Mennonites Respond to Immigration Policies - Ep. 173

In this episode, we explore your questions on illegal immigration, public policy, and Jesus as a refugee.

With me are Regan Schrock and Marlon Summers, and we will respond to several questions that you, our audience, sent to us. The first two questions address immigration, and I will read two comments that people from our audience sent to us. The first one was a YouTube comment left on the episode called Jesus a Refugee, and somebody asked, "What should be our perspective on illegal immigration?"

The second comment was posted on Dean Taylor's episode about Anabaptists and Muslims. This individual says, "Easy to say when you are sat in the USA, try living in Europe and dealing with it. Coming to Christ? No, coming to take social benefits from Europeans more like it. Take them to your home and see what it is really going on."

So how do you all respond to those questions and comments? So one thing we don't do a lot of here is direct comments on public policy.

Because we don't work that hard on policy, we try to work around policy when we can, use the opportunities that are available. But just in a broader scope with immigration, I think a lot about the Old Testament as setting kind of a pattern. I think it gets expanded in the New Testament, but the sojourner who was typically in the land for economic reasons, the Old Testament emphasizes, okay, welcoming them, helping them to settle. And also, even though there was slavery in the Old Testament, there was also basically a command not to send runaway slaves back to their masters. So again, you get these themes of welcome, a different kind of attitude from Christians than what we often get from society.

Yeah, I'm not quite sure how to respond to all of these, except that, I don't know, I mean, I guess I would just say we don't really do public policy, so I'm not really sure what all we're even supposed to say to these things outside of we know what our command is to love everyone. Jesus says, "Love even up to your enemies and those who are abusing you," and et cetera. Well, someone who needs help and you have a chance to help them or love them, you know, I think all of that is fairly straightforward. But when it comes to how do we view illegal immigration, I'm not sure if I have a whole lot more to add than what you said outside of, "If your enemy is hungry, feed him," you know, or love those that are in need.

Yeah, I see what this person is saying about, you know, it can seem almost naive when we sit here in our very comfortable environment. And at least the episode we did with Dean Taylor about refugees coming into different places and how they're reevaluating their worldviews and what they believe and how the church is involved there. Yeah, you know, I can see what that person is saying. It is very easy to say when we are sitting in a comfortable situation. And in reality, those things are difficult and they're complicated, and there's always a thousand different ways to look at them. It still doesn't change our command, though, of what we're supposed to do, regardless of if it's extremely inconvenient or dangerous or even costs us quite a bit.

We still know what our command is to help those in need. But you know, again, I mean, to be fair, that person may be living in an environment where it is extremely challenging. And here we are sitting in a very nice, comfortable environment saying, "Oh, you should just do this certain thing." And that is easy for us to say when we're not faced with something like that. Well, it's important to just be honest with it. And yeah, okay, I haven't been to Europe, but I can very well imagine and hear the reports when you have a large number of people who are coming in from just plain cultural difference. That's huge.

If they're coming in as refugees and have lost most things and need a lot of help getting started, that's also a huge challenge for a country. And European countries have taken in a whole lot more than the US, where we are, in a lot of ways is a good thing, but I'm sure that brings an awful lot of challenges for them.

But also be realistic on the other side, and that is just thinking about our American context. You know, the US would be in pretty bad shape if we didn't have immigrants coming in from other places. Immigrants bring a lot to the US in a lot of ways. Yeah, some of it might be doing unskilled labor that Americans are not even unskilled, just manual labor that Americans aren't willing to do, even if it's highly skilled manual labor.

But that's across a range of occupations, too. Immigration brings a lot of professionals and brainpower and just the whole range of good work that America needs. I mean, like for us, practically day to day, I don't know, it is a little harder to implement because it's not like we have a huge wave of refugees that have showed up in our town. You know, I help with a nonprofit that is pretty deeply involved with refugee work. And it's something that I care a lot about because, you know, these are people that have had a very rough situation that they never wanted, you know, came into their lives.

