Lux Lucet

Ruth and Naomi Leave Moab, 1860, by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794-1872).

Up to this point, most of this series on immigration has been destructive. I have examined immigration stances of various groups – secular and religious liberal, secular and religious conservative, Roman Catholic, globalist – and found them wanting. With this installment, Lord willing, I intend to being building the Reformed, Biblical case for immigration.

The Principle of Free Movement

One error nearly all participants in the immigration debate get wrong is the purpose of borders. As John Robbins pointed out when questioned about immigration, the purpose of borders is to separate rulers, not people, form each other. It’s not the job of governments to tell people where they are to live.

On the immigration restrictionist side we see this misunderstanding represented by the desire to build walls and enact ever tighter immigration laws.

On the open borders side, men who support mass immigration fail to understand that the principle of free movement does not obligate the people of the receiving country to foot the bill for people who wish to come. Immigrants are responsible to pay their own freight. Further, many open borders advocates take the position they do, not because they are interested helping people attain life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but to subvert nations and push a globalist agenda.

The idea of free movement of people can be traced to the Old Testament. For example, when Abraham was called by God to leave Ur of the Chaldees for Canaan, he did not require a passport or any sort of governmental document. He and his family simply up and left. He did not have to negotiate a byzantine bureaucracy to do so.

Likewise when Jacob left to visit Laban. He simply left and went to live with his extended family in another country.

When Jacob was old during the famine, his sons travelled to Egypt to buy grain without any hindrance mentioned in Scripture. Late he and his whole family moved to Egypt.

In the law of Moses, the Israelites were consistently enjoined to welcome the stranger, because they themselves were strangers in Egypt.

On the other hand, restrictions on free movement and deportations were characteristic of big-government imperial powers. For example, the Assyrians deported the population of the Northern Kingdom following the fall of Samaria in 722 BC. In like fashion, Babylon carried off the people of Judah in waves, the last talking place after the conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BC.

According to one source, the earliest known example of a passport was issued by the king of Persia. The account is found in the Book of Nehemiah. In chapter two of that book, Nehemiah requests and is given letters from the king to ensure his safe passage from the Persian capital of Susa to Jerusalem. That these letters served as the equivalent of a modern passport can been see from the words of Nehemiah, who reports that he “gave [the governors in the regions through which he passed] the king’s letters.”

In the New Testament, Acts 18 reports that Paul met a Jewish couple, Aquila and Priscilla, at Corinth. As verse 2 tells us, they were in Corinth, because they had been driven from Rome by a decree of the Emperor Claudius, who had ordered all Jews to leave the city.

Current Barriers to Free Movement

So having just made a Biblical case for free movement of people and open immigration, am I now advocating that the US – I write from an American perspective, because I’m most familiar with this country, but the principles I state as applicable to the US I intend as applicable to other nations as well – throw open its borders and welcome one and all without any restriction at all?

In short, no.

When addressing any political issue, it is important to think about it systematically. Immigration is not an island unto itself. Rather, it is but one policy among many and, therefore, it must be addressed with respect to how immigration is tied to other governmental policies.

Although open immigration and the free movement of people is a goal worthy of pursuit, any attempt to open up immigration must, at the same time, be accompanied by a reduction in the size and scope of government. If open immigration is pursued without also making other, related policy changes, disaster likely will follow.

So what are these other necessary changes of which I speak? In the first place, the welfare state must go. It is often said that during the heyday of Ellis Island in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, about 1/3 of the immigrants eventually returned to their homeland. The was before the New Deal and Great Society welfare state apparatus was put in place, so it was sink or swim for the new arrivals.

This lack of a tax-payer funded safety net was not, as is often assumed today, a failing of American society, but was an expression of America’s Christian heritage of limited government and property rights. Everyone was responsible for himself. “Society” owned no one a living.

In welfare-state America, immigrants and refugees can go on the dole. And to the degree the welfare state is operative in a nation, to that extent there is a disincentive, not only to productive labor, but to assimilation also.

A second barrier to the free movement of people and open immigration to the US is our sloppy definition of citizenship. Because our courts have ruled that, with a few exceptions such as children born to diplomats, any child born in the US is automatically an American citizen, American citizenship has been absurdly cheapened to the point where a woman can come to this country in complete violation of our immigration laws, given birth, and be rewarded with a baby who’s an American citizen. This legal loophole makes a mockery of American citizenship and by all means must be closed. I shall argue this point at greater length in a future installment of this series.

