This month’s First Things includes a short essay by Gilber Meilander on immigration policy. There is no direct link yet on the FT site. I guess I went on a little FT binge this morning. Here is another bit I sent in to the correspondence section, this one on Meilander’s piece:
Peter C. Meilaender’s thoughts on immigration policy (“Immigration: Citizens & Strangers,” May 2007) are careful, balanced — and devoid of any Biblical, prophetic passion for the poor strangers among us. Meilaender concludes that we must “weigh carefully our obligations toward both curent members [of our society] and outsiders, duties particular and universal.” Our “particular” duties, Meilaender reminds us, are to our own families and local communities (as he puts it with more rhetorical panache, to “the aged father in need of regular attention, the cousin whose husband is way fighting in Iraq, the fellow parishioner who has lost his job”).
Well, yes. And yet in the “careful weighing” we are supposed to be doing before welcoming the stranger, Meilaender never explains why the proper metaphor is a set of scales that represent a zero-sum game. How does a broad and welcoming immigration policy detract from the resources available for us to employ in our local communities? The reality is that immigration is a dynamic social and economic force that creates economic growth and enriches communal life. Not the least benefit of this dynamism is that many immigrants from the global South bring with them a fresh and fervent religious vitality that we in the more prosperous North often leave behind in our zeal to preserve our social privileges.