And I do feel, yeah, the church does have an obligation to help those people. Now, what all that looks like, I don't know. Again, we don't have a whole bunch of refugees that have just showed up where we live right now. We're here in Athens, Tennessee, you know, but there are a lot of other places that do need help. And I think that's something that we should, yeah, we should put that love into shoe leather, whether that's helping people that have fled these areas to get back on their feet by helping them find a job or helping them go through the asylum process. I have friends like, you know, Lancaster City houses a lot of refugees, at least per capita.

I think it's one of the highest in the country. And they're very involved with that process, helping the refugees go through the process of getting their papers figured out, getting them jobs. I think that's wonderful. You know, that's a very hands-on, practical thing of helping these people. Now, that's different than what this person is saying as far as illegal immigration, which is different from a registered refugee or a legitimate refugee.

And yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure how helpful that is. What do you think, Marlon? Yeah, maybe first just a word on the illegal immigration. Yeah, that's a hard one. I would want to kind of go case by case.

For somebody in my community, I'm certainly not going to be asking a lot of questions, at least if I don't know them very well. I do know one case of, you know, somebody that was here illegally ended up in a Mennonite church and eventually felt like he should go back because he wasn't legally in the country. But one thing I'd note there is that that was a little ways down the journey. It wasn't like he just was sent back right away or they were telling him to go back right away. I'm sure the people in church helped him think through it.

But he was there for a while, got his roots, got his stability, and he came to that conclusion. And I can certainly respect that. You know, I have not had to answer the question as an employer where I would suspect people working for me of being here in undocumented ways or whatever. I think there needs to be some case-by-case asking the questions there. It's definitely not our job to be government enforcement agents, but neither is it our job to be anti-government either. Well, this is helpful in talking about what we're talking about in practical terms, the kind of hospitality or love that we would envision believers ought to be showing to immigrants, whether illegal or not.

But I want to do justice to this person's question. And you mentioned that maybe our response sounds naive, but if the point is that by facilitating welcoming and hospitality to refugees and immigrants is harming and making life difficult for the people who live in the areas that the immigrants are moving to, I'm curious how you respond to this, because this may be more complex than just showing love and welcome to immigrants. That act of hospitality may, if I'm understanding this person correctly, I'm trying to represent their side, may cause harm to others. And I'm curious how you would respond to that. So like America, I don't think that's an issue for us.

Frankly, the numbers are low here, which again is due to public policy. And so I see it almost entirely as welcome. And I don't have a lot of, don't have really personal experience there other than I know that there are immigrants in the community. And I want to cultivate that attitude of at least, you know, avoid the, the very least avoid the negatives that go with it. But I try to do more than that.

Try to show up sometimes in a gas station that's owned by an immigrant, pray that they would feel welcome in the community. And, you know, would love to be able to take that further. You know, again, here in America, the story my parents got to know an immigrant and through kind of one contact person, a kind of a community of immigrants that had settled in a town close to them.

And one of our friends had arranged basically a work opportunity, some contract work for some of those people. And I think that's kind of a great example. But yeah, Darren, on that one with the, you know, are you causing harm by welcoming somebody? I just think about it like, okay, so Anabaptists have been in Greece where there's kind of large numbers of refugees going through. And again, we didn't have anything to do with that policy.

But I think it is very important that if you're there as a mission or as an aid organization to pay attention to the local community. And the local community might need help too in that kind of situation.

Again, I'm no expert there, but it's definitely something to pay attention to, especially when you start throwing your weight around as an organization and you have an extensive organization. Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to, yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. This isn't something that we're going to face nearly as much in this country as opposed to some other places. So nonprofit I've helped with has been in Iraq some. And that's a very different scenario where, you know, one area that had like close to a million or I think it was actually a little more refugees came in or immigrants came into this one specific spot, but they were from a different part of that same country.

So technically not refugees, but they were a different ethnic group had come into this area. And it made an enormous burden on the economy and there's not enough jobs to go around when you suddenly throw that many people around one city. They're all in one place. And yeah, it was a real challenge. And the difficulty there could be as a church or organization, you may want to focus on the ones that are the immigrants because their situation, it was at least at that point a lot more dire. They had fled with almost nothing, but then failed to notice everybody else. And by helping one, how do you balance these things? Though it was interesting to see the local people and how they responded.

