Christendom Restored with Bojidar Marinov | Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Network

Logical and Theological Analysis of the Current Immigration Policies in the US

Dear Sir: I am informed that a Ship with [Germans] is gone up to Baltimore, among whom are a number of [Craftsmen]. I am a good deal in want of a House Joiner and Bricklayer, (who really understand their profession) and you would do me a favor by purchasing one of each, for me. I would not confine you to [Germans]. If they are good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa, or Europe. They may be [Muslims], Jews or Christian of any [denomination], or they may be Atheists. I would however prefer middle aged, to young men, and those who have good countenances and good characters on ship board, to others who have neither of these to recommend them, altho, after all, the proof of the pudding must be in the eating. I do not limit you to a price, but will pay the purchase money on demand. This request will be in force ’till complied with, or countermanded, because you may not succeed at this moment, and have favourable ones here after to do it in. My best respects, in which [my wife] joins, are presented to Mrs. Tilghman and Mrs. Carroll. and I am etc.

Before you take offense, this is not about buying slaves, but about hiring indentured servants. Indentured servitude was the way for many people to pay off debts and accumulate capital while being economically protected. It was the institution that helped many immigrants come to America and settle here. In fact, if you can trace your ancestors in this country more than 6 generations back, there is a 100% chance that they either arrived here as indentured servants, or hired indentured servants as a means to help them immigrate. The history of some towns in Central Texas, the German/Czech/Polish heart of Texas, is a history of whole families coming over as servants of one or another Austrian or German noble. Indentured servitude is a Biblical concept, and you can read about it in Gary North’s economic commentary on the case laws in Exodus 21-40.

Can anyone guess the name of the author of this letter? Any takes as to who the rich employer is that would not mind hiring Africans or Asians, no matter what religion they are, Jews, Atheists, or even Muslims, as long as they are good workers? Any takes as to who this despicable wealthy liberal traitor is who sees no problem with even Muslims immigrating to American soil and even hiring them for his business, effectively robbing local honest American workers of their right to his business?

The letter, my conservative and Christian friends, is signed, “Mount Vernon, March 24, 1784, George Washington.” And before someone replies that Muslims were not back then a threat as they are today, I will remind them to search the origin of the words “to the shores of Tripoli” in the US Marines’ Hymn, and see what threat Muslims were back then as they are today.

I am not an absolute fan of George Washington; I am more skeptical concerning him than most Americans educated in government schools. Much in his ideology was closer to centralism and statism than my beliefs. But this letter speaks about more than just Washington; it shows us the spirit of the early decades of the new American Republic. So as we continue discussing our present policies and the views of many conservatives on immigration, keep in your mind this vision of America restored to her roots: An airport gate with no border control or TSA or any other kind of government thugs and perverts, and George Washington picking workers to hire for his business, of those who just got off the plane. And if this vision is not part of your greater vision of America restored to her roots, then you are not part of the solution; you are part of the problem we have today. A problem that is statism, tyranny, and injustice, brought upon us by crafty socialist politicians with either R or D behind their names.

Notice how when speaking about the immigration of those workers, Washington speaks in terms of two issues: One is economics: He has an economic need of workers, and he wants them skillful and understanding their profession. The other is spiritual/religious: He wants them to be of good character and of “good countenances.” (It was believed at the time that the good character of a person is inevitably expressed in his outward countenances.) The economic and the spiritual factors were the only factors that controlled the issue of immigration. Notice carefully that one factor is missing. A factor that is absolutely dominating the immigration debate today, more than any other factor.

It is the political factor. Washington doesn’t seem to have any concern about any political issues. He doesn’t mention any laws about immigration. He doesn’t mention any problems with unions or government bureaucrats. He is not concerned that a shipment of so many workers from a country that just three years prior had 18,000 mercenaries in service of the British government on American soil, fighting the army of Washington himself. He doesn’t mention anything about the possibility that there may be a political assassin among these people who would be more than happy to take out the very leader of Revolutionary America. Which makes us wonder: Why would were these Americans in the early days of the young fledgling Republic so oblivious to the dangers of uncontrolled immigration? Why aren’t they mindful of the political consequences of letting people just come and find a job? Why is the very person who led the troops in the War of Independence so pragmatic in his attitude to immigrants, even to the point of seeing no problem with Muslims or Atheists coming over, as long as they are of good moral character?

In order to understand the immigration policies of the US today, we need to look all of these issues, political, economic, and religious, and compare ourselves to America as she was supposed to be. We already saw how we compare to the Biblical Law: And we saw that as Christians, we have actually been on the wrong side, friends with the enemy and enemies of God, mistreating the foreigner and worshipping evil laws imposed by an evil, pagan regime. We also saw the history of these laws, where they came from, and we saw that there is nothing Christian nor conservative nor American in the laws limiting immigration. We saw that they were passed by fascists, socialists, liberals, and statists, and we have allowed to be brainwashed by those same fascists, socialists, liberals, and statists to accept these laws as legitimate, and even root for them and insist on their enforcement, instead of returning America back to her roots.

But we have a final argument to address: What about today? Isn’t today different than yesterday? Aren’t there different principles today to look at immigration? Aren’t there unique dangers today that previous generations didn’t face, problems that make in necessary and expedient to make a U-turn on immigration and adopt a stance which our forefathers would find immoral, unjust, and paranoic? Can we learn from the past, and therefore try to return America to her roots, or is the present so wildly different that her past experiences don’t matter anymore, and we are to be like the “progressives” we criticize, declaring our past experiences to be of no consequence to us today?

To answer these questions, we need to look at the modern arguments for immigration restrictions, and answer them. We need to look at them from all perspectives – political, economic, and religious – and honestly assess our situation and our views and policies. And if necessary, be humble and acknowledge if we have been wrong and change our views, and change our practical living and social and political action.

As we saw, political considerations were excluded from Washington’s letter about immigrant workers. There’s a good reason for such omission. The American Patriots had dealt with the political side of the issue in the Declaration of Independence: restricting immigration by legislation or political means they considered an act of injustice and tyranny. It was injustice and tyranny enough to make it one of the good causes for righteous rebellion. The solution they had to it was to de-politicize immigration altogether, taking it out of the set of the legitimate prerogatives of the civil government. Controlling immigration was just as much an act of statism and tyranny as was a 3% tax on tea. Therefore, the civil government should be barred from controlling it.

We seldom stop to think today that the essence of politics, the primary question of every political issue is this: The individual vs. the government. (On a deeper, spiritual level it is always “Christ vs. Caesar” but you will have to listen to my talk to the Kuyper Foundation Conference last year to get that message.) No matter what the issue is all about, it is all about the government trying to grab more power and destroy the freedom of individuals. If it’s about helping the poor, it’s not about helping the poor, it is about more power to the government. If it’s about protecting the environment, it is about more power to the government. If it is about gun control, it is about government control. If it is about education, it is about more power to the government. If it is about food safety, it is about more power to the government. If it is about school vouchers, it is about more power to the government. And, if it is about immigration, it is about more power to the government.

