“You must not exploit a resident alien or oppress him, since you were resident aliens in the land of Egypt.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Immigration and border security are two of the hottest political topics in our nation right now. The reasons for this are pretty obvious too, especially if you live in a community near the southern border or one of the major cities were thousands of the immigrants who have crossed the border illegally in the last year are being sent. Having an enormous influx of new residents who don’t speak the language, don’t know the culture, don’t have much in the way of means of supporting themselves, and who may likely owe debts to the criminal cartels who facilitated their getting here in the first place is a recipe for a social and economic disaster. How we should solve this problem as a nation is far beyond the scope of what we could possibly tackle here. How we as followers of Jesus should think about and act toward these folks, on the other hand, is a fair bit clearer. Let’s talk about what we see here, and what it reveals about the character of God.

Let’s start with defining our terms. When the phrase “resident alien” appears in the Old Testament law, we should not imagine someone who has crossed the border illegally. Israel would not have had a cultural category for someone like that. While they certainly had national borders, those borders would not have been guarded quite as closely as modern nations guard ours. People would not have had papers that pronounced them able to live or work in certain areas that were not their original home. Most people didn’t travel like that in the first place. What we should call to mind in this case is someone more like a green card holder; a person who has been given legal permission to be a permanent resident in a nation that was not originally theirs.

In other words, laws like this in the Old Testament do not give us any kind of direction as far as how we should police our borders. Nor do they give us any kind of indication just how many people we should allow into our nation in the first place. They are not even particularly helpful in terms of telling us how we should handle people who have come here illegally. So then, what can they tell us?

Legally speaking, anyone who lived within Israel’s borders would have been expected to obey the laws of the land. In this sense, everyone was held to the same standard. An example of this is the Sabbath law. God is explicit there: no one is to work on the Sabbath for any reason. Everyone – even the resident alien in their midst – was to take a day of rest. If you wanted to live for any amount of time in Israel, you were going to have to submit to God’s laws for the people. Otherwise, you were not going to be allowed freely to be a part of the people. This went for both natives and non-natives alike. Immigrants who didn’t obey the law were to be subject to the same penalties as citizens who didn’t: both were expelled from the people. In this case, the immigrants at least had a tribe they could theoretically return to. The Israelites in this case were in really bad shape.

This practice points us to a couple of important principles that seem to contradict each other, but actually go hand-in-hand. The first principle is that having one set of laws for citizens and another set of laws for non-citizens is unjust. You can’t treat some people differently from others in a legal sense. The law should apply equally to everyone covered by it. If the law declares certain measures by which someone can permanently (or temporarily) live and work in an area, everyone should be held to that.

At the same time, a second principle here is that non-citizens should not be eligible for the same benefits as citizens. There are privileges that come with being a part of a particular people. That is perfectly normal and acceptable. Without these kinds of things in place, citizenship itself starts to become irrelevant. When you are fully a part of a group of people, you naturally gain relational benefits from them that they will not similarly extend to people who are not fully part of that group. This is because relationships have boundaries. If you are willing to live within the boundaries, you are in the relationship. If you are not, you aren’t. If you are not in the relationship, you should not expect to be treated like you are. And, if one party in a relationship starts extending the benefits of being in a relationship to everyone, that sends a signal to the person or people who are already a part of the relationship that the relationship doesn’t really mean anything anymore.

Taking this thinking forward a step, doing things like securing our borders is not an unjust thing to do. Making clear what the boundaries of the relationship are is not only right it is good. This safeguards the integrity of the relationship for the people who are in it. It also tells people who are not in the relationship what to expect if they are going to be a part of it. Scaling this up to the national level, securing the borders of the nation is actually a just thing to do because it prevents people from getting themselves in a situation that will be hard both for them and for the communities where they land who may or may not have the capacity to extend to them even basic human rights without unnecessarily (not to mention unfairly if the nation is unwilling to properly secure its borders) burdening the people who are already living there.

For the last nearly three and a half years, the United States has seen an enormous number of people entering into our nation across our southern border in contravention to the current laws for how a person can legally enter and remain in the nation. Our laws explicitly allow for a certain number of people to legally enter the country with plans to stay and work for an extended period of time each year. The reasons for these numbers are many and take into account things like the capacity of various communities across the country to provide housing and employment opportunities for them. The number we allow is actually a good bit higher than what most other nations in the world allow. The number of people who have illegally entered with plans to stay in the last three years vastly exceeds that number. This creates a huge burden on the communities where these individuals are sent when they arrive because most of these communities don’t have anything like the extra resources lying around to extend public services to them, and it puts the immigrants themselves in situations in which they have to make sometimes terrible choices in order to acquire the means to survive for themselves and their families. This should not be.

So, what should we do about all of this? As I said, that’s way beyond the scope of what we are going to talk about here. Solving this problem is incredibly complex. There are a ton of different factors to consider and pathways to pursue. What is a great deal simpler for us to consider is how we should think about this issue and the people who are involved in it as followers of Jesus. We can start with what we see here. God has compassion on people who are in hard situations. Almost no one becomes an immigrant because everything is going well in their original home. Immigration is almost the result of sin of some kind, and that unfailingly breaks God’s heart. Jesus had incredible compassion on people who were suffering. God is a just God and would not accept His people’s abusing and exploiting immigrants for any reason. That still holds for us today.

As followers of Jesus today, it is incumbent on us to extend the same compassion to immigrants and refugees in our own communities today. If you have immigrants in your community – and you very likely have immigrants in your community – seek them out in order to show them the love and compassion of Christ. Find out which ministries or agencies are working with them and find ways to support those groups. Volunteer with them. Sometimes the thing immigrants need most is not food or shelter, but lessons on how to navigate a culture that is in all likelihood very different from the one they left behind. They need help learning the language. They need people to help watch their kids while they work. They need direction on figuring out the school systems. They need people to advocate for them so that they are able to access all the legal protections to which they are constitutionally entitled. That system alone can be an impossible-to-navigate labyrinth. Having someone walking the path with them can be a great encouragement. It may be that they need to be justly held to account for decisions they’ve made, but we can help make sure that process is as compassionately constructed as it can be.

Immigrants are an incredibly vulnerable part of the population. God cares for the vulnerable. And if He cares for the vulnerable, so should we. While there are many other parts of this issue that are not simple, that part of it is. Let’s make sure we get the simple ones right. Then the more complex ones will be made that much easier.