January 6, 2017

“For you were once strangers”

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Family friends once told us how, fleeing the Red Army towards the end of World War II, they were taken in by a Hungarian family just before Christmas. Overhearing them discussing the preparation of “kutya” (also transliterated as “kutia”) for Christmas eve supper, the Hungarians were alarmed by this strange Ukrainian custom: kutya is Hungarian for “dog.”

This anecdote highlights some aspects of immigration. Many immigrants are refugees – they are not merely “seeking a better life,” but fleeing for their lives. Christians are morally bound to offer shelter to the homeless stranger, and not only at Christmas. But sometimes, cultural misunderstandings complicate charitable action.

Today, Hungary is in fact one of the countries that has taken a firm stand on immigration, as Europe again finds itself flooded with desperate refugees. Although they include Christians as well as Muslims, many Europeans are determined to keep them out. The situation is replete with irony: a de-Christianized Europe wants to defend Christian civilization; Christian charity to Muslims threatens to undo Christianity itself.

In the United States, the question looks somewhat different. In addition to refugees from the Middle East, we are concerned with the deluge of immigrants from Latin America. As mostly economic migrants, they resemble our own Ukrainian “First Wave” of the late 1800s and our current “Fourth Wave.” But the distinction between a political refugee fleeing persecution or death and an economic migrant fleeing dire poverty or starvation can seem immaterial. In any case, this complex problem, which enjoyed prominence in the recent presidential election, remains near the top of the national agenda as a new administration begins to formulate its policies.

Immigration has economic, security and cultural aspects. The economic argument for restricting it centers on competition for low-paying jobs in a situation of high unemployment, particularly for working-class white males. We sometimes think of the United States as a lifeboat that will sink if it takes on too many of the world’s survivors. An overload of immigrants could destroy our quality of life – a costly way to discourage further immigration.

The chief economic concern, however, is illegal immigration across our permeable southern border. President-elect Donald Trump’s proposal to build a wall has been ridiculed, though its impracticability is disputed. While China’s Great Wall, built mostly during the 16th century, had little effect, Muscovy’s Izium and Belgorod lines of the following century kept the Tatars in check. But proposals to seal our borders smack of hypocrisy: we maintain our high standard of living by investing capital and extracting resources around the globe, and are perfectly happy to receive capital from other countries – as long as it isn’t human capital.

We might also do well to address the root causes of excessive economic immigration rather than its symptoms, and in the long rather than the short term. By increasing development aid to source countries like Mexico, for example, helping them to sustain their populations, we would reduce their incentive to emigrate. This applies to the Middle East too: immigration hard-liner Hungary has created a special department to help persecuted Christians survive at home rather than fleeing abroad.

The security issue has obvious headline appeal. Mr. Trump has proposed stopping all Muslim immigration, in the hope that this would prevent the infiltration of terrorists. But the constitutionality, feasibility and effectiveness of such a policy are doubtful. Can we ask potential immigrants to declare their religion? How would we identify Muslims? Would excluding them prevent terrorism? Even a blonde, blue-eyed American-born citizen can become a radical Islamist and engage in jihad. And excluding everyone from a “Muslim country” could prevent Christian refugees, persecuted by those same Muslims, from finding safe harbor in the United States. Of course, weeding out potential terrorists from a mass of prospective immigrants is slow, hard work. Mistakes are inevitable. But what if the post-war U.S. had tried to keep out Nazi collaborators by simply excluding all East European and Soviet refugees? True, former collaborators do not pose a security threat. But a policy of total exclusion would keep out legitimate immigrants without guaranteeing that terrorists would not worm their way in all the same.

Here again, a long-term policy addressing root causes would be advisable. We must avoid the kind of half-hearted and inconsistent meddling that has contributed to the humanitarian disaster in Syria. Taking Muslim grievances about Western policies like aggressive secularization seriously, and fostering Christian-Muslim dialogue (that much-derided word) could eventually help defuse the simmering discontent that feeds terrorism, while discrediting the false theologies that support it.

The cultural issues are delicate. We have tried to limit the immigration of certain populations before, notably in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 sought to limit further immigration from southern and eastern Europe by setting quotas. Some Americans want to restore white Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance. They would have to go back to a time before the influx of the Irish (caricatured as unruly Catholic breeders), the Italians (cast as thieves and mobsters), the Poles, Jews and Asians, not to mention those drunken Ruthenian strike-breakers with their married priests and weird ritual foods (see kutya, above). Does diversity dilute or enrich?

In fact, all those groups have assimilated. In so doing, they have sometimes shunned – or even exploited – subsequent immigrant waves from their own homelands. They have also, quite understandably, opposed illegal immigration. Partly for that reason, and to the dismay of liberals, many Latino immigrants voted for Donald Trump. But upward mobility has often meant a switch from “conservative” working-class to liberal middle-class attitudes – always easier to maintain when insulated from their social effects.

Perhaps, on that Christmas of 1944, our friends’ Hungarian hosts, themselves descendants of Magyar migrants, recalled that Joseph, Mary and Jesus had been refugees in Egypt and that God had admonished Moses to love the stranger as himself, “for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33-34; see Exodus 23:9). We might do well to emulate them.

Andrew Sorokowski can be reached at [email protected].

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