Any issue is just a smokescreen for the real agenda of the bureaucrats: more power to the government. When you have a politicized issue, an issue that politicians talk about extensively and draw lines in the sand, separating between “them” and “us,” watch out: the final issue is, “How is the government trying to expand its own power?” For the politicians, the “them” is always the individuals, and the “us” is always the political class.

Given this constant greed of government officials for more power over the individuals, our political participation must be based on the following rule of thumb for discernment of political causes: Any political cause that ends up asking for more power to the government over individuals is an evil, wicked cause, a cause of tyranny, and we are under obligation to stand against it. No matter how beautiful the declared intentions of the politicians are, we must stand against it, because it is tyranny. If your local representative shows you a starving child in Africa and says we need more taxes to save that child, we must stand against it. If he shows you the 9/11 destruction and says we need more power to the government in the Patriot Act, we must stand against it. And if he shows you a bunch of illegal immigrants and says we need the government to do something against them, we must stand against it.

The patriots in the 1770s understood this simple truth. Modern American Christians and conservatives, when it comes to immigration, are blind to the obvious, and immune to common sense. They rather prefer to think on reflex level, like amoebas: “If Obama is for amnesty, immigration must be bad. Let call for more Federal troops in Texas to secure the border!”

This stupidity leaves conservatives open to manipulation. It makes it easy to produce some fake crisis, which would make more conservatives mindlessly ask for more Federal troops in Texas. At the end, Obama will have tighter military control over one of the freest states in the US, and that at the insistence of the conservatives in the state! Every time you are not thinking in depth but only superficially (“If Obama is for amnesty, immigration must be bad!”) you become a victim of crafty politicians. The current so-called “immigration crisis” is just the same kind of manipulation as showing pictures of hungry kids in Africa to make people agree to more foreign aid sent to African dictators. Except that one is designed to manipulate liberals, the other is designed to manipulate conservatives. The final objective of both, of course, is “more power to the government.”

The very fact that the first reaction to a crisis is, “more Federal control, please,” should make a true lover of liberty stop and consider what is going on. As with everything else, we should be wise and not give free reign to our emotions, let alone emotions driven by fear.

We should show such wisdom when we think about the amnesty our socialist government wants, and not make the mistake of confusing amnesty with open borders, as so many conservatives do. Have the socialists really changed their mind on immigration? No, they haven’t. Remember, they don’t care for immigration one way or another; they want to use any crisis, any occasion possible to increase the control of the Federal government over the individuals. From this perspective, open borders means “no government intervention,” immigration laws mean “government intervention,” and amnesty means “double government intervention”: once when deciding who gets in legally, and once in deciding who of the illegals stays and who doesn’t. The government then becomes not only a law-giver, but a giver of grace as well. In this regard, asking the government to “secure the border” is only helping the socialists: securing the border will never work, it will create more crises, and more power to the government to solve the crises and give grace.

The only truly conservative response to the Federal government, then, is this: Obey the Constitution, get the government out of the immigration business, let people travel and settle wherever they want, and only make laws about naturalization, as the Constitution requires. And, most of all, Mr. Obama, get your troops out of Texas.

The political rhetoric has affected another area in the thinking of the conservatives, and with devastating effect: Immigration is the main issue through which conservatives are groomed to worship Federal legislation and submit their moral senses to the Federal government. Few are the areas where this idolatry of the Federal government is so obvious. So brainwashed are they that they do not stop to think how the conservative mind is now conditioned to define good and evil not according to an objective standard of a transcendent law but according to whatever laws are passed in Washington DC. You don’t believe it? Here’s the proof.

It is in the argument used so often to justify the hatred so many American Christians and conservatives show toward immigrants: “If they were decent people, they would come here legally, through legal means.” Do you see how Federal legislation has become the ethical standard for good and evil? Do you see the worship of the state in this argument? If you don’t, let me apply the same argument in another area:

“If you are decent person, you will comply with Obamacare.” How does that sound? Or, “If you were a decent person, you will comply with the gun control laws.” Or, better yet, “If the Founders were decent people, they would have complied with the King’s laws.” “If Cory Ten Boom was a decent person, she would have complied with the Nazi laws.” “If Soviet dissidents were decent people, they would have complied with the laws of their Communist state.”

What should be the reaction of a Biblical Christian or of a true conservative when we hear such an argument. It will be this: “No, if the law was a righteous law, it wouldn’t make criminals out of people whose only crime is their desire to find a job and provide for their children. If it was a righteous law, it wouldn’t give the government so much power over individuals. If it was a righteous law, it wouldn’t deprive the employers of the liberty to hire whomever they want.” And then, as is the good old American Patriot tradition, the conclusion would be: If it is an evil, unrighteous law, I have no moral obligation to obey it, and those immigrants have no moral obligation to obey it. Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.

The reality is, by the stroke of a pen, Congress created a new legal category of a “criminal,” an artificial category supported by neither the Constitution nor the Bible: the illegal alien. Conservatives have cheered for it and have transformed that artificial legal category into a moral category: “Illegal aliens are bad people.” And then the same conservatives are surprised that Congress creates other artificial legal categories of criminals: for example, “uninsured American,” who must be fined for his refusal to get health insurance. Reality is, once Congress imposes unjust laws on foreigners, it will inevitably end up imposing unjust laws on US citizens. God is not mocked.

Not to mention the practical issue of, “Who exactly decides who gets in legally and who doesn’t?” Isn’t that the same Federal bureaucrats who, as we know, have a very different idea of what America’s interest is compared to our ideas. Would you trust a Federal bureaucrat with finding you a job? Deciding your healthcare? Educating your children? Deciding what to do with your money? If not, how come you suddenly trust those leeches when it comes to immigration? Are those Federal bureaucrats in the consulates less corrupt than the rest of them? Less bribeable? I know of hundreds of cases where decent, hardworking, independent, entrepreneurial people were not given even business visas to visit and meet business partners, while we know of multiple cases of outright criminals who get visas. How’s that immigration control working for ya? Isn’t it much better to disband that bureaucratic army and let people travel freely, for in this way we have a better chance to have decent people come in?

As we saw, for over 1,500 years Christian Europe, and for over 300 years Christian America knew these obvious truths. That is why the American Patriots denied the civil government power over the immigration of people. And that’s why George Washington didn’t have to include any political considerations in his talk about hiring immigrant workers. Liberty was liberty.

Thus, politically, a conservative shouldn’t be against immigration. If anything, if conservatives in America were really conservatives – and if Christians in America were really Christians – they would be demanding the repeal of all immigration laws, immediately, as the solution to the fake immigration crisis today. The crisis is not real; it is artificially created by laws that shouldn’t be there in the first place, if America stood faithful to the original intent of the Founders.

But about the economic consequences of uncontrolled immigration? Wouldn’t the economy collapse under the pressure of so many immigrants pouring in?

