Is the Foreigner My Neighbor? A Christian Dialogue on Immigration
We asked two of our contributors to discuss the ethics of Trump’s immigration policies.
Dear James,
My wife, an immigration attorney here in Texas, held a well-attended “know your rights” session for immigrants last night. But not a soul who was at risk of deportation came. Undocumented people here are terrified, and they have good reason to be. Vulnerable women, male breadwinners, and people facing destitution or death in their countries of origin are being deported on an hourly basis—not, as the Trump administration sometimes claims, just criminals.
Trump and his backers often say that immigrants are leeching off the American social service system. Some version of “We need to take care of our own” is their typical conversation-stopper. But the truth is that undocumented immigrants are the ones taking care of us. They pay taxes, including social security tax, which they’ll never benefit from themselves. Nor can they receive other entitlements like Medicaid or SNAP. Businesses stay afloat by paying them below minimum wage for farm work, picking our fruits and vegetables, nannying, or construction work. They’re an easily preyed upon shadow population—and the American economy is deeply dependent upon them.
So, as you can imagine, I don’t find President Trump’s policies to be morally coherent or rational even from a purely self-interested perspective. But more importantly, I think they’re theologically unsupportable.
Christians are supposed to be a people who live a different sort of Spirit-led politics, a “nation” (1 Peter 2:9) of people from every nation. That we Christians would deport our fellow citizens of the kingdom because they don’t have the right papers and don’t look like “job creators” militates against this fundamental Christian logic. It also repulsed the Catholic Church’s greatest modern thinkers. As Gaudium et Spes says, deportation “insults human dignity,” “poison[s] human society,” and is a “supreme dishonor to the Creator.”
Clearly you think otherwise. I’d be pleased to learn why.
Joel
***
Dear Joel,
Your wife’s experience indicates that the laws constituting America as a nation and Americans as a people are at last being enforced. That is a good thing. What is mystifying is that it should have taken political leaders so long to fulfill their duty to implement laws enacted by Congress at the behest of the people. As Aquinas reminds us, it is a basic precept of natural law that rulers are to uphold the positive laws that it grounds, especially those laws intended to protect citizens from physical injury and financial insecurity. Romans 13:1–7 instructs Christians to submit to governing authorities on the basis that they are instituted by God to maintain order and punish wrongdoing. Illegal migration by definition involves disregarding the legal authority of a nation.
Rapid unvetted migration at scale harms citizens. It depresses working-class wages. It strains public services. It sustains the vast criminal networks that make up the human trafficking industry. It facilitates the flow of drugs that are killing tens of thousands every year. It erodes civic trust. It gradually dissolves the shared heritage of a people—its norms, its traditions, its language, its culture—to the point where it can no longer use the first-person plural. And it harms the migrants’ countries of origin by draining them of the very citizens who would make poor countries less poor.
You cite Gaudium et Spes, which does indeed condemn unjust deportation; but it is not unjust to deport those who hold in contempt the laws of the nation whose hospitality they are seeking to enjoy. Moreover, that encyclical also insists on the indispensability of ordered societies (§26) and the importance of legitimate political boundaries (§74). Nowhere does it imply that there is a universal human right to live and work in a nation, nor would it have been coherent to posit one. Immigration is not a human right that any charter or convention would recognize—it is a privilege that should be granted to a person only insofar as it promotes the national interest.
Yours,
James
***
Dear James,
We can agree that Gaudium et Spes shouldn’t be interpreted as prohibiting deportation no matter what. Some people do hold the law in contempt, after all. But even on your reading, the Trump administration’s mass deportations should be understood to fall under the council’s condemnation. The first people the administration deported legally entered and applied for asylum through the now-defunct CBP One app. Others with no criminal record were sent to Guantánamo Bay. If the council fathers thought these people deportable, what immigrant isn’t a legitimate target (see §26)?
Further, shutting down the U.S. asylum process—which President Biden campaigned on and President Trump carried out—appears to violate the right to asylum (article 14) set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (article 1. A. 2). U.S. asylum law is based on the Protocol’s definition of a refugee; hence the recent proliferation of immigration-related lawsuits.
But I doubt the ultimate basis of our disagreement lies here. Perhaps we can get at it by considering the biblical query, “Who is my neighbor?” If I’ve read you rightly, you believe Christians should put their countrymen above the foreigner. I believe, however, that Christ rejected such thinking in the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Recall what led the expert in the law to ask Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:27) He believed that to inherit eternal life he must love his neighbor as himself. Jesus agreed. In fact, he called this the second greatest commandment (Matt. 25:27).
So Christians advocating strict limits on immigration seem to have a dilemma: (1) Either they must argue that they could lovingly deport their neighbor—and themselves. Or (2) they must say that the foreigner isn’t their neighbor. Do you believe that the foreigner isn’t your neighbor?
Regards,
Joel
***
Dear Joel,
You argue that Trump’s deportations violate Gaudium et Spes, but that document champions the common good, not an unrestricted right of entry for all. You claim that shutting down asylum breaches international law, but that law grants a right to seek asylum, not to receive it, and restricts refugee status to the persecuted, excluding economic migrants.
