Christians love Scriptural commands; it makes things easy. We weigh in on an issue by citing a verse (or five) and we’re done—ding! Next problem?
So it is with immigration. We surf through our New Testament and then pause, sighing thankfully that there is a verse that seems to deal with illegal aliens, or at least strangers: “The stranger that you invited inside, fed, and clothed his nudity…it was me, Jesus. When you rejected that stranger and left him imprisoned; you rejected me, Jesus1.”
Well, we blush; it’s not as good as an explicit command. The passage is totally about interaction at the personal level and it doesn’t offer anything in the way of “thou shall”—especially not on the national level.
Ignoring the other post-worthy problems up above, I think there’s a proper goal in finding what Scripture says in regard to immigration. Surely, not for the purpose of finding a new law (wrongheaded, that), but for the purpose of discovering operating principles.
For that, we need to construct a thought model.
In a recent discussion about the validity of Trinitarian theology there was some questions about the use of the term “Son of God” as applied to Jesus. Some have argued that (1) the Son of God can’t technically be part of the Godhead since the Son is the physical manifestation of the Word. The basic argument is that “Son of God” is temporal language (like Jesus) which can only come into proper usage when the Son is born (Luke 1:35-this one will be called the Son of God). Others argued that (2) “Son of God” is an ambiguous term completely interchangeable with “Jesus Christ” and “The Word of God”. Yet others argue that (3) the term “Son of God” has been imbued with new (and exegetically unsound) theological meaning by the New Testament writers.