When it comes to economic issues concerning immigration, Christians are just as unable to think clearly and employ common sense. The picture formed in their minds when they think “open borders” is millions of immigrants who are entrepreneurial enough to cross several borders and into the US, only to remain passive for the rest of their lives and only live on welfare, destroying the American economy in the process. Such picture is the fruit of fears instilled by two decades purposeful liberal propaganda, and its origins can be traced back to the trade unions and their socialist propaganda techniques in the early 20th century. But it has no precedent nor confirmation neither in the history of the US, not in the history of the world. In fact, a thorough study of the facts of history reveals that only positive things can come out of “uncontrolled immigration.”

First let me say this: There is no such thing as “uncontrolled immigration.” Immigration, like any other human action, is always controlled by some factor or another. It is controlled primarily by economic conditions but it is also controlled by religious, cultural, and linguistic factors. In general, if left free of government interference, immigration will depend on the market forces: People will calculate the cost of immigrating, and will compare it to the perceived benefits. This balance between perceived costs and perceived benefits will always be the controlling factor of immigration, if the government is not included in the equation. When the government intervenes, though, the information from the market is twisted, and immigration now depends on the government, not on the natural development of the market.

So immigration is always controlled, the question is who controls it, the market or the government. When the government controls it, the market suffers, as is with everything else.

Historically, we don’t have a single instance in history when economic immigration has destroyed a country or a civilization. We do have examples when mass immigration actually helped accelerate the economic growth – and America of late 19thand early 20th century is the most perfect example of it. In fact, for countries with aging population – like the US, Canada, and Western Europe – and low birth rates – or high level of abortions – mass immigration may turn out to be the only tool for preserving the economic growth. Let’s not forget that the US alone has killed more than 55 million human beings in the holocaust of abortion. These are 55 million workers, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, production organizers, etc. The chicken are coming home to roost in our day, as 70+ million baby boomers are entering retirement age, and given the increased average life expectancy, will need senior care for another 20 years, at least, after retirement. (The average life expectancy after retirement at the time they were born was about 5 years.) Germany, Britain, and the Scandinavian nations are facing the same crisis; the presence of “guest workers” is important for the survival of the whole system. Even Hitler’s Germany, for all the racism and xenophobia of the Nazis, had to import millions of foreign workers to keep their economy going. China and Japan are in a much worse condition than the US and Europe, chiefly because there isn’t a large demographic contingent that is willing to immigrate to those countries; and the Chinese themselves tend to leave their country at first opportunity, rather than stay.

The picture of millions of lazy immigrants who only wait on welfare is a false picture, and it has nothing to do with reality. To the contrary, in any place where immigration is freed from restrictions, the industrious, active, entrepreneurial immigrants outnumber the lazy and criminal elements by a large margin. It is to be expected, because immigration is an undertaking of significant cost to the individual immigrant, and when allowed the liberty to immigrate, it is usually the future-oriented, entrepreneurial type of person who is willing to pay the price. In fact, it is partly for this reason that the socialists in the past – and Marx himself – have always been firm opponents of open immigration, because open immigration never changed the political landscape in their favor. Karl Marx himself admitted that the policy of open borders of Britain was a reason why his ideology couldn’t spread in Britain.

As improbable as it may sound to you, it is possible that the current change in policy of the liberals – in favor of immigration instead of their traditional hostility to immigration – is caused by the realization that their economic policies don’t work, and therefore they need more immigrants to keep the economic growth. (Remember, for all their xenophobia, the Nazis imported millions of workers to keep their militaristic-welfare state going.) The welfare state in the US is a step from collapse, and since America has no means to naturally replace the needed workers, the fastest measure to prevent economic collapse is to import workers. In this, they have finally returned to economic common sense; but now the conservatives have adopted the old liberal policy and the culturally suicidal ideology of closed borders.

Restricting immigration has other economic, often invisible consequences. The major one of them is outsourcing. The connection is seldom made but it is real, and it has to do with the distorted economic environment created by government control over an area that is purely economical. How then does immigration affect outsourcing? Here’s how:

Immigration laws are normally proposed by lobbyists of Big Labor, the trade unions. Since unions are the voting power behind immigration laws, they have a say as to who gets admitted and who doesn’t. Of course, as with everything else, they shape the laws to admit only those who wouldn’t be competition to the unions’ members on the market place. Thus, lower middle class workers seldom get immigration visas. Only higher middle class entrepreneurs and professionals and lower class welfare recipients get admitted because neither group is a competition threat to the unions. Such policy, of course, distorts the market in the US: The lower middle class workers who are members of trade unions remain in lower supply compared to the other groups, and therefore their relative market price and political leverage are much higher. Thus they can twist the hands of the entrepreneurs (who now face competition from the admitted higher class immigrants) to get better terms: better wages, more benefits, earlier retirement, pension funds, etc. But better terms for the workers mean higher costs for the entrepreneurs. Eventually, increased labor costs in the US make business unable to compete. The solution? Entrepreneurs take advantage of the better global communications and the spread of knowledge and outsource their production facilities. Because of immigration restrictions, they can’t decrease their costs by hiring those potential immigrant Mexican, or Chinese, or Indonesian workers. What they do, then, is go where these workers are, move whole production facilities to Mexico, China, or Indonesia, and give the same jobs to the same Mexican, Chinese, or Indonesian workers. The only difference is, because of immigration restrictions, it is the US that is losing production facilities, and not only the unions lose available jobs, but service companies in the US lose business that would have normally stayed in the US, if it wasn’t for the distorted economic environment created by the immigration laws.

The fear of immigrants is based on a basically socialist view of the economy: There are only so many resources for so many people. Therefore, the opponents of immigration say, we need to limit immigration so that we don’t get poorer. Amazingly, Christians seldom stop to think who they align with in this argument. Isn’t this the same argument of those who advocate birth control? “There are too many people on the planet and too little resources base, let’s limit the population.” Isn’t this the argument of rich liberals like Bill Gates who hopes that vaccinations in Africa will help reduce the population there? Isn’t this the argument of abortion advocates in this country: Better kill a baby than let her live in possible poverty? Isn’t it absurd that with the same mouth we debunk the myth of overpopulation and at the same time agree with it wholeheartedly?

If only Christians could stop and realize the absurdity of the argument. If more people really meant less resources per person and richer individuals, would reducing the population of the US to one man only make that man the richer man in the world? After all, he will have all these resources, n’est-ce pas? The reality is, if you reduced the population of these United States to one person, or even a thousand people, or even a million people, and somehow kept all the resources intact, this group of people will be poorer than an average farm worker in Bangladesh. Why? Because the availability of resources is not what makes people rich but the work that makes them usable for humans. Wealth is not in resources that are passively existing somewhere, wealth is created by work and division of labor and mass production, and work, division of labor and mass production depend on the size of the population. (Other factors play a part, too, like government policies, traditional views of work and entrepreneurship, etc.)

Related to it is that other socialist argument, “Immigrants are taking our jobs.” Er, excuse me? Whose jobs are those? In what sense does a job belong to you and not to the employer? If I need a man to mow my back yard, does this job belong by right to my next door neighbor just because he lives closest to the job? Or can I hire the guy who lives two blocks over, just because I  want to hire that guy over my next door member? Can your Walmart send the cops to your home for shopping at Sprouts, because Walmart has the right to your business being closer to your home, in your neighborhood? Since when do we conservatives think in collectivist categories like little well-trained communists?

