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.
