An Evangelical Perspective on Immigration

Several years ago, World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, started receiving calls from pastors who—in ministering to immigrants in their congregations—had suddenly come upon legal questions they could not answer. The pastors turned to us because they knew we had been serving immigrants for over thirty years. Some asked whether undocumented immigrants could serve in leadership in the church. Others asked to what extent the church could help immigrants resolve their legal status issues. These pastors' questions reflect a question the broader evangelical community is grappling with: how do we balance compassion and mercy toward immigrants with the rule of law?

Evangelicals are committed to the authority of Scripture over all of our lives, and World Relief started addressing these questions not from an economic or political perspective, but from a distinctly biblical point of view. By grounding our response in the common values of our community, we knew we could change the hearts and minds of those in our faith community, especially since Scripture has so much to say about how to treat immigrants. We knew that while immigration is often viewed as an economic or political issue, for people of faith, immigration reform is an urgent moral crisis that has fissured the many families and communities who have lived in the shadows of the United States for years.

As we started this journey of education, we knew it would not be an easy task because polls showed that few evangelicals thought biblically about immigration. The Pew Research Center, for example, found in a 2010 survey that only 12 percent of white evangelicals say that their views on immigration are primarily influenced by their Christian faith. Over the years, however, there has been a shift in evangelical understandings of immigration and attitudes toward immigrants for several reasons.

What would it mean for immigration policy if we took seriously Jesus's Torah-inspired call to love "the stranger"? This stained-glass window, Housing the Stranger, was modeled after a print by Maerten van Heemskerck.

The Bible's Call to Love the Stranger

First and foremost, there is a biblical mandate to show compassion to and care for immigrants. The Hebrew word for an immigrant, ger, in fact, appears ninety-two times just in the Hebrew Bible. In Leviticus 19:34, God says "Any immigrant who lives with you must be treated as if they were one of your citizens. You must love them as yourself." God also repeatedly references immigrants along with widows and orphans as particularly vulnerable groups of people who deserve special attention (this happens in Psalm 146:9, Malachi 3:5, and Jeremiah 7:6, among others). In the New Testament, the idea of philoxenia (the love of strangers) is a call by Jesus Christ to his followers. Jesus suggests that by showing hospitality and loving the stranger, we may actually be welcoming him (Matthew 25:31-45).

Many Christians point to the passage in Romans 13:1 that says to "submit to the governing authorities" as a reason why Christians should not support immigration reform, but in fact this passage calls to mind the need to ensure our laws are working for the common good. When they are not, they need to be changed. The status quo—in which some laws have been selectively ignored for decades and our legal immigration system is out of touch with the needs of our labor market—is unacceptable.

For evangelicals, immigration reform is not an issue about them, but rather an issue about us. Studies have found that immigration accounts for the fastest—and, in some cases, the only—growth in U.S. evangelicalism today. Immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa are now leading the evangelical church in unprecedented numbers. Evangelical leaders are thus coming to see immigration not as a threat, but as an opportunity to "share the Good News."

As pastors and community members build relationships with immigrants, they suddenly encounter a broken immigration system in which many cannot get right with the law even though they...