Third, there is the problem of professional ethnic lobbies. These lobbies get their power from certain provisions in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Affirmative Action laws that followed from it. In short, it pays to be an ethnic minority in the US. Until the Affirmative Action laws are struck down, minorities who immigrate to the US enjoy legal protections and opportunities that are unavailable to the native born white Americans.

For example, I know of a case where a Hispanic immigrant received a very lucrative university scholarship designated specifically for Hispanics. Oddly enough, the heritage of the Hispanic person in question was every bit as European as my own, and this individual’s family was far wealthier than the average American. Yet this person received a discriminatory Hispanic only scholarship – can you imagine the howling if someone dared to suggest establishing a scholarship for, say, a white Americans only – due to country of this individual’s origin. This sort of obvious double standard in favor of minorities, the cost of which falls upon the shoulders of native born Americans, is almost certainly responsible, at least in part, for the resentment many Americans feel toward immigrants.

For open immigration to ever by a practical reality, the Affirmative Action double standard must go.

Fourth, our foreign policy needs a radical overhaul. Americans constantly hear talk about this or that refugee crisis, yet the Mainstream Media, deliberately in my opinion, never talk about the origin of the seemingly endless stream of refugees flowing into the US and other Western nations.

Take, for example, all the talk the past few years about the Syrian refugee crisis. Millions of Syrians have fled their native land, with many of them moving to Europe. This raises the question, why did these people leave Syria in the first place? The answer is the ongoing civil was in that country, supported to a very large degree by American money, weapons and direct military involvement. There is not one sound reason for the US to take sides in the Syrian civil war, but the federal government has, contrary to the Constitution and to the Just War principles laid down in Scripture, decided to involve itself anyway.

The pattern in Syria has been repeated many times by the US, especially in the decades since WWII. It has become some common that prominent blogger Steve Sailer has coined a term for it: Invade the World, Invite the World.

Any attempt by the US to solve the refugee crisis must start by acknowledging our own hand in creating it in the first place. We must dump the destructive and immoral neo-conservative policy of preemptive / preventive war and general militarism and return to the Christian foreign policy held by our nation’s founders: We do not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

Fifth, globalism and the New World Order must be rejected, and the principles of Westphalian Sovereignty must once again be embraced. This means rejecting the programs pushed by the Antichrist papacy and the Roman Church-State, the UN, George Soros and his Open Society organization, and fascist crony capitalists who seek to push secretive legislation such as the Trans Pacific Partnership through Congress. None of these individuals and organizations has the interest of the American people at heart. They are wolves who seek to tear the nation to pieces to advance their own evil program of creating a one world government empire.

Mass tax-payer subsidized immigration / migration / and refugee resettlement is one of their favorite techniques for bringing this about. Their purpose is to weaken and ultimately subvert independent nations, particularly strong Western nations, by replacing the native population with foreigners, all the while positing themselves as humanitarians and champions of the poor and downtrodden. A nation rife with warring peoples and economically enslaved by debt is easy pickings for the globalists to sweep into a system of world government.

This technique, what I call weaponized immigration, is not immigration in the traditional sense at all. Despite pious talk by its proponents, its end goal is not about giving the hard working poor of the third world the opportunity to better themselves. It’s about destroying the West in order to create the sort of global empire described in the Book of Revelation, with the Antichrist papacy and the Babylonian Harlot Roman Church-State in charge.

For all these reasons, it is my contention that open immigration and the free movement of people, at least in the full Biblical sense, cannot be realized at the present time. Further, any move to free up immigration must at the same time be accompanied by corrective action in the five areas I’ve identified in this post. This list is not necessarily exhaustive – a good argument can be made that most the social pathologies listed above could not exist apart from our unbiblical, immoral financial system, based as it is on central bank issued, debt based, fiat currencies – but has been put forth as a beginning sketch to at least give the reader a sense of the context of the current immigration problem.

In closing, most important of all it must be emphasized that the current immigration crisis facing the US and the West ultimately not a political problem, but a spiritual one. John Robbins once called the growth of government in the United States the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. And ultimately, the reason for the explosion in the size and scope of government is the collapse of the Christian worldview that shaped the founding of our nation. 21st century Americans no longer believe the same things as their 18th century forefathers. And this includes the latter’s Biblical understanding of the proper role of government. Every single one of the barriers to open immigration mentioned above is a barrier created by a collectivist, that is to say, an antichristian worldview.

If America is to have any chance of solving its immigration problem, Americans must once again seek counsel of the Lord. Anything short of that is a waste of time.