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There are many questions to be asked about SB 1070, Arizona’s controversial new immigration law: questions of constitutionality, of enforcement, of specific provisions, of racial bias. These issues are certainly important and require much thought and discussion. But for the follower of Jesus they must take backseat to a much more important question: how does SB 1070 impact the “least of these”?
Matthew 25 contains some of Jesus’ most famous stories. Jesus speaks in the parable both to the righteous and the wicked, and to the latter he says, “For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me. … Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” This passage has long stood as a perennial call to Christians to stand with the oppressed, with the “least of these,” with those at the bottom of society, those most marginalized by “the system.” I believe that it is this passage which must frame Christian discussion of Arizona’s immigration law.
I submit that Christians must regard undocumented immigrants as “the least of these” in the context of the American immigration debate. Every year, millions of people around the world struggle to make enough money to live, to feed their children, to be able to go through their day-to-day lives with some semblance of security. Many of these people find that they are unable to find work in their own country, and so they seek to emigrate and establish a new life somewhere else to provide for themselves and their families. Pushed out by broken systems and broken circumstances, marginalized by greedy economic structures and ineffective governments, many look towards the United States and its relatively strong economy as offering hope for the future of themselves and their children.
Unfortunately for most of these people, it is incredibly difficult to immigrate legally to the United States. The process is time-consuming, costly, and uncertain, and can thus leave a potential immigrant who is denied a visa worse off at the end of the attempt than at its beginning. Daunted by the difficulty of this long-term process, with fears compounded in many cases by immediate economic uncertainties, many people are put into a situation where they see no other option to provide for their themselves and their families than to enter the country illegally. With no realistic alternatives, they live at the margins of American society.
These undocumented immigrants, truly the “least of these,” are the targets of Arizona’s new law. SB 1070 is manifestly designed to further marginalize these people and those who help them, to make it easier to arrest and prosecute them, to interrupt their day-to-day lives as they work (often in below-minimum-wage-jobs) to set food on the table every night. Rather than try to fix the broken systems that put these people in the situations they are in, Arizona has decided to punish them and ostracize them. Arizona has cracked down on the victims of America’s broken immigration system rather than try to address the underlying problems with the system itself.
I believe that a straightforward application of the message of Jesus Christ condemns Arizona’s immigration law. The Kingdom of Heaven is a kingdom of grace not legalism, of inclusion not exclusion, of welcome not hostility. The Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth is a proclamation of justice in the face of oppression, of liberation from bondage, of love for the marginalized. With this in mind, I ask Christians across America to remember that as they do to the least of these, so do they do to Jesus himself.
[This post was originally published at YourPerspective.org]
A young woman, only 17 years old, is sick — dying, in fact. She has already survived cancer, but her liver has been damaged. She needs a transplant. All the doctors agree on the procedure. They sign the necessary forms, and the family is given hope for their daughter’s life. But liver transplants are expensive — and the after-care for them costs more money still. The family’s medical insurance company doesn’t want to lose money. So the corporation delays approval again and again for payment for the necessary procedure, in order that the girl will die and after-care costs will be avoided.
The girl dies. Unnecessarily, disgustingly, criminally. She dies. Because the almighty dollar wins in the end.
This seems overly dramatic, too terrible to be true. But it’s real; it actually happened. The girl’s name was Natalie Sarkisyan, and the insurance company was Cigna HealthCare. This is just one example among many that demonstrates an ultimately irrefutable fact: the American health care system is exploitative and often deadly.
Indeed, health care in America has become a form of structural violence. Like racism, sexism, and other forms of systemic oppression, US medical insurance exploits one group (the patients) for the benefit of another (the corporations). All too often, monetary gain is valued far above the lives and livelihoods of the “insured”. This should be unsurprising: it is to be expected that a system based on the principles of greed (capitalism) would fare rather badly at protecting the helpless and defending the weak.
Christians should be especially alarmed by this, for we serve a Lord who stood precisely alongside the downtrodden (Luke 4.17-18), denounced greed and the excesses of material gain (Mark 10.17-31), and stood against all violence (Matthew 5.38-48). The exploitative, violent system of American health care has in many instances come to embody all that Jesus Christ himself combated. It has become a facet of what Walter Wink calls the “domination system”, a system that in the Resurrection is exposed as being ultimately powerless, even if still fearsome.
We as Christians must hold fast to hope. We must remember the words of Jesus in John 16.33: “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” [esv]. The Powers of the world do indeed create much tribulation, tribulation which we see in cases such as that of Natalie Sarkisyan. But Jesus Christ has overcome those structures of oppression and evil, demonstrating in his Resurrection the final futility of their attempts to create death and destruction.
As William Stringfellow once wrote, “The essential and consistent task of Christians is to expose the transience of death’s power in the world.” Health care in America has become a system of death; but as a community that attests to the reality of Resurrection in we world, we must continue to expose the transience of that system.
Tuesday’s edition of The Argyle Sweater:
From James 2.14-17:
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say that you have faith do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lask daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
Some thoughts on why people like me should care.
1. As George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Though the phrase has become stale and cliche, it remains true. Without learning the lessons of how our nation has failed, we have no hope to succeed in the future.
2. Some will say, “If I’m white, why should I care? Black history is important, sure, but it’s not my history.” But many whites fail to see the full significance of what the civil rights movement accomplished. It made major steps in freeing African-Americans from the systemic evil of racism; but it did more than that. Societal systems of injustice not only victimize the oppressed but also dehumanize the oppressors, forcing them into a role that no human being was ever meant to have. The civil rights movement helped change this. In religious terms, the movement not only helped save blacks from the injustice of oppression, but also helped redeem whites from the sin of being oppressors. Every non-racist Caucasian in the American south thus owes a debt of gratitude.
3. Some will still say, “Sure, maybe I as a white person owe the civil rights movement my thanks. But I’m a teenager. I’m not racist, I didn’t help create oppression, I wasn’t there, I had nothing to do with it at all. Why do we have to focus on it?” This is true. We weren’t there. We didn’t have anything to do with what already happened. But we do have something to do with what happens today. And the sad reality is that racism, like it or not, is far from over in America. It is much, much easier to be white than to be black in America. White people, even those of us who aren’t racist, who had nothing to do with racism, continue to benefit from what sociologists call “white privilege.” We have it easier, not for anything we’ve done (or not done), but just because of who are parents are and who we are. And that is wrong. It’s not our fault, to be sure — it’s systemic, not individual. But if we don’t acknowledge it, if we don’t learn about it and about its history, there is no hope that we as individuals can ever foster the kind of systemic, societal change necessary to establish true equality. It’s not a matter of “feeling guilty”; it’s a matter of recognizing facts that, while not our fault, are within our capability to alter.
Social transformation starts with you and me, and it must start with knowledge of history.
Rev. Joseph Lowery, heroic co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said this in his benediction at the inauguration of Barack H. Obama:
Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.
There’s not much I, or anyone, can add to that.
