A Short Treatise On Immigration

George Barna Group

‘What we’re finding is that when we ask them about all the key issues of the day, [90 percent of Pastors] telling us, Yes, the Bible speaks to every one of these issues. Then we ask them: Well, are you teaching your people what the Bible says about those issues?–and the numbers drop…to less than 10 percent of pastors who say they will speak to it.’

The reasons for that doubtless are varied. I intend to suggest a couple.

First, many conservative Pastor have been convinced that the pulpit is not the place for these kinds of pedestrian messages. The thought goes that the Pulpit is so special that we dare not waste time in it teaching on comparatively un-spiritual issue of the day. And so Ministers avoid issues like what God’s word teaches on issues like “Capital Punishment,” “progressive taxation,” “death or property tax,” “usury,” “centralized banking,” “minimum wage laws” or “illegal immigration,” as well as any number of other subject matter that is deemed “not Holy enough for the pulpit.” “We need to focus on ‘Spiritual Issues,’ so the story goes and as such God’s people hear very little of God’s mind on these types of issues.

Second, the reasons like these issues don’t come up in the pulpit is that they are prone to being controversial and as ministers like to avoid controversy so that the giving doesn’t go down, because angry people leave Churches, ministers tend to avoid these kind of subject matters like the plague.

The Barna report that I cited out of the chute confirms this reasoning. The report went on to ask: “Why the disconnect between your confidence that God speaks to all of life but your reluctance to teach that? According to Barna, the answer is simple. The answer lies in the conviction that Pastors are concerned about building big Church and one can’t build large churches based on sermons that are inherently controversial.

A third reason that these kinds of subject are not broached from the Pulpit may also be fear of the IRS 501c3 tax-exempt status being revoked.

Today we briefly take up one of those controversial issues and that is the issue of immigration,

43The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low. 44He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.

Here God explicitly says that one consequence of His people’s disobedience is that they are oppressed by the stranger that is among them.

The immigrants who live among you will be promoted over you, higher and higher! But you will be demoted, lower and lower!

Deuteronomy 28:43 (Common English Bible Translation)

There are more than one Hebrew word translated as “stranger,” “sojourner,” “alien,”

The picture that is painted is one of an outsider among a foreign people who at times is a part of the culture and at other times is on the margins. This is a person who is counted among a specific people, but does not themselves belong to that people. They are required to obey the laws of the land, and can even participate in some of the customs, but in the end, they are still outsiders. This status threatens to lead to oppression, even though oppression of the sojourner and other marginalized people is expressly prohibited.  This paints a picture of a people who exist within the nation, but occupy the margins; they are in, but not included. There are thus continuities and discontinuities between the alien and the native born.

Of all the verses in Deuteronomy, the passage that sends the most mixed signals on this word and concept is Deut 5:12-15. Here sojourners are promised the same Sabbath rest as citizens, an indication of equality. However, when viewed in a slightly different manner we notice they are listed after children, slaves and livestock, which could indicate they were viewed no higher than the beasts of burden.

So, what we see here is that this idea of stranger, alien, sojourner requires context in order of us to understand how it is being used. Clearly in this Dt. 28 passage the word is being used in more of a discontinuity sense. We know this because God is saying that disobedience will bring the result that the alien … the one not belonging to the Israel as Israel will rise higher and higher over them. A clear demarcation is being made between the immigrant and the native son.

The resident alien (ger) in Israel was never so integrated and assimilated into the Israeli social order that the distinction between citizen born and alien evaporated. The resident alien (ger) was held to the same law, could become part of the worship cult BUT they were always known as distinct from Israeli born. Hence they are continuously referred to as ger (stranger).

Having said this we should realize that clearly there is a immigrant class that is living among the people of God. This people are not to be oppressed. They are to be treated with justice according to God’s law and they are to be able to find a way in the land. However, they are clearly the “tail” of the social order.

We know this because the text teaches that the roles will be reversed for disobedience. They who were once the head will become the tail and those who were once the tail will become the head.

So one judgment of God upon Israel’s disobedience is that God’s people will become strangers and aliens in their own land.

We should note here also that this text does away with notions of egalitarianism. All peoples in all settings are not equal. God speaks here of one people being a tail and one people being a head and says that He is the one that makes that to be the case and in here we learn that obedience to God’s Law results in being the head.

It is not Christianity that teaches egalitarianism but rather it is Liberalism as Machen noted,

“… one thing is perfectly plain—whether or not liberals are Christians, it is at any rate perfectly clear that liberalism is not Christianity. And that being the case, it is highly undesirable that liberalism and Christianity should continue to be propagated within the bounds of the same organization. A separation between the two parties in the Church is the crying need of the hour… The modern liberal doctrine is that all men everywhere, no matter what their race or creed, are brothers.”

(J.Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p.133)

Of course we have come to the point that we no longer think in terms of categories like stranger, alien, foreigner, and sojourner which means we no longer think in terms of family. If we take Deuteronomy 28 seriously and find delight with the stranger being lifted above us we must at least ask ourselves if we hate our family and secondly if we are under God’s just punishment for our disobedience.

When we think of our own immigration issues we see that the result here is also that the head is becoming the tail and that the tail is becoming the head

This reality is portrayed as low skill labor class immigrants saturate our markets. Because of this immigration saturation opportunities for the native born at the entry job level have markedly decreased and those Americans who are the most to be hurt by this policy have experienced a dip in wages as a result of this saturation immigration.  Immigration expert George Borjas estimates that immigration is responsible for half the decrease observed in the wages of high-school dropouts.  “The biggest winners from immigration are owners of businesses that employ a lot of immigrant labor and other users of immigrant labor”, writes Borjas. “The other big winners are the immigrants themselves.”  The primary losers are native citizens with minimal skills and low levels of education.

