After six years of back and forth about immigration and over 500 days after the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill, President Obama announced his broad executive action designed to provide temporary protection for 5 million undocumented immigrants that will ensure they are not deported. The impacted immigrants will still need to wait on Congress to take action to provide a pathway to citizenship or another permanent opportunity to remain in the United States.
In last night’s speech, President Obama asked a series of questions that all Americans should consider:
Are we a nation that tolerates the hypocrisy of a system where workers who pick our fruit and make our beds never have a chance to get right with the law? Or are we a nation that gives them a chance to make amends, take responsibility, and give their kids a better future?
Are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms? Or are we a nation that values families, and works to keep them together?
Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us? Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs, businesses, and industries right here in America?
Additionally, he provided a reminder of the biblical expectation for how people of faith care for immigrants alongside a reminder that we have always been a nation of immigrants:
Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger – we were strangers once, too.
My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal – that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.
So What?
Immigration reform is a topic that many feel passionately about. It is also a topic that those who follow the Way of Jesus must view through eyes of faith. Not long after the President’s speech, I posted the following questions on Facebook:
- What nation are we and what nation are we striving to become?
- Are you actively involved in bringing such a vision to reality?
- Is your community of faith?