Love (and Deport) thy Neighbor?
Conservatives Discuss Immigration
by Todd J. Gillman
Originally Published by the Dallas Morning News

For people of faith, the immigration debate requires a trip through a maze of seemingly contradictory teachings.

Does a focus on family values demand a tight border to protect Americans from outsiders, or an open-door policy to ensure opportunity to the poor of other nations? It is more important to welcome the stranger or to respect the rule of law?

At a forum Thursday hosted by the conservative Christian group Family Research Council, conservative and liberal religious leaders lobbed Bible verses, unable to agree on what Jesus would do about the nation's nearly 12 million illegal immigrants.

Immigrant advocates warned that a crackdown would harm families and violate Scripture. And a lawmaker leading the charge for tougher enforcement decried the impulse to direct "compassion" at foreigners while ignoring the plight of low-income Americans.

The three-hour conversation, intense and inconclusive, reflected the gray contours of the moral and political debate over immigration – from the pulpit, along Main Street and in Congress.

"We have a right to expect the government to fulfill its divinely ordained mandate to punish those who break the laws and reward those who do not. Romans 13," said Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. "We also have a divine mandate to act redemptively and compassionately toward those who are in need."

The trick, he said, is to balance those twin mandates.

In terms of policy, he sees neither moral imperative nor political will to round up and deport illegal immigrants. But until the government reverses its "disgraceful failure" to guard the border, he added, there won't be much interest in a guest worker program, either.

Public opinion polls show that conservatives – political and religious – generally favor a crackdown, including tighter border controls, criminal penalties for employers who hire illegal workers, perhaps even sanctions against the immigrants themselves.

Other clergy, notably Catholic bishops, have organized rallies, pushed for a new guest worker program and promoted plans to let illegal immigrants attain citizenship eventually.

But the leaders of most evangelical Christian groups have stayed on the sidelines, including the Family Research Council and Dr. Land's denomination, the nation's largest Protestant group with more than 16.3 million members.

The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez Jr., president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, an evangelical group with 15 million members, called that frustrating – especially given that conservative Hispanics have stood with other evangelicals on gay marriage, judicial nominations and other fights.

"We are the gatekeepers and the loudest oracles of family values, and you can't be consistently pro-family value and then on an issue that impacts 12 million families, not be there," he said.

Brent Wilkes, executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, challenged people of faith to consider all the implications of efforts to crack down on immigrants. He cited a Washington-area woman whose husband beat her repeatedly but who feared that calling police would lead to deportation.

"As Christians, as people with family values, can you honestly condone that?" Mr. Wilkes said.

But Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo. – a leader in the push to curtail immigration – said too little attention is paid to the plight of American Indians and others who never violated the rules.

"I only ask people to be compassionate in a broader sense," he said. " ... Why aren't we compassionate to the people who are legally present in the United States, who are being negatively impacted by massive illegal immigration. Why is it just a one-way street?"

The testiest moment came after the Rev. Joan Maruskin of Church World Service's Immigration and Refugee Program compared Jesus to illegal immigrants.

"Christ came in as a stranger – the migrant refugee Christ to whom we owe our salvation," she said. If Jesus and his disciples arrived in the United States as 13 bearded men without documents, she said, "they would be put into a detention center, be victims of expedited removal or they'd be sent to Guantánamo."

Immigration-control advocate John O'Sullivan, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, decried such "moral bullying."

Describing himself as a rank-and-file Catholic, Mr. O'Sullivan criticized attempts to translate religious doctrine into public policy without weighing all implications – the downward pressure on wages for natives and prior immigrants, for instance.

"We have to make choices – how many of them to admit, which of them to admit," he said. "We are importing poverty."
Besides, he said, unlike individuals, "governments cannot turn the other cheek" by ignoring law-breaking.

The Family Research Council itself has remained neutral. Its unscientific online survey found that members view the issue as far less pressing than abortion or judicial activism. But the vast majority also agrees that under Christian teaching, illegal immigrants should be arrested and deported rather than "welcomed ... as strangers searching for a better life."

That tracked the law-and-order emphasis Dr. Land and other conservative Christians offered Thursday, though one evangelical pastor who attended the forum, the Rev. Jason Poling of New Hope Community Church in suburban Baltimore, expressed dismay at that approach.

"That, in my circles, is known as preaching to the choir," he said. "Given the demographics and the political trends within the evangelical community, I think it's incumbent on us to remind not only our policy makers but our own people of the biblical mandates of compassion and justice and mercy."