One of Jerry Pournelle’s readers points out that there are considerably more lessons from the Bible that can be applied to the question of immigration than are generally applied by Churchians who carefully cherry-pick a single element from a verse they otherwise ignore:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
“St. Paul may have been an optimist.” – Jerry Pournelle
Or Galatians 3:28 is being grotesquely and disingenuously wrenched out of context to attempt to justify secular social and political goals and ideas it never had the slightest connection with. Coincidentally enough this verse and a few others before and after were the Epistle reading a few Sundays ago at our church. Since you appear to be using the Berean Literal Bible I’ll continue with it:
Galatians 3:26 teaches, “For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.”
Galatians 3:27 continues, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”
And Galatians 3:29 followed up with, “Now if you are of Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to the promise.”
Taken together this very clearly refers to a fellowship of all Christian believers. It certainly can never be used under any circumstances to justify an unlimited influx of non-Christians into any Christian land. And it can’t even be used at all unless a theocracy is set up.
Alternately we could go ahead and add numerical references to each word in the Bible, or even each letter. This will make it still easier for people to indulge that favorite pass time of using the Bible to justify their personal positions. As the late Sam Francis observed on the occasion of the Southern Baptist Convention’s apology for slavery, the Bible endorses human slavery and does not prohibit it. Even John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul advised slaves to be content in their situations.
But this being Sunday, I’ll quote one another applicable Bible teaching, this one on the question of the extremely wealthy welcoming strangers while imposing all the costs of their hospitality involuntarily on their poor neighbors:
2 Samuel 12:1-6
The Lord sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, “There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.
“Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him.”
David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, “As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this must die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.”This seems appropriate for the many persons who enjoy the large profits of low cost immigrant labor – frequently illegals – while involuntarily imposing all the social costs onto the broader community. Mark Zuckerberg and his H1B programmers come to mind here.
As is ALWAYS the case every time the Churchian case is examined, it turns out to not only have destructive and diabolical consequences, but it is obviously theologically incorrect, and all too often, directly anti-Biblical. In fact, as far as immigration goes, this is merely scratching the surface of the total historical falsity of the Churchian pro-immigration case.
Churchianity is a series of lies stacked upon other lies. I will not go so far as to say it is the religion of the Antichrist, although it carries a distinctly deceitful odor that is in line with various prophecies of that abomination. But there is no doubt whatsoever that it is anti-Biblical and anti-Christian.
UPDATE: I forgot to answer a question posed by Jerry:
We’ll assume it is possible for the sake of discussion, but can we all agree that it will be very difficult and expensive to deport them all, and the benefits of deporting all 11 million are likely to be lower than the costs?
No. It may be difficult and expensive, but it will definitely be worth the cost. And then we can start on however many are necessary to restore the promised pre-1965 demographic levels.