Last Friday, Donald Trump visited Austin, Texas, and promised, “Immediately upon taking office I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.”
“January 20 … will be liberation day in America,” he said in front of a background that read “END MIGRANT CRIME” and “DEPORT ILLEGALS.” He accused Vice President Kamala Harris of using the border as a “staging ground to import her army of gangs.” And he said of America, “We’re like a garbage can for the rest of the world to dump the people they don’t want.”
Napp Nazworth
To be a great nation, we must have ethical immigration policies and rhetoric. For too long, our nation’s leaders have failed this test.
Policy matters. Rhetoric matters too.
When our political leaders demean immigrants, attitudes change and our national ethos suffers. Instead of being an open-hearted, welcoming, caring nation, we become stingy, uncaring and insular.
Rhetoric like this contributes to dehumanizing and racist attitudes toward immigrants in the U.S. today. It also weakens our communities and sows division in our families and associations. And if you care about solutions to our border crisis, this sort of language harms efforts to build a necessary consensus.
“If you care about solutions to our border crisis, this sort of language harms efforts to build a necessary consensus.”
World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, published an open letter to the major party presidential candidates informing them that most “American evangelicals are neither anti-immigrant nor advocates for open borders.” That letter contains three core principles that can serve as grounding for ethical immigration policy and rhetoric.
They are:
- Immigrants are humans with innate dignity
- Our borders should be secure, safe and orderly
- Immigration policies should not separate families.
We should urge our elected officials to pass immigration reforms grounded in these principles. (And according to recent research from Lifeway, more than 90% of evangelicals agree on these three issues.)
A truly great nation has nothing to fear from immigrants. We can and should bless others, just as we have been blessed. And as we’ve seen throughout American history, immigrants will in turn bless us with their presence.
Napp Nazworth serves as executive director of American Values Coalition.
Related articles:
Separated, again | Analysis by Kristen Thomason
I’m not laughing about Puerto Rico | Opinion by Randy Shepley
100 years after the Immigration Act, we’re reaping what we’ve sown | Analysis by Rodney Kennedy