A Judeo-Christian Approach to Illegal Immigration

By Bryan Fischer, Executive Director

The immigration policy of the United States has historically been grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Two of its fundamental principles should guide us in the future as they have in the past.

The first is compassion. God commanded ancient Israel, “The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt (Leviticus 19:34).” As ancient Israel was, we are a nation of immigrants and this has prompted us to develop the most generous, open-handed, and open-hearted approach to legal immigration in the modern world.

We roll out the welcome mat every year to a million people who take advantage of our liberal immigration policies and become full-fledged American citizens.

The second principle is justice. God commanded ancient Israel, “The community is to have the same rules for you and for the alien living among you. The same laws and regulations will apply both to you and to the alien living among you (Numbers 15:15,16).”

The principle here is equal treatment before the bar of justice. The native-born and alien are equally obligated to obey the law, and equally subject to punishment for violating the law. Neither the native-born nor the immigrant who disobeys the law should be exempt from accountability for illegal behavior.

We cannot maintain our respect for law if 11 million illegal residents are allowed to not only scoff at our laws but be rewarded for their behavior.

Unfortunately, the current proposal from Republicans in the Senate does exactly that. It is a form of amnesty, a solution tried and found wanting in 1986 when we legalized 3 million illegals in hopes of solving our immigration problem. The result? A problem four times the size in just 20 years.

This is not a civil rights issue; the civil rights movement was about upholding the law, not breaking it. The Creator has endowed no one with the inalienable right to sneak into someone else’s country and break its laws.

Perversely, the Senate would hand out the greatest rewards to those who have broken the law for the longest time. Those who have been in this country illegally for more than five years would be placed on a guaranteed track to citizenship without having to do so much as leave town.

Contrast this with the story of a Romanian friend of mine who came to America on a student visa to pursue education and opportunity here. He has played by immigration rules from day one.

He discovered recently that he had inadvertently missed a deadline – by nine days - to file for a change of status following his graduation. He learned to his shock that immigration officials showed no leniency and no flexibility. He was forced to leave the country within the week, and is now back in Romania separated from his wife and young son and starting the immigration process all over.

Here are some proposed solutions to bring compassion into balance with justice. First, we should secure our borders. We do not lack the resources, the manpower, or the technology to do this. We lack only the will. Building a wall – whether the electronic kind or the brick and mortar kind - to protect our border is the polar opposite of the Berlin Wall. As Charles Krauthammer says, a wall built to keep people in is a prison; a wall to keep people out is an expression of national sovereignty.

A mental hospital once devised a simple test to measure the sanity of its patients. The staff would turn on the faucets in the shower room, then give patients a mop and bucket with instructions to clean up the water. Only those who turned off the tap first, before mopping up the mess, were considered sane enough for the real world. So a rational immigration policy dictates that we secure our borders as a first priority before we figure out how to clean up the mess created by an unchecked tide of illegal immigration.

Loose borders endanger our national security, illustrated by reports of growing numbers of Islamic terrorists who melt into the migrant population and cross our borders using the same tactics as conventional illegals. Ground Zero is the product of lax immigration enforcement.

Loose borders endanger our domestic tranquility. Currently, 29% of all inmates in the federal correctional system are illegals. If a criminal underclass can slip through the sieve, then everyone’s life, liberty, and property are at risk.

Loose borders endanger our national health. A number of diseases once virtually eradicated in the U.S., such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, are making a comeback on American soil, brought here by illegals who are not screened for communicable diseases.

Loose borders endanger our economy. Despite popular perception, illegals consume more in taxpayer-funded benefits than they generate in economic growth. The costs of medical care, social programs, education, and incarceration far outstrip their contributions to the American economy. Dozens of hospitals have been bankrupted by the obligation to provide free health services to illegals, which deprives everyone in those areas of quality immediate care.

Even the liberal and often partisan Paul Krugman of the New York Times says, “Unfortunately, low-skill immigrants don’t pay enough taxes to cover the cost of [government] benefits they receive.” Illegals may be a benefit to some employers, but they are burden to every taxpayer.

Meanwhile, Mexico has a massive military presence on its southern border to deter illegal immigration, forbids even legal immigrants from any participation in its political process, makes illegal immigration a felony offense, and deports more illegal immigrants than the United States.

Second, I do not believe we should punish employers who hire illegals. It is easy for illegals to procure counterfeit documents, and we should not expect employers to be expert document examiners or surrogate immigration agents. They should not be punished for the failure of the government to secure our borders.

Besides, employer sanctions were at the heart of the 1986 amnesty bill, and they didn’t work then any more than they will work now. Interior enforcement is so lax now that only three businesses were cited for hiring illegals in 2004, down from 417 five years earlier.

We can’t know that illegals are doing work that Americans will not do because their presence artificially depresses wages. As a young man, I worked in a car wash, a vegetable shed, a meat packing plant, and picked grapes. Younger Americans today are willing to do the same if the price is right. A Harvard study indicated that American high school graduates would earn eight percent more if illegals were not in the labor pool.

Third, we should insist on immediate deportation for any illegal who comes to the attention of law enforcement, even for a traffic stop. They do not have a right to the same legal process the Constitution guarantees to American citizens.

Such a policy would not remove illegals from our midst, but would make them the most careful and law abiding segment of society.

We cannot round up 11 million people and deport them. But neither should we legalize them and thus reward their defiance of the law. They are, in Thomas Sowell’s words, “gate crashers,” not “guest workers,” and should be treated as such.

Further, the immigration bureaucracy has a backlog of 7 million background checks. How will it possibly deal with the sudden demand to process 11 million new ones? Reports have emerged that immigration officials are spending as little as four minutes per application. This is a virtual guarantee that the screening process will be slipshod and error prone.

Fourth, we should insist on rapid assimilation of legal immigrants to prevent cultural disintegration, which is a form of national suicide. We should insist that immigrants learn English and American history, and embrace American values such as pride in their American identity, belief in America’s democratic principles, and a commitment to the Protestant work ethic of self-reliance, hard work, and upright character.

European nations are now discovering the problems created by the presence of millions of immigrants who have no love for their host country and its traditions but instead are implacably hostile to the values that give these nations their identity.

Many immigrants from Mexico believe that the American Southwest – including parts of Idaho - rightly belongs to Mexico. They believe that the reclamation of “Aztlan” will come through the sheer force of numbers. They have no desire to assimilate into American culture; in their minds, we are the illegals who should be required to leave.

Our national slogan is “E Pluribus Unum,” “Out of many, one.” We have found unity as a people by merging our original ethnic identity into a new and higher identity as simple, un-hyphenated Americans.

A recent Gallup Poll found that 81 percent of us think illegal immigration to the United States is out of control. Now is the time to act, to protect our security, our economy, our values, and our national character.

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