Columbus Day and Immigrants

Columbus Day used to be something I looked forward to as a child.  After all, it meant one thing:  no school!  Later, it meant reading and reflecting on the tremendously risky undertaking of Christopher Columbus and the men who joined him on those three, now-famous ships:  the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María.  Still later it meant reflecting on the impact - mostly negative - that Columbus' so-called "discovery" meant, not the least of which was the impact of Old World diseases on New World inhabitants who had no natural immunity to those diseases, with predictably disastrous results.

Of course, Columbus & Co. were not the first Europeans to arrive on this continent. Evidence points to Norse sailors who, traveling west from Greenland, arrived in Newfoundland almost five centuries before Columbus.  And of course this hemisphere wasn't "discovered;" it had been here, and been inhabited, for millennia.  So, how should we observe this day?  Well, what might one call a boatload of Hispanics who arrive on our shores with no papers?  The contemporary term is "illegal immigrant."

I don't underestimate the challenge of immigration in our day.  We all are keenly aware of the limited resources of our assistance programs, our educational system, and our housing availability.  Yet, with the exception of our Onondaga neighbors, who are one of the original five constituent nations of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy, all of us were immigrants to this country, many of us brought here illegally as slaves or indentured servants.

There are no easy answers to how to wrestle with this challenge.  However, we must respond, both as citizens of this country and as Christian people, and we must respond with compassion.  After all, Emma Lazarus, in her poem, "The New Colossus" that is engraved in the Statue of Liberty, calls that landmark the "Mother of Exiles." And the closing words of the poem still clamor to be heard and realized:

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

And then there are these pesky two verses in Leviticus 19:33-34:

"When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God."

These two verses go along with some 60 or so other citations in the Bible about how we should treat immigrants and those who are societal outcasts.

So what do we do about immigration?  Our political leaders must decide that.  We don't need to deal with "immigration," as if it were some abstract, sociological subject for study.  Our task is to deal with people, some of whom happen to be immigrants. And we interact with them as we are called to interact with all of God's children: "And you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself."  And lest we defensively demand to know just how one must define "neighbor," remember that Jesus was asked that very question... and he answered it persuasively.