There is a head and tail reversal going on here as a consequence of disobedience to God’s law.   This saturation immigration is creating a coercive and massive transfer of wealth from productive tax payers to the world’s poor from other nations.  Knowing this about illegal immigration and still supporting illegal immigration is an endorsement thus of theft on a grand scale in the name of philanthropic do-goodism and “Christian” charity. It is to invoke the sanctity of theft in the name of Christian charity. It is to disinherit our children so as to place the alien above the native born. James Hoffmeier, in his book, “The Immigration Crisis” teaches that a State is under no compulsion to have a generous immigration policy and does have a responsibility to protect its borders –just as States did even in the Old Testament. The biblical texts used by progressive Christian organizations like “Sojourners” to support illegal immigration are ripped out of their context in order to guilt the laity into thinking being a good Christian means disinheriting one’s self and children by supporting illegal immigration.

R. J. Rushdoony probed these issues as far back as 1965 in the context of the passage of the Immigration law that has finally placed us where we are now at. Rushdoony said then,

“The purpose of this immigration policy then is to unify man, to bring about the unity of the godhead. Its purpose, and its premise, is not economic but religious. It is theologically rooted in this religious dream, the United Nations.”

Rushdoony realized that the 1965 immigration act was religious in its essence. It was about pursuing a New World Order where man would be God. Rushdoony was insisting that where Humansim thrives, via Statist expression, there you will have a Unitarianism that requires the same oneness in all men, in a universal order, as obtains in the Unitarian God State.

One God-State to rule them all,
One God-State to find them,
One God-State to amalgamate them all,
and in the darkness bind them

So, Rushdoony realized that the immigration push was to eliminate all borders so that the humanist global order could come to the fore. Rushdoony understood that the immigration act in 1965 (and what is currently happening is merely the flowering of that Legislation) was being pushed by Humanists desiring to destroy the Nation State order. Rushdoony understood that such immigration was not Biblical because its real purpose and goal was the destruction of a Christian social order and the Christian religion.

This intent to assimilate the world into a New World Order via mass migration and immigration has no historical legs in terms of Biblical Christianity.

A Reformed Old Testament scholar Martin Wyngaarden, from Calvin Seminary a generation ago, recognized this when he wrote,

“Thus the highest description of Jehovah’s covenant people is applied to Egypt, — “my people,” — showing that the Gentiles will share the covenant blessings, not less than Israel. Yet the several nationalities are here kept distinct, even when Gentiles share, in the covenant blessing, on a level of equality with Israel. Egypt, Assyria and Israel are not nationally merged. And the same principles, that nationalities are not obliterated, by membership in the covenant, applies, of course, also in the New Testament dispensation.”

“More than a dozen excellent commentaries could be mentioned that all interpret Israel as thus inclusive of Jew and Gentile, in this verse, — the Gentile adherents thus being merged with the covenant people of Israel, though each nationality remains distinct.”

Martin J. Wyngaarden
The Future of the Kingdom in Prophecy and Fulfillment: A Study of the Scope of “Spiritualization” in Scripture pp. 101-102.

Before 1950 or so no orthodox Christian theologian of any heft believed in this mass amalgamation project that mass immigration portends.

Conclusion,

The common view of immigration on the Left is that Mass immigration is a useful weapon on four fronts

1.) The war against the ideal of limited government

The influx of third world immigrants that is being advocated will result in the burgeoning power of the State as these new immigrants vote for candidates who will take from the stolen monies of citizens, that are nested in the Government coffers, and redistribute those monies to the new race pimps representing the immigrant constituency. The consequence of this, of course, is to expand government in its stealing from Paul to give to Peter routine.

2.) The greater jihad against the historic American nation itself

Bertolt Brecht in a similar context where people had risen up against their government poetically asked,

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Clearly a state apparatus that fancies that the best arrangement for a State is a Centralized top down State replete with a planned economy is going to do all it can to create a citizenry that agrees with them and will support the State. Traditional Americans who know their history and are familiar with their birthright will be, at the very least, diluted by the immigration influx.

3.) Enriching the Super Wealthy by swamping the market with low wage slaves.

Immigration redistributes the wealth upward into the pockets of the super-wealthy as wages are suppressed while the super rich get richer. What this means is a “have vs. have not” social order with the corresponding erasure of the middle class. For the “haves” there are high stock prices, rising home values and surging corporate profits buoying their recovery-era incomes . For the “have nots”their incomes are weighed down and falling by high unemployment and stagnant wages  due to the labor surplus created by untrammeled immigration.

“Love” for the immigration translates into disregard for the native born. We take care of the world at the expense of disinheriting our own children.

4.) And the Ultimate goal … To destroy the Historically Orthodox Christian Faith

This provides the ultimate reason biblical Christians should resist untrammeled immigration. Ultimately the agenda in this mad pursuit is to recruit the pagan hordes and so dilute the leverage and muscle of what little remains of Christianity. All of this is ultimately at attack on the Crown Rights of the Lord Christ. It is a indirect attack on Christianity. The intent is to pull down those who have most carried the banner of Christianity on a civilizational basis. In pulling down the West via mass immigration and amalgamation, Christianity falls also.

Most of the types of Biblical Christianity that informed America for the first 75 years or so has long gone into eclipse but remnants remain. With continued immigration Christianity will be redefined just as the rest of the nation is redefined. Biblical Christianity accounts for the belief in limited Government, the belief if just wages and just prices, and the belief system of traditional Americans. As such, this ultimate goal of destroying the Historically Orthodox Christian faith, if accomplished, assures that the lesser proximate goals are achieved.

Love of Christ as well as love for our people, our culture, our Fathers and our generations yet unborn require us, as Christians, to fight.