An argument is sometimes proposed, that given the socialist wasteful policies of the US government, open borders will only increase the waste, so therefore, let’s first close the borders, fix what we need to fix, and then open the borders again. The problem with this argument is that it presupposes that limiting immigration will limit the waste. But what in the world would make us think that government waste depends on the size of the population or on limiting immigration? Has there been a time in America’s history when Congress actually needed the excuse of more immigrants to increase taxes and spending? When has there ever been such correlation? Congress increases spending for any reason whatsoever, it never sets aside money for immigrants specifically. If you we open the borders, Congress will increase spending; if we close them, Congress will increase spending. What in the world can make anyone believe that closing the borders will in any way decrease spending and waste, or will help us fix the problems in our society and government? And of course, when we close the borders, we actually give the same Federal government the power to decide who gets in. And guess what, who gets in will be those who pledge loyalty to that same Federal government, which will decrease our chances to turn things around, as opposed to entry uncontrolled by the government where lovers of liberty will have better chances to enter and help us restore liberty and justice for all.

There are many more economic arguments in favor of open borders that we won’t have the time to cover today. As with everything else, whenever an area is controlled by the government, the economy suffers. Labor is simply another economic resource which needs to remain fluid and movable to be able to respond to the demands of the market; when the government controls the movement of any economic resource, the economic environment is distorted. Human resources are not an exception. Also, when the government controls the movement of any economic resource, this open opportunities for corruption and crime. And again, human resources are not an exception. The only solution to the current immigration crisis is get the Federal government out of the immigration business, open the borders for free travel and settling, and let the market forces control what is a market phenomenon in the first place.

But nowhere is the madness of American Christians more pronounced than when we come to the religious issues and factors of immigration. In their minds, American Christians are so blind to their own professed faith and to the facts of history and of the current situation in the world, that they are completely unable to see the real picture of modern immigration. In their minds, open borders means that “the lawless pagans of the world will flood America.” Seriously, because America doesn’t have lawless pagans, and the world outside America is full with only lawless pagans, and if there are any Christians, they are not so enterprising as to immigrate for whatever reason, they do not want a better future for their children, and they prefer to live in misery, tyranny, darkness, and persecutions.

Stop here and ponder over this last word. Ah, aren’t we such softies, tearfully posting pictures of persecuted Christians around the world! Don’t we show such solidarity with our brothers and sisters insisting that the Federal government takes measures to stop persecutions of Christians around the world! Aren’t we so righteous to post data that Christianity is now the most persecuted religion in the world? And aren’t we so incredibly foolish to not stop and connect this fact with our rooting for restrictive immigration laws!

If Christianity is the most persecuted religion around the world, I ask, who of the representatives of all religions is most likely to want to immigrate to another place, most of all the United States? And therefore, who of the representatives of all religions is most likely to be stopped and deported and returned back home by our immigration laws? Good people will obey immigration laws, you say? But are those who enforce the laws good people? Aren’t they Federal bureaucrats? Would you trust Federal bureaucrats to protect you as a Christian in the US? Would you give them the power to decide whether you need protection or not? If not, why do we trust Federal bureaucrats to actually make decisions in favor of protecting persecuted Christians around the world? How did this work for the persecuted German Jews in the 1930s? How many of them were returned back to the Nazi slaughterhouses because of our immigration laws? And what in the world makes you think it will work differently for persecuted Christians today?

Stop here and consider this. If this argument doesn’t make your blood freeze in your veins, you are not a true Christian, you are a fake Christian, you are just a church-goer, your true faith is not in Christ, and your true religion is statist idolatry, or American idolatry, or any other kind of idolatry, but not the Christian religion. If these immigration laws you have been supporting have been the reason for the return of even one Christian back to his persecutors . . . nay, if these immigration laws have been the reason for even one Christian to despair of even trying to find asylum in the US because of the high bars imposed on legal immigration, or because of the corruption of Federal bureaucrats using those same laws, the blood of that Christian is on your hands! If it’s better to tie a stone around your neck and jump in the sea rather than seduce one of these small ones, then it is better to have ten thousand Dearborn-Michigans in this country than send one Christian to death by persecution by supporting evil laws! And before you take offense at this statement, could it be that Dearborn MI is actually a warning by God for us, to make us see what we have done to Christians around the world with our immigration laws, and give us a foretaste of the judgment coming on us? Could it be that in our foolishness we have misinterpreted the signs God is giving us?

Contrary to what many Americans believe, of all religions around the world, Christians are disproportionately represented among the world’s immigrants, even in the United States. Also, even among the non-Christian immigrants, the statistical odds of conversion to Protestant Christianity are much higher than among the homeborn. The best example, right here, in front of our eyes, is the Hispanic population of the United States. A study of 2002 shows that while Roman Catholicism was the religion of over 90% of the Hispanics over 60 years old, the same percentage is down to 60% in the age group of 30-40-year-olds, with Protestantism in all its forms rising to 40% of the faith of the younger generation of Hispanics. Hispanic Protestant iglesias strike the observer with their average age, compared to the aging population in the traditional Anglo churches, as a commentator on the study wrote ten years ago. But there’s more, and the two books of Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom and God’s Continent give real facts and data about the religious constitution of the immigrant communities in Europe and the United States. Contrary to the prejudices we all hold today, when immigration is not restricted, Christians are those who dominate immigration, even if their home countries are not predominantly Christian. The Korean and the Filipino populations in the United States are the greatest examples of that: While Christianity is the religion of only about 40% of the Korean population, in the Korean community in the US, Christians outnumber non-Christians by more than 20 to 1! The situation is the same among the Filipinos, and similar among – listen to this – the Arabic immigrants. When you meet an Arab immigrant – or anyone of Arabic origin – in the United States, you run a 50% chance of them being Christian, a percentage far far higher than in the Arabic world. Such is the picture among Russian and Ukrainian immigrants as well, and the Russian and Ukrainian pockets in New York City are actually bastions of the Republican Party in a city that is heavily Democrat in its voting preferences. And it is known to all that immigrant Jews from the former Soviet Union separate themselves from American Jews for one simple reason: Immigrant Jews are self-consciously conservative, and much more loyal to the original vision of America than are American Jews.

The situation is the same in Europe, as Philip Jenkins shows. While we love to be scared by pictures of immigrant communities in Europe with women in burkas and men in turbans, the truth is, Christian churches – not just the dead European traditional churches, but vibrant, live, active churches – outnumber mosques in the immigrant communities by 4 to 1. This not visible to the eye because these people do not go around in flowing robes and turbans and burkas, but the truth is, Christianity in Europe is flourishing among immigrant communities, and in some areas immigrant communities provide the only place a true worshipper of God can go to. The examples are too many to be listed here, but you all need to read these two books to actually learn the real facts.

Restriction of immigration, therefore, won’t help save the Western civilization, it will only help surrender it to the forces of atheism and socialism. Just like the influx of Gentiles in the church helped save and continue the Covenant of God, saving it from the homeborn Jews, immigration today may be the same forc?”e sent by God to save the Western civilization from its downward spiral to atheism and lawlessness. Religiously, we have nothing to fear from immigration; and we have everything to fear from our own spiritual stagnation, and our violation of God’s Law in this particular area.

