What is the Christian Perspective on Immigration?

Question 12055.

A Christian immigration ethic has to do something the newspapers never manage, which is to hold together a genuine concern for the stranger and a genuine concern for the community receiving him. Most public argument picks one and treats the other as evidence of bad faith.

I am not going to tell you how to vote. What I want to do is set out the biblical material honestly, including the parts that make my own instincts uncomfortable, and then say where I think a believer should stand.

Why Christian immigration thinking has to start with God

Migration is not an accident of modern economics. Paul told the Athenians that God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, Acts 17:26-27. And He did it, Paul says, so that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way towards Him and find Him.

That is a remarkable statement and it is where Christian immigration reflection ought to begin. The movement of peoples is not outside God’s purposes, and its stated aim in that sermon is evangelistic. Whatever else is happening when a family arrives in Britain from Iran or Nigeria or Ukraine, God is not surprised by it and He has a purpose in it.

Hold that alongside the Bible’s frank realism about nations, borders and the responsibilities of rulers, and you have the two poles between which a Christian has to think.

The stranger in the Old Testament

Israel was commanded to love the sojourner, and the reason given is always the same, because you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. The ger, the resident alien, had legal protections, a share in the gleanings, access to the courts and a place at the festivals. Oppressing him is listed alongside oppressing the widow and the fatherless as the kind of thing that brings a nation under judgement.

This is not a marginal theme. It runs from Exodus through Deuteronomy into the prophets, and Malachi puts those who thrust aside the sojourner in the same sentence as sorcerers and adulterers. A Christian immigration conversation that never feels the weight of that material has not read the Old Testament.

At the same time, the sojourner in Israel was expected to live under Israel’s law and to respect its worship. Welcome carried expectations. That is not a modern immigration policy and I am not pretending it is, but it does show that generosity and expectation were never treated as opposites.

Israel is not Britain, and that matters

I have to say clearly that Israel was a theocratic nation under a covenant that no modern country shares. Its land was given by God, its law was revealed rather than legislated, and its national life had a redemptive purpose no other nation has been given. Lifting its statutes directly into British policy is the same interpretive error as lifting its warfare or its dietary rules.

What transfers is not the legislation but the character of God revealed in it. He defends the vulnerable, He hates exploitation, He notices when the powerless are used and discarded. Any Christian immigration position must be able to say that plainly, whatever it concludes about numbers.

And He also ordains civil authority to keep order, as Paul sets out in Romans 13. A government that manages its borders is not defying Scripture. I work through that side of the question in my answer on neighbour love and border control.

What the New Testament adds

The church itself is a migrant community. Peter addresses believers as elect exiles of the dispersion, sojourners and strangers, and the word he uses is the same one applied to resident aliens. Our own status before the world is that of people with papers issued elsewhere, Philippians 3:20.

That should make Christians unusually sympathetic to those who have left home. We know something about being from somewhere else. The letter to the Hebrews describes the patriarchs as strangers and exiles on the earth, seeking a homeland, and commends them for it.

Then there is Jesus’ own account of the judgement of the nations, where He says I was a stranger and you welcomed me. However you take the identity of the least of these, the criterion is not one a comfortable church can read without discomfort.

What Christian immigration ethics does not settle

Scripture does not give a number. It does not tell a government how many people a country can absorb, how quickly, or on what terms. Anyone who claims a biblical mandate for a specific policy is overreaching, and I include Christians whose politics I share.

That means this belongs among the matters of wisdom. Two believers can love the Lord, read the same texts, and land in different places on quotas, asylum rules and enforcement, because those questions involve empirical judgements the Bible does not make. Treating a policy disagreement as a test of orthodoxy is a category error and it wrecks churches.

What is settled is the treatment of persons. Honesty about facts, dignity in language, keeping promises made, protecting the trafficked and the exploited. A Christian immigration position that produces contempt for actual human beings has already failed regardless of its policy conclusions.

What the church can do that the state cannot

Here is the part I find most exciting, and it gets almost no attention. God has brought to our streets people from nations where the gospel cannot be preached openly, where owning a Bible carries risk, where no missionary has been permitted for decades. They are now living in Bradford and Glasgow and Southampton.

Some of the fastest growth in British churches at present is among Iranians and Afghans, people who came with nothing and found Jesus here. I have sat in services where the testimonies would make a Victorian missionary society weep. Whatever your view of policy, and I say more about the politics in my answer on Christians and politics, that is the hand of God and it should shape a Christian immigration outlook profoundly.

Practically, this means language classes, lifts, meals, help with forms, a Bible in the right language, and the patience to become someone’s friend over years rather than months. It also means asking the newcomers to serve rather than only to receive, because dignity works both ways.

There is a further point that Christians on the restrictive side often miss. Britain’s churches have been sustained in living memory by people who came here from elsewhere, from the Caribbean in the fifties, from West Africa and Korea more recently, frequently after being turned away from congregations that should have known better. That history should make us slow to speak as though newcomers are only ever a burden to be managed.

And Christians on the generous side have their own blind spot. Compassion expressed by demanding that a government act, while the congregation does nothing itself, is cheap. The most credible advocates I know for a welcoming policy are the ones whose spare rooms have been occupied for years. Christian immigration convictions cost something in that house, and everybody can tell.

Fear, grief and honest conversation

I am not going to dismiss the anxiety many people feel. When a neighbourhood changes rapidly, something is genuinely lost, and the people who feel it most are usually not the people who set the policy. Churches that treat that grief as bigotry drive it underground, where it curdles.

The pastoral answer is to let people say it out loud in a place where Scripture can get at it. Fear needs to be brought into the light, not managed by shame. A believer whose hope is fixed on a returning King can afford to look at change without panic, and that settledness is one of the more attractive things about a mature Christian.

A Christian immigration conversation held in that spirit is one of the few places left in Britain where the subject can be discussed without anyone being shouted down. That is worth protecting.

So, now what?

Work out what you believe and why, and be able to state it without heat. Then measure your Christian immigration convictions against a simple test: does holding them make you more likely or less likely to go and meet the family down the road?

Do one concrete thing this month. Learn a name. Offer a lift. Invite someone for a meal who has never been inside a British home. Find out whether your church has any contact with new arrivals in your town, and if it has none, ask why. The gospel travels along relationships, and relationships begin with somebody making the first move.

If God has brought the nations to our door so that they might seek Him and find Him, what does that make of our reluctance to open it?

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself.

Leviticus 19:33-34, ESV