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]