Thus, there are no reasons, political, economic, or religious, to curb, control, limit, or restrict immigration. Immigration is not bad, and in fact, it is good for America. Restrictions on immigration are only another area of government control that has gone beyond the limits God placed on civil governments, and they are destroying America politically, and economically, and religiously.

The final question, then will be: How then do we deal with the immigration crisis we are facing today? If we were asked, as Christians, by our representatives in Congress, “What do we do? What does the Bible say?”, what answer are we to give them? Our answer should be:

Like so many other crises American has been through, this crisis is an artificial crisis, created not – as many wrongly believe – by the lack of involvement by the government, but by too much government. Just like the violence and gang crisis created by the Prohibition a 100 years ago, we today have a violence and gang crisis created by another prohibition, the immigration prohibition. If we were faithful to the Bible, and if we were faithful to the Constitution, and if we had never given the Federal government the power to control the movement of individuals, these children would have been with their parents because their parents would have come over the normal way just as your ancestors came here several generation ago. As we saw before, between 1880 and 1910, in the span of 30 years, America’s population tripled thanks to immigration. And there was no such immigration crisis, as wave after wave of immigrants reached the shores and made their new home in their new country.

The real crisis is not that we have allowed more immigrants; actually, if you look ate the individual states, the states boast when they are able to attract more people, and Texas is the state that boasts more than any other state with attracting people from the other states. The crisis that we have allowed to be duped by the liberals to declare immigration a bad thing, and adopt a socialist view.

When the Prohibition created the crisis of violence and corruption and gangs, the only solution was: End the Prohibition, now. When they did, the problem disappeared over night. The more they delayed the solution, the worse the problem became. You don’t solve a problem by delaying the solution.

Therefore, there is only one solution to this crisis: Obey the Bible and obey the Constitution, get the Federal government out of the business of immigration, and repeal all laws that limit immigration. Return America to the original formula of open immigration, limited political franchise. Let the people move free, restrain the government, and limit the voting privilege. Anything else will only continue the agony, and will eventually bring judgment on this once great nation for her disobedience to the Law of God

History of Immigration Laws in the US and the West

PASSPORT, or safe conduct in time of war, a document granted by a belligerent power to protect persons and property from the operation of hostilities. In its more familiar sense a passport is a document authorizing a person to pass out of or into a country, or a licence or safe-conduct to. The person specified therein and authenticating his right to aid and protection. Although most foreign countries may now be entered without passports, the English foreign office recommends travellers to furnish themselves with them, as affording a ready means of identification in case of need.

Now, close your eyes and imagine a world where you could travel to any country without having to carry with yourself any means of identification, whether passport, visa, or ID card. (Actually, try to imagine a world where you can drive in your own home state without any means of identification, driver’s license or anything else. If you can.) Imagine a world where you don’t have to meet the perverts of the TSA, police thugs, border control bureaucrats, corrupt and greedy customs officers, etc. Imagine a world where the government has no means to track your movement, and if they want to stop a criminal from going somewhere, the burden of proof is on them: they need to first provide the court with an incontrovertible proof of committed crime, and then do the arrest in such a way that no innocent person’s rights are violated—no road blocks, no rounding up innocent people to check their papers, etc. Imagine a world in which you can freely carry your weapons with you on a plane or a ship, or any substance you want, or any kind of valuables, without any fear that some government crook somewhere may have decided that certain substances or valuables can’t cross borders. Imagine a world where you can buy a house or do business or get a job in any place in the world and never see a government bureaucrat, or never need to see one; or never have to have ID for any of the activities you have chosen.

That, my friends, was the world our ancestors lived in a little over 100 years ago. The quote I gave you was from Encyclopedia Britannica of 1911. In 1911, a person could travel the world without a passport. If they decided to furnish themselves with a passport, it was to protect them from government thugs, not to make it easier for government thugs to track their movements. Read some fiction of a century ago, and pay attention to the way they traveled: they never had to meet customs officers, border control, or experience any other violation of their rights. A German could get on a ship to Mexico, cross over to the Pacific side, take another ship to California, become a gold-digger, amass a fortune, take his gold and his guns he bought in the US, and get back to Germany by the same route, and he wouldn’t have to declare neither his gold nor his guns at any border, nor show any passport, nor even use his real name anywhere. As long as there was no one to accuse him of any crime to any government, he was left free and unmolested to travel, work, do business, establish contact, etc. That was the world left to us as legacy from our Christian ancestors.

The claims of our modern pagans today that it was a world of tyranny and oppression are ridiculous. Calvin fled Paris after the so-called Affair of the Placards in 1534, and safely crossed several borders to get to Basel, an outlaw to the French government. In the course of the next several years he freely traveled between Basel in Switzerland, Ferrara in Italy, and Strasbourg in Germany, and he was even back in Paris, still unarrested and unmolested by the French authorities. Two centuries later, Voltaire, under the French so-called “absolutist” monarchy, banned from Paris because his plays earned the wrath of the King himself, settled in Geneva. Geneva had a ban on theatrical performances at the time, so Voltaire would cross the French border regularly and stage his plays in Ferney, on the French side of the border! Just compare this to what Edward Snowden had to go through when he righteously exposed our wicked, tyrannical government in DC. We have liberty today? We don’t know a thing about liberty today, compared to our ancestors in the past. Next time you see a government employee, thank him for your slavery. (In fact, next time you see a voter, do the same.)

Even as late as the 1930s English and American journalists and writers liked to make fun of the German phrase, “Your papers, please.” As free Christian men, they couldn’t grasp why a government would force its citizens to spend money to get a passport so that the government tracks their movement. Of course, they still thought in terms of the old Christian morality, that the ability to move and travel was a basic human right not to be trampled by any government; in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, it was a privilege granted by the state. As late as the 1960s the Rhodesian Air Services still advised their passengers before a flight to have their revolvers unloaded, their automatic pistols on safety and holstered safely away from children, and their rifles and shotguns unloaded and placed in the overhead compartment. (And Rhodesia at the time wasn’t the backward racist socialist pagan corrupt gangster country modern Zimbabwe is, it was a modern, developed, free Christian nation, the economic miracle of the world, keeping a steady pace of economic growth of 7% a year in the midst of world recession.)

Yes, this is the world we lost, a legacy of more than a millennium of Christendom, of a Christian civilization that started on the ruins of a self-destructed pagan civilization to develop into a civilization that ruled the world, and brought the Biblical ideals of liberty and justice for all to all corners of the world. The story of why we lost it, and why we are back to a Barbarian world of government oppression is a longer story. Suffice to say here just briefly, the fault lies with us, Christians, for abandoning the comprehensive message of the Kingdom of God and focusing our attention on the salvation of our little precious souls, effectively excluding from our preaching more than 99% of the Gospel of Christ which has to do with subjecting all things to Christ. The fault lies with us that we have allowed our pulpits in our churches and seminaries to be filled with men who have preached and administered theological vasectomy in the church, shrinking the faith of the church to a few propositions of personal salvation and moralism, effectively abandoning the world to the enemy. But this is the topic of another lecture, and another conference.