Hospitality is a virtue, but not one that eclipses every other. Chesterton’s observation that “[t]he modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad” aptly captures the way some Christians assume that hospitality trumps the many and various virtues required to preserve a just and ordered community.
You say limits on immigration deny that foreigners are neighbors, citing the Parable of the Good Samaritan. But that parable simply enjoins charity to those within our sphere of moral concern, not a dissolution of Samaria’s borders with Judaea! It’s a singular, proximate act—binding a wound—not a summons to treat all, near or far, kin or stranger, with equal practical regard.
Charity does not end at home, but it does begin there. Paul urges the Christians in Galatia to do good to all, but especially to the household of faith (Gal. 6:10). Love, in other words, is radial; and love’s intensities must be ordered if we finite and fallen creatures are to love all our neighbors well.
Your dilemma presents a false dichotomy: The foreigner can be my neighbor situationally, but that does not mean he enjoys perpetual parity of moral regard with those tied to me by kin, culture, or citizenship. Deportation is a loving act insofar as it upholds justice by protecting the innocent. Nowhere is this truth plainer than when the deported are criminals like the gang members and people-traffickers of Tren de Aragua, notorious for their murderous violence and callous commodification of human life.
Reconciling love for humanity and love for one’s own is a moral challenge that will often be freighted with difficulty, but no Christian should treat it as insuperable.
Warmly,
James
***
Dear James,
Do you have in mind a right to “seek” asylum that a government could fulfill without a functioning asylum program? That’s a pretty miserable little right. But no matter. We have bigger (theological) fish to fry.
Back to the Good Samaritan. You wrote that the parable “simply enjoins charity to those within our sphere of moral concern,” not “to treat all, near or far, kin or stranger, with equal regard.”
I take it you’re describing the ordo amoris, the notion that Christians should love those closest to them—family, friends, countrymen—before strangers and foreigners. You’ve rightly noted before in First Things that Augustine is often credited with Christianizing the idea. But in coming to grips with the Good Samaritan, Augustine didn’t put human beings in rank order by how tightly natural ties bound them. Instead, he asked in De Doctrina Christiana: “Who can fail to see that there is no exception to this, nobody to whom compassion is not due? The commandment extends even to our enemies.” Augustine didn’t jive well with our modern ordo amoris.
His conclusion is rooted in the parable itself. Some readers will know that Samaritans—descendants of the exiled northern kingdom of Israel (2 Kings 17)—had built a counter-temple on Mount Gerizim. A century before Jesus’s birth, Jews burned that temple, sacked their cities, and enslaved the population. Samaritans could hardly fail to remember this. For their part, Jews saw Samaritans as a cultural pollution: heretics at best, traitors and idolators at worst.
So Jesus’s Samaritan had far weightier natural reasons to bypass the wounded Jew than American Christians today have to summarily deport their neighbors without papers. These two didn’t know each other. The Samaritan doubtless had kin and friends with pressing claims on his affections, time, and money. Their peoples hated each other.
And yet he showed mercy. Doing likewise, Jesus said, is the path to eternal life (Luke 10:25, 37).
Joel
***
Dear Joel,
No one contests the basic principle of asylum. But the mass importation of tens of millions of unvetted aliens—some deserving asylum, but many not—has shattered public trust in such systems all across the West. It has hardened citizens against the truly needy and replaced charity with resentment, especially among society’s most marginalized.
You misunderstand the ordo amoris. Love for all could not possibly entail equal practical concern for all. That way lies moral paralysis and social collapse. Proximity is the criterion for calibrating compassion. No one would have faulted the Samaritan for failing to care for the victim had he decided not to take the road to Jericho that day. If you think that the message of the Parable of the Good Samaritan is that Samaria should welcome and care for all of Judaea’s dispossessed, think again.
In the passage you cite, Augustine tells us that compassion is due to all, not that it is due to all to the same degree. He also correctly insists the duty extends to enemies, but note that he uses the word inimicos (personal enemies), not hostes (public enemies). The command to forgive and love a personal foe does not mean we should embrace those who are hostile to the common good. And if you’re not clear that unvetted mass migration swells the ranks of public enemies, ask the grieving families of Laken Riley, Mollie Tibbetts, Kate Steinle, Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin, or Aiden Clark.
Strangers deserve kindness within the constraints of reason and justice. Aquinas rightly insists that prioritizing the common good means barring alieni who threaten it, a position plainly rooted in Scripture: Deuteronomy 23:3–4 excludes Moabites for their past hostility; the fate of the Gibeonites in Joshua 9:21–27 for deceitful entry is servitude not membership; Leviticus 19:34 applies only to sojourners who honor their host nation, as Ruth the Moabite so movingly does (Ruth 1:16); Hebrews 13:2 and Matthew 25:35 urge personal kindness to strangers; and so on. None of these justifies the immense social upheaval and demographic chaos that mass migration has unleashed.
Yours,
James
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