A Theology of Immigration | The New Yorker
When I was working with refugees in Lebanon and Turkey and the Iraq crisis and Rwanda and elsewhere, you know, when everything is taken away from you, God is all you have left. So we need a way to talk about who God is and who we are before God, and I think theology gives us a way to do that.
I’ve noticed something similar in the debates about homelessness and immigration: the Church is doing enormous work on the ground, but theological issues seem to have been sidelined from the broader public discourse.
I went to graduate school at Berkeley, so when I was in California, I remember one day I woke up and, literally, on the other side of the bed I was sleeping in, in front of the window, was a homeless man. And for me, that began a long journey of trying to understand the theology on the other side of the wall – not just from the perspective of a library or a room, but from the perspective of the street and the people who live on the margins.
What you see in the teachings of the Church, called the seamless garment of life, cuts through homelessness, immigration, the elderly, and all of life’s other problems. When I spend time talking to migrants at borders around the world, I often ask them: What would you like people to hear? Or if you could preach on Sunday, what would you want people to know? And it’s often a question of dignity. It’s about saying: we are human beings here, and you treat us like we are dogs.
The problem is that these people have become non-people. I mean, we don’t even see them. And I think part of the work of the Church is to say: actually, these people belong to a human community, and they need to be seen, and so they also have a place in the discourse.
You make this fundamental argument that all men are created in the image of God, Imago Dei. This is something many people would say they believe. But when you see the news right now, the horrible videos that are coming out, the responses that are being made to them, do you have the impression that this idea is in crisis?
What we also included in this understanding is that in the fall we lost the likeness, but we never lose the image. There is a deep core within us that is indestructible: our worth and value before God.
One of the things I often say is that if we cannot see something of ourselves in the immigrant, in the homeless, or in people considered different from us, we have lost touch with our humanity. So I think that’s what’s at stake. We have deported our own soul, if we have truly lost touch with our own humanity.
You argue that every person should have everything they need to live a truly human life. What does this look like in practice if it’s not just about opening borders?
The Church recognizes that nations have the right to control their borders, but this is not an absolute right. It is subject to a broader sense of what is called the universal destination of all goods. And what does the Church mean by this? In practice, everything belongs to God, and when we die, we will have to leave everything behind anyway. So there is a way that we are, at best, stewards in this life, not absolute owners of anything. And even our nationalities and national identities are only of relative importance in light of a broader vision of what the kingdom of God is.
The question is: what is the narrative that shapes our consciousness about this? If the narrative is: this is my business, this is my country, this is where I belong, this is what I own, and I must defend and protect it, that’s one way to understand it. But if the narrative says that everything I have is a gift, and when I die I’m going to give it all up, that I’m a steward and not an owner, and that I can be judged by how I use what I’ve been given, that’s a different way of inhabiting the world. If the story is about how to come closer to communion with God and closer connection with one another, with a life and faith that does justice, in terms of caring for one another, that is a very different way of inhabiting the world.
