Faith Doesn’t Require ‘Comprehensive Reform’

For people of faith, support for comprehensive immigration reform should be a no-brainer. For the three Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), hospitality to the stranger among us is embedded deep in our DNA. — Gene Robinson, www.washingtonpost.com 10/24/13

Fact Check: “Comprehensive immigration reform” is the euphemism commonly used to describe the legislation before Congress to grant amnesty and citizenship to illegal aliens, to increase legal immigration, and to increase temporary visas for foreigners to take American jobs.

Robinson’s viewpoint seems to be that hospitality to strangers—as he conceives it—trumps every other principle of the Abrahamic tradition. Nothing could be further from the truth. That tradition also affirms the principles of nationhood and the rule of law.

The God of the Bible commanded the nation of Israel to show hospitality to foreigners, but that hospitality was within the context of Israel remaining a nation. Israel was not required to surrender her national character to the needs and demand of foreigners—which indeed the Old Testament scriptures forbade. Foreigners who passed through Israel and lived there on a long-term basis had to abide by the laws of the Israelites. That was the condition for receiving hospitality.

Thus there is no mandate from the Abrahamic tradition to reward people who break our laws and welcome mass migrations that will erase any vestige of our national character and identity. Courting chaos and national suicide has no justification in any legitimate ethical tradition.

Chaos through diversity, however, is most useful to people who want to consolidate power. They can use the chaos and division to seize absolute control in the name of restoring order. The radical left in America promotes mass immigration with this strategy in mind, often while using religious language to conceal its agenda. The goal is tyranny, which the Old Testament scriptures condemn.

The economic right also promotes mass immigration because it wants an endless supply of cheap labor, regardless of the consequences to society. The motive, purely and simply, is greed, a sin strongly condemned by the Abrahamic tradition.

From the standpoint of that tradition, in its full scope, opposition to “comprehensive immigration reform” is the no-brainer.

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