A Thought Experiment
At this point, I would like to ask my progressive Christian friends a few questions.
Not rhetorical questions, actually.
I sincerely want to know where they draw the line.
Suppose we could accurately identify every noncitizen who is unlawfully present in the United States.
Would it be morally permissible for a Christian to support the removal of those who have committed serious crimes?
Surely the answer must be yes.
And if such a person is already sitting in a county jail, is it really more Christian for local authorities to refuse cooperation with ICE—thereby requiring federal agents later to locate that person somewhere in the community?
Why?
Would it not be more humane, safer, and more orderly for immigration authorities to take custody at the jail once the criminal case permits it?
Would supporting that policy make me insufficiently concerned about “the stranger”?
I don’t see how.
Now suppose the person being removed has a wife and children.
Family separation raises serious moral concerns. But does that make removal morally impermissible? What if assistance is provided so the family can remain together by returning together?
Would Christians still be prohibited from supporting removal?
If so, why?
Let’s go further.
What about a noncitizen who entered unlawfully, has no valid claim to remain, and openly rejects the laws and civic obligations of the country whose hospitality he is demanding?
Does “love the stranger” require that he remain indefinitely?
Again: why?
And here I want to make an important distinction.
I am not arguing that government should deport people merely because they criticize America, wave a Mexican flag at a protest, advocate socialism, practice Islam, or hold political opinions I dislike.
My question is more fundamental:
Does Christian hospitality impose no reciprocal obligation upon the person receiving that hospitality?
Does the stranger have duties as well as rights?
Must he obey the laws?
May the host country expect him to accommodate himself to its civic order?
May it refuse admission—or terminate permission to remain—when the conditions of its lawful immigration system have not been satisfied?
And may the state consider national security, public safety, capacity for assimilation, and the welfare of its existing citizens when deciding whom to admit?
If the answer to all of those questions is still, “No, Christian love requires us to let them remain,” then I think the biblical proof-texting needs to be examined very carefully.
Ancient Israel certainly did not understand “love the stranger” to mean that the stranger entered a community without obligations.
The ger (stranger) was protected.
He was not to be exploited or oppressed.
He was to receive justice.
But he also lived within an ordered community governed by laws that applied to him as well as to the native-born.
That part of the biblical picture tends to disappear when “welcome the stranger” is lifted out of its literary and historical context and dropped directly into a twenty-first-century immigration debate.
So here is the question I really want my progressive Christian friends to answer:
Is there any immigration restriction or deportation policy that you would regard as morally legitimate?
If the answer is yes, then good. We are no longer debating whether Christians may enforce immigration laws. We are debating which laws, under what circumstances, enforced how, and with what degree of mercy and prudence.
That is a political and prudential argument.
Scripture informs it.
Scripture constrains it.
Scripture certainly forbids cruelty and injustice.
But Scripture does not settle every policy question simply by giving us the phrase “love the stranger.”
And if the answer is no—if practically every meaningful attempt to exclude, remove, or restrict unlawful immigration is condemned as unchristian—then I begin to suspect that something other than exegesis is doing much of the work.
Perhaps a political philosophy is being smuggled into the biblical text and then handed back to us as though it were simply “what Jesus requires.”
That is precisely the kind of proof-texting Christians of every political persuasion should resist.
The Political Philosophy Beneath the Proof Text
I suspect there is sometimes another political philosophy operating beneath this biblical argument—one that should be brought into the open and debated on its own merits.
It goes roughly like this:
The wealthy nations of the “Global North”—the old “First World”—became wealthy in significant measure through colonialism, slavery, exploitation, extraction, and domination of the poorer nations of the “Global South” or “Majority World.”
Therefore, today’s enormous disparities in wealth are not merely differences in economic development. They are, at least in significant measure, the accumulated consequences of historical injustice.
And from that premise follows a reparative obligation.
Wealthy Western nations are therefore expected to redistribute wealth, accept more migrants from poorer nations, relax immigration restrictions, and in some versions of the argument treat migration itself as a form of reparation for colonialism.
That line of reasoning is not something I am inventing. Serious contemporary political theorists explicitly argue for “migration as reparation.”
Now, that is a political and historical argument worth having.
But notice what has happened.
We have moved a very long way from:
“You shall love the stranger.”
We are now talking about colonial guilt, global redistribution, reparations, and the moral legitimacy of national borders.
Those are not the same argument.
And that is precisely why I object when the entire package is presented to Christians as though it simply falls out of a few biblical verses about “the stranger.”
It doesn’t.
If someone wants to argue that the modern West owes the developing world reparations because its prosperity was produced principally through exploitation, make that historical case.
If someone wants to argue that present-day Americans inherit a moral debt for the acts of previous empires or generations, make that philosophical case.
If someone wants to argue that immigration should function as a mechanism of global wealth redistribution, make that economic case.
But don’t simply quote Leviticus and imply that Christians who reject those conclusions have somehow rejected Scripture.
That is exactly the move I am objecting to.
And I reject much of the underlying premise anyway.
The prosperity of the modern West cannot plausibly be reduced to colonial plunder.
Institutions matter.
The rule of law matters.
Property rights matter.
Scientific and technological development matter.
Markets matter.
Political stability, education, cultural habits, and human capital matter.
History certainly includes exploitation, conquest, slavery, and genuine injustices for which moral reckoning may be necessary.
But the simplistic morality play in which the rich world became rich primarily because it stole from the poor world—and therefore now owes the poor world access to its borders and accumulated wealth—is an historical and economic thesis, not a biblical commandment.
And that is the crucial distinction.
Once again, the danger is that a modern political ideology gets smuggled into the biblical text and then emerges wearing a clerical collar.
That is not exegesis.
That is politics with a proof text.
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