legal wage limits by working under the table. General rules of supply and demand were understood, increasing the supply of labour would make it cheaper, benefiting those who employ labour at the expense of those who depended on scarcity of labour to demand higher wages for themselves.
High immigration at that time was seen as a “Koch brothers scheme” of sorts, a very right-wing, anti-labour, anti-working class thing. Famous left-leaning heroes like Cesar Chavez and Bernie Sanders were against immigration for this reason.
The political polarities have since switched, as the right has increasingly become seen as the party of the working class and the left as the party of the elites (There is room for argument, of course).
The left tends to rely on pathos more than anything, and if you’ll remember believe in Jonathan Haidt’s theories about moral foundations, arguments about care and fairness are the most impactful to a left leaning person. Therefore, democrats had to repackage the phenomenon in those terms, which is why caring and fairness are now the main arguments in favour of something they once argued was damaging, or unfair, to the working class.
As Christian’s, we are to eh gentle as doves and wise as serpents, so we must be wise enough to recognize when language is being used to push something that masks the harms it causes.
This type of immigration primarily benefits the wealthy who can abuse the cheap labour and suppress wages, be it legal or illegal. Employers will sometimes prefer legal immigrants with certain visas, because their residency is tied to their employment. This allows the employer to exploit the employee to a degree that’s far greater than a resident who could quite their job without the fear of being deported. They’ll sometimes prefer illegal immigrants because they do not have to pay for things like benefits or insurance, or even the minimum wage.
In addition, one advantage the US has currently is that it is essentially importing all the world’s smart people. It’s to America’s benefit, but arguably those countries from which they’ve been poached likely need their smart people more than a hegemonic superpower.
Allowing exploitation under the guise of “helping” people is duplicitous at best. Forcing poor and middle class people to compete with the entire world for their wages is also not kind.
Allowing the wealthy to import serfs, whether legally or illegally, serves mammon, not God.
Humanitarian arguments still hold weight, however. Many are coming from truly heinous conditions. The difficulty comes in asking how many people can fit on a lifeboat before the whole thing sinks? The answer isn’t zero, but it’s not an infinite number either, and good intentions don’t keep the realities of a finite world from imposing themselves.
You are full of crap & half truth & Hypocracies, because ancient India is a successful multi racial society where race or skin colour was never a problem unlike in Europre where Roma gypsies, Jews, Muslims etc were historically persecuted.
Ancient India is a mixture of indigenous harrapans, Aryans, Europeans, Turky & middle eastern and then Dravidians who are closer to Africans etc.