What we want to do here is find out about the history of immigration laws in Christendom, of laws that governments passed to control and track the movements of individuals and groups of people across borders.

It is commonly acknowledged today by historians that part of the success of the Gospel in the early days of the church were the Roman roads on land, and their marine equivalent, developed technologies for navigation and safe sea lanes free from pirates. Just a couple generations before Christ Julius Caesar employed the might of Rome to completely destroy all the pirate fleets and nests in the Mediterranean. So complete was his victory that the effects of it lasted for 7 centuries; it wasn’t until the emergence of Islam that pirating became a threat to shipping again. His successor, Caesar Augustus, took up the enormous task of building roads for an empire that had grown beyond anything the world had known by that time. The road building office was raised to the level of imperial ministry. In fact, even though we have no direct information of the government budget at the time, given the extensive road building in Augustus’s time, it may have well been the largest item in the government budget during his reign, larger than the military expenses of the Empire. In addition to building government roads, an ancient Roman Law was revived in the Empire, that travelers could freely cross through private land if there was no road on it, built and maintained by the property owner. This encouraged large landowners to build and maintain private roads where there were no imperial roads. So extensive was the road system that Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing his Roman Antiquities to reconcile his fellow Greeks to the Roman rule, sets apart the Roman road system as one of the three great accomplishments proving the greatness of Rome, together with the aqueducts and the sewers system.

The roads wouldn’t be of a great use for commerce, or for the Gospel, if the Romans didn’t also remove all legal barriers to travel. What before had been a fragmented world of numerous little states with immigration restrictions against each other, and populations tossed around by royal edicts (remember how Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians re-settled whole nations), under Rome became a vast territory of safe and unrestricted travel. The Romans didn’t do it because they valued the individual or believed in individual liberty, that’s for sure. But whatever their motives were, the policy helped the Gospel spread like wildfire, in the face of opposition from both the Jews and the Roman state.

It is for this reason that Paul was able to travel over 10,000 miles over the course of 20 years—at least what is documented in Acts, who knows how many other undocumented journeys he made. That would make it 1.6 miles every day, if we take out the Sabbaths. Or, given the average speed of traveling at the time, he spent 3 hours average per day outside the protection of cities. Which makes it a total of 2.5 years outside cities. And we have not a single account of him being attacked by robbers. Paul’s appeal to Caesar in Acts 25 is taken as something casual and normal, and we don’t see any concerns raised about the difficulties of the journey to Rome.

It was later, when the Roman state became more fascist, that restrictions on travel and settling were imposed, first on foreigners, and then between the different provinces. The one-time census described in Luke 2:1 became, in the later days of the Empire, an extensive policy of restricting the movement of whole classes of people for the purpose of farming tax revenues for the state. By that time, the Gospel had reached every place in the known world, and had even reached the Barbarians outside the borders. An open world was an open world for the Gospel, and the Gospel took full advantage of it. Other religious, ideological, and political influences were also able to take such advantage, and they did. But at the end, the only lasting influence was the Gospel. In a world of no borders and free movement, it is the Gospel that triumphs over its rivals.

It was a lesson well-learned by the early Christians. So well learned, that when Christianity established its hold on Europe after AD 500, for almost 14 centuries Christendom did not institute any policy restricting immigration. Shutting down borders was left to the Barbaric pagan world. The pagan world had a reason to be afraid of free travel and immigration, for it was the Gospel that was the superior spiritual force. China remained a closed society for most of its history, limiting not only immigration of foreigners but trade with foreigners as well. Japan used its geographical position to establish immigration restrictions of almost complete isolation from the rest of the world. The paranoia of China and Japan of anything foreign could be rivaled only by the paranoia of the Greek city states, or by the paranoia of modern American church-goers. Trade restrictions were instituted by the Muslim world for Christian traders—which later led to the attempts by Portuguese navigators to find a sea passage to India. The pagan tribes to the north and northwest of Christian Europe wouldn’t allow any stranger on their territory, much like what missionaries testified of the Amazonian tribes in the 20th century.

In contrast, Christian Europe opened its borders to immigration, confident in the power of the message of the Gospel. The Byzantine empire allowed pagan tribes to settle within the borders of the Empire and let them organize their own areas of tribal jurisdiction. To those who became Christians, it opened possibilities for political participation. (At least one of the emperors was of Khazar nationality.) The trust in the power of the Christian message and the Christian culture was justified: politically, the empire disintegrated; but religiously, it left behind a strong legacy of Christian culture. So strong, in fact, that several centuries of concentrated efforts by the Ottoman authorities to eradicate it proved fruitless, and eventually the Sultans gave up. In the western part of Christendom, the legal principle was established, that the non-political members of the society—those who were not nobility, soldiers, or servants of rulers—should be safe from political harassment, including border restrictions. This led to some curious moments when, after wars or plagues, different principalities actually competed to attract freely traveling peasant families to settle on their lands. The restrictions of the time were economic, not political, and an economically free person was allowed to travel anywhere he pleased.

It is amazing for us today to read accounts of people who were declared outlaws, and yet were able to travel extensively without being arrested, some changing their names to conceal their identity. It was taken for granted in Christian Europe that government agents couldn’t stop a person just on mere suspicion. Within the course of 1,000 years, Christian Europe was transformed from a pagan/Barbarian place to a civilized culture where the individual had rights like nowhere else.

The Reformation and the wars of the Reformation created another legal precedent and concept related to immigration, one taken directly from the Law of God: Cities of refuge (from Numbers 35). It is seldom understood today that the Reformers looked at Christendom in general as a civilization of refuge, and therefore of the Reformed nations as nations of refuge first and foremost. Much has been written by ignorant or biased historians about Geneva of Calvin as a “religious” city where religious zealots reigned unopposed. The truth is, for most of Calvin’s stay in Geneva, the government was in the hands of Calvin’s theological opponents, the libertines, who were practical atheists. Geneva was ridiculed and attacked by the Romanists not for its “tyranny,” as ignorant people today like to believe, but for its excessive liberties! And why did Geneva have excessive liberties? Because Genevans considered their city not a bastion of the Reformation but a city of refuge, a safe ground for those who were fleeing economic distress, political turmoil, plagues, etc. This is why for the period of Calvin’s stay in Geneva the population of the city increased 4 to 5-fold: mathematically, this would be an increase of 7 to 8% per year in the course of over 20 years. To compare, for the same period the population of Europe decreased by between a fourth and a third of the total, due to wars, plagues, and harsh climate conditions.

The other Reformed nations didn’t stay idle, either. The Netherlands, Scotland, England, and the Calvinist principalities in Germany were actively recruiting immigrants to come to their countries. The fate of the French Huguenots is well-known, and their immigration to the Netherlands, England, and North and South Carolina. Less known is the startling open invitation these Reformed countries issued to the persecuted Jewish communities in Spain and France; startling by the standards of the time, at least. (Remember, as late as the 1930s, the socialist/fascist government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused entry to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, effectively delivering them to death.) Oliver Cromwell’s opponents spread the rumor of him being of Jewish descent on account of his policy of open borders, of which the Jews took the greatest advantage. One of the original drives for establishing colonies in the New World was to make them “cities of refuge,” as the story of both the Pilgrims and the Puritans in Massachusetts reveals.