And it was very much that the mindset of, you know what, this could have been me. This could have happened to me. These people are in a rough situation. Let's all help each other out. You know, and it wasn't always that, you know, they weren't always that nice about it. But some of them that I talked to had more of that mindset. And I thought that was pretty neat. And it was, let's all work together and figure out something that will work for everybody in this rough scenario. Again, I don't know. Each situation is going to be so different, though. And it's a challenge. But it's a real concern, you know, like what this person's bringing out.

And I don't think we would have the answers necessarily for that. Each situation will be different. So the word that comes to my mind is creativity. Yeah, some of us have more of that than others. Some of you have a lot more of that than me. So Regan, maybe this is related to a topic, to an essay you wrote for us called Cultivating Spiritual Creativity.

Like, does somebody have the vision for how to engage in ways that help and don't hurt? And that's going to take some creativity and figuring out what it is. Yeah, because that and caution that do no harm is a big thing.

It's a real challenge, especially in things like humanitarian aid or whatever. You'll see a situation that is genuinely very desperate. People really need help. And so you're just like, okay, well, let's, you know, let's give them food or let's give them clothing for the winter. Okay, those are noble things. They're good things. But sometimes we fail to see the long-term snowball effects of some of those things. And every nonprofit group, every church group, you know, each situation, again, is different, but it takes a lot of wisdom and a lot of prayer and working together as a team and figuring out what is ways that we can work together with all the parties involved, not come in as we're going to just save everybody because that, no, Jesus is the answer, not ourselves.

And humility, I think, is the key at the end of the day for all of this. Because we want to help. You know, I think that's something that, you know, as you know, if you follow Jesus, you want to help. Like, that's a good thing. It's a good response. But do no harm at the same time. Anyway, I feel like we're being slightly ambiguous.

Is this, do you think we're getting any more light shed on this question? Yes, some light, especially when you guys were talking about practical things. But I do appreciate you all engaging with this. I hope that we did justice to whatever extent we're able to the individuals who asked this. Yeah, and we're just Anabaptist perspective staff here trying to address the question. Maybe it's important enough we need to find practitioners with deep experience in the field that can really say more about it than we can. That's a good point. That would be advisable.

Well, let's move on to one more question before we end this episode.

And a YouTube comment on an episode by Dean Taylor. Stephen asked, I recently started attending a Mennonite church and would like to share some of your discussions with them, but they have a filter on their phones and computers, which disables YouTube.

Do you have videos in email format? Oh, that's a great question because we had someone else, one of my, in one of my friend networks, they messaged me the same thing. And I said, no, we don't. But there's an app called Telegram. And a lot of conservative groups have, it's basically, it's running that app, which is a messaging service, but with various filters, and they call it CloudVail. And a lot of conservative churches will use that as an alternative way of communication and things so that you don't have to go through services like YouTube. So what if we would start a group or a channel or something on this service and release your material that way?

So we did. We can't email them because the files are too big, but this service allows us to do that. So there, yeah, you can get them through that service, either Telegram or it's called CloudVail, and you should just be able to search the name and find all our content there. And it's been a neat way of messaging things directly to people that do have this filtration system on their devices.

Even outside of it, one of our volunteers told me that he was aware of us through YouTube, but it was really when we started the CloudVail Telegram group that he really started following us because it was on his phone in his messaging service. Yeah, you get it, you get a message to you every new episode comes to you, right there video and audio message right to your phone. And it's great. You don't have to go on YouTube or use some other service. This may sound almost like an advertisement, but he did ask the question. So that's your answer, Stephen. Hopefully you can find us on that service. Also, many people only listen to us on YouTube, but we also have a podcast.

So if you're not able to use YouTube, podcasts might also be a viable option for you. And if not, that consider Telegram or our website. You can always go to the website. Thank you for joining us for this episode. We invite you to join our monthly partner program. Monthly partners are key to the financial sustainability of Anabaptist perspectives. Partners also gain access to bonus content, including our exclusive podcast where we respond to audience questions and comments. Sign up at anabaptistperspectives.org.