Ruth and Naomi Leave Moab, 1860, by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794-1872).
What does a Biblical immigration policy look like? That’s the question I asked myself for years, well before I started writing the current series on immigration, which has now, remarkably, stretched to eighteen installments.
I began writing this series in September 2016, just a couple months before as the US presidential election that had featured immigration as a major issue. Democrat Hillary Clinton told voters, in effect, “you know that whole system of taxpayer subsidized mass immigration / migration / and refugee resettlement?, well, it’s great, it’s wonderful, we need to do more of it and the faster the better. And if you don’t agree with me, you’re irredeemably depolorable.”
Donald Trump, on the other hand, stated that the interests of the American people should be considered first when formulating immigration policy. This is the sort of talk that, on the surface, would seem about as non-controversial as declaring the sun rises in the east, but it sent much of the intellectual, media, and political elite into a paroxysm of outrage.
Much to the shock and chagrin of the movers and shakers, and to the delight of the depolorables, Trump won. In large part, his victory can be attributed to the perceptions by ordinary Americans that he actually took their concerns about immigration policy seriously, rather than unctuously lecture them about how they have a moral obligation to underwrite the costs of mass welfare-based immigration – regardless of how heavy the burden – and then denounce them as hate filled xenophobes for raising even the mildest objection to this arrangement.
Lux Lucet 