Emma Lazarus’s sentiment in her “New Colossus” was the sentiment inherited from previous generations of her Jewish ancestors who found refuge in Reformed lands:

Give me your tired, your poor,

The “city of refuge” concept, of course, was closely related to the most important of all Reformed social concepts, the “city on a hill.” It would take another lecture to explain why it is the most important concept of the Reformation, and how it influenced the founding of America, and how we lost it. In short, the idea of building a society that exhibits God’s justice and mercy was central to the teachings and the practice of the Reformers and their spiritual heirs. But if the Reformed communities would become a city on a hill, beacons of God’s liberty and justice for all, it was natural to expect that the “glory and the honor of the nations” will be brought in this city (see Revelation 21:24-26), and “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” would be eager to settle in it. A city on a hill whose gates are closed is the dungeon of a tyrant, not the celebration halls of the King of kings. The gates of the Reformed communities, therefore, were to remain open to everyone who had the heart and the will to come in.

The history of the last four centuries supplied abundant proofs for the success of this view. Contrary to the foolish fears of modern American Christians, open gates don’t attract criminals and lazy people; it is the moral, industrious, entrepreneurial type of person who is willing to undertake to move to a better place for better safety and better opportunities for his children. The argument is the same as the argument about gun control: when guns are banned, only the criminals have guns; when guns are allowed, to every criminal there is a number of honest people who can shoot back. In the same way, when borders are shut down, only criminals cross them; when borders are open, to every criminal there are multitudes of honest workers and entrepreneurs who would want to come in and settle. The Reformed communities who opened their gates for the flood of immigrants, Christian or non-Christian, prospered abundantly within a generation after having been the economic backwater of Europe. Protestant Netherlands profited so greatly from the “uncontrolled” immigration that the country that in 1540 was a few fishing villages in the swamps of a corner of the Hapsburg’s possessions, within a generation, by 1580, was the economic, social, and military miracle of the world.

It was this concept that was at the foundation of the early colonial views in America concerning immigration. The colonists opposed immigration restrictions as a violation of their liberties. The Royal ban on colonizing the Appalachians and beyond the Appalachians was ignored and disobeyed by the early American colonists in large numbers. In a sense, most of the soldiers in the Continental Army were, by the modern statist lingo, “illegal immigrants.” (If they were decent people, they would have obeyed the immigration laws of the King, right?) We can’t understand the Fourth of July and the meaning of the American Revolution if we do not consider the fact that these people violated the Royal laws because they believed them to be unjust. And one of those laws was the ban on immigration.

Amazingly, the proof for it is in the very Declaration of Independence which conservatives claim to honor as one of the founding documents of the United States:

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

Modern conservatives pay lip service to these words, and then turn around and demand from today’s government the same thing that the colonists fought against. (This is called intellectual schizophrenia.) Immigration was considered vital to the vision of a city on a hill; the Patriots—and especially the Calvinist Presbyterian crowd—wanted not simply immigration, they wanted laws to encourage immigration.

The US Constitution didn’t give any branch of the Federal government the right to control immigration. It did charge Congress to pass laws to regulate naturalization, that is, the right of foreigners to political suffrage. It was understandable, given the fact that immigration was a right, and a religious necessity for a city on a hill. Political suffrage was a privilege. Not everyone could vote. But everyone could come and prosper.

And indeed, between the War of Independence and 1882 there was no major attempt by Congress to control or regulate immigration. In compliance with the Constitution, Congress passed in 1790 – a year after the forming of the United States under a single Federal government—the Naturalization Act, regulating not immigration but the right to citizenship. Much can be said about this act and its discriminatory character: it allowed an immigrant to receive citizenship after a stay of two years, but it excluded blacks, American Indians, and Asians, as well as slaves and indentured servants. It was amended multiple times between 1790 and 1921 to fix some problems, or create new problems. Essentially, though, it did not limit nor control immigration; the old Christian Reformed concept of city of refuge remained at the foundations of America’s immigration policy for about a century. In fact, in a few cases immigration was encouraged, and in the 1840s and the 1850s, while the conflict between the Northern and the Southern states was forming and picking up speed, both sides worked frantically to attract immigrants. By 1860 the North had obvious advantage over the South in numbers; the South had failed to attract enough immigrants to preserve the demographic balance. The influx of immigrants provided the North not only with enough human resources to man the Northern armies but also with the necessary labor force to man the growing industrial base. Not to mention that more immigrants meant more people with new and daring ideas, entrepreneurial spirit, and the skills to organize production to levels unheard-of before. To win the war, the North needed to enlist only about 20% of its adult male population, against 80% and more of the population of the South. And, significantly, the North came out of that war much better developed industrially. In 1870, the United States was already the economic superpower of the world, due to the unique combination of Puritan work ethic and unrestricted immigration bringing in an abundance of labor and talent.

Unfortunately for the North and for the US in general, the mid-19th century was also the time the first trade unions were started. In the crowded cities of the North-East their influence picked up almost immediately, and by the 1880s the individual, fragmented, isolated trade union groups started uniting for action. Part of their struggle was legitimate, economic, in providing the individual worker some kind of leverage for his protection. They started and organized mutual assistance foundations, training courses, retirement funds, etc., in addition to collective bargaining. Part of their struggle, though, was political and immoral. And their first target in their political struggle were not their employers nor the banks who provided the capital for growth, but the competition in the face of foreign immigrants. Mainly Chinese.

By 1882, two laws were passed to exclude Chinese workers from the labor market in the US. The argument raised by the unionist activists and the first Marxists in the US was the familiar argument used today by conservatives: “The Chinese take our jobs, lower the wages, and are unable to assimilate in and adapt to our culture.” (Next time you hear a conservative using that argument against Mexicans, keep in mind that he is mindlessly repeating old and worn-out socialist and Marxist slogans.) There were some legitimate moral concerns, though, given the fact that the Chinese coolies were not free individuals who migrated on their own accord but actual slaves, bought in China from their feudal masters by agents of the American railroad companies. After the War Between the States such slavery was embarrassing for a government that pretended to have exterminated slavery. Another law was also passed that forbade the import of workers for any kind of business, from any region in the world, ending the practice of many industrialists of German origin of shipping hundreds of workers for their factories. None of these laws, however, banned an individual foreigner from entering the country and settling in it. They did have some negative economic effect, mainly on the railroads and the mining industry which used imported labor extensively. But they were not immigration laws. Immigration was left to the states, and since the states competed for immigrants, there was no limitation. The old religious principles, combined with the economic incentives of the industrial age, made America open its borders.

It is important to note that the Supreme Court decision of 1892, that “the US is a Christian nation,” was made in reference to an immigration case, where the Church of the Holy Trinity challenged one of these restrictive employment laws, and won. It is ironic that such a statement by the court would be made against an immigration law.

But the War Between the States only accelerated the centralization of power in the government in Washington DC, and the 1880s the Federal Government was already an active agent of its own, ready to overstep even more boundaries. Remember, the immediate occasion for the start of the War Between the States was not slavery but the issue of who will collect the tariff duties. By 1882, some smart people in Washington had realized that immigration was a huge untapped source of revenue. Since people were the main import commodity of America, there should be a tariff on it.

Thus was passed in 1882 the first true Immigration Act in the US. Its main purpose was the collection of a head tax of 50 cents for every immigrant. To make it not so blatant that the act was centered on collecting revenue for the Federal government, some proforma stipulations were added, declaring certain persons, called LPC, or “likely public charge” to be ineligible for immigration: convicts, lunatics, idiots, and persons unable to care for themselves. Paying homage to the Christian values of the past, the Act specifically stated that the category “convict” excludes those who were convicted of political offenses, reflecting the traditional American belief that the United States is a haven for those persecuted by foreign tyrants.

The main purpose of the Act, of course, was the creation of the first massive Federal immigration bureaucracy, and the creation of a source of revenue for the federal government that couldn’t be challenged or influenced by the states. The immigration policy administration created by that act became the forefather of many modern agencies, from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA. The head tax was increased from 50 cents in 1882 to $8 in 1917 (in a period of gold standard and a deflation of the currency of about 7% total). For most of those 35 years only the revenues from immigration (excluding all other revenues) exceeded abundantly all the costs for running the Federal government. The immigrants were a cash cow for the statist agenda of Washington DC.

Since the law was rather focused on revenue than controlling immigration, it did little to restrict it. For the next 30 years the population of the United States would triple from over 30 million to 100 million. This was an unprecedented situation in history: never before and never after has any nation seen such wild demographic growth. And, contrary to the foolish prejudices of modern conservatives, this unprecedented growth coincided with the period of the wildest economic growth in the history of the world. Never before, and never after has a nation seen such steep rise to economic prosperity and domination over the world’s economy.

There was a problem, though. And the problem was that the influx of immigrants at the rate of 2 per 1 citizen created a great diversity in the population that was undesirable. Undesirable for whom? For a small political and intellectual elite from New England (the Yankeeland) who had adopted the ideas of Darwin and of the French racist Gobineau (praised by Marx and Engels for his racist “studies”), and had made their goal to deepen and expand the political centralization of the United States as a means to ensuring the survival of the white race against the “inferior races.”

The ideologue of the new immigration policies was one Prescott F. Hall, a Boston lawyer who in 1894 became the founder and the first secretary of the Immigration Restriction League. A short but comprehensive review of all his interests and views must be presented here in order to understand how we got our first truly restrictive immigration laws.

Hall’s views were a crude early form of everything that would later become the official ideology of the National Socialist Party in Germany. He was a believer in the occult, and was a member of the American Society for Psychical Research, devoted to the study of paranormal phenomena. He also believed in genetic determinism, that the culture of a nation is determined by its genes; therefore, genetic pollution would lead to cultural and social degeneration. He was therefore a proponent of eugenics, the pseudoscience which led to legislation for forced sterilization of certain classes in the American society. He viewed the perfect society as a genetically homogenous society in which a superior race of genetically pure humans establish a culture corresponding to their genetic constitution, unpolluted by other genetic constitutions. He was also an ardent proponent of centralized government education, an admirer of Horace Mann, and an activist for the National Education Association. He was also an evolutionist, believing in the struggle for survival as the major motive for all social relations and conflicts. He believed that the world would become richer if the superior racial character becomes dominant. Here’s a quote from his essays on immigration:

The Mediterranean races, unlike the Nordic, look to the State for progress instead of to individual enterprise. The Semitic consciousness, as expressed in men like St. Paul, Spinoza, Marx and Bergson, is the champion of abstract universals as contrasted with Nordic concreteness. A nation of many races has no longer one soul, one spirit. Its integrity can be destroyed not only through heredity by cross-breeding, but in a slower way by a change in the environment through the mere presence of alien elements. Gobineau long ago pointed out that the doctrine that all men are equal is announced only by mixed races. . . .

It is ironic, of course, that 100 years after he wrote this, the only truly socialist indoctrination centers teaching only abstract universals in the world would be the universities of the Yankeeland, manned almost entirely by “Nordic” professors, Ironically, as he was writing these lines, the Swedish Social Democratic Party was being formed, later to become the ruling party in Sweden for more than two generations, turning the “Nordic” nation into a herd dependent on the state for their progress. At the same time, a generation of Jewish (Semitic) professors were laying the foundations for the Austrian Economic School, the most thorough defense of individualism and private initiative ever written in the history of economics. If Theodore Roosevelt was the American fascist among the politicians, Prescott Hall was his ideologue. And the public political voice for the Immigration Restriction League was Henry Cabot Lodge, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, and fervent American Nationalist.

In 1921 and in 1924 two immigration laws were passed, the Emergency Quota Act and the National Origins Act which introduced quotas, and with the quotas, introduced full control over immigration by the Federal Government, in violation of the Constitution which gave Congress power only over the naturalization of foreigners. The laws were deeply racist. The “quotas” were actually percentage quotas for different genetic regions of the world. Homogenizing America genetically was seen by the statists at the time as the necessary prerequisite to establishing a centralized government over all America. People of different genetics would only create greater confusion, and will thwart the efforts towards more centralization.

If you have read the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, it was inspired in part by the official political ideology in the US in the 1930s, influenced by the views of Prescott Hall and his fellow-ideologists. The novel describes exactly the kind of world Hall would want. The other influence was Herbert George Wells, the famous British science fiction writer who had the same views on races and immigration as Hall. We also need to emphasize that Wells was a committed Fabian Socialist, and the Fabian Society was originally Darwinian and racist to the core. Another connection there would be Margaret Sanger, another Fabian Socialist, racial supremacist, and activist for abortion as a means for exterminating the undesirable races. Such was the origin of the first real immigration laws in the United States.

After the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, racially-based immigration laws became an embarrassment for America, so right after the war work started on a change in the immigration policies. The change was not meant to return the US to the original formula of open borders, though. Once the Federal government grabs a certain lever of power, it never relinquishes it. The attempt was to find a new formula for continuing Federal control over immigration in the post-Hitler world. The resulting Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 was just as much a violation of the Constitution in that Congress affirmed its control over immigration, which was not one of its Constitutional prerogatives: Immigration was left to the States and the people, only naturalization was left to Congress. It retained the national origins formula but the ideology was changed, from racist/genetic to fascist/collectivist. The previous laws regarded people as genetic animals. This law now looked at them as members of cultural blocs that are unable to be re-educated culturally because of their belonging to a collective. In his defense of the law, its architect, the Democrat lawyer and Senator Pat McCarran, said the following:

However, we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies.

This is how you know a socialist, or a liberal, or a fascist: They never think in terms of individuals, they always think in terms of “blocs.” Exactly the opposite to that original American spirit that gave the individuals the right to self-determination and did not demonize them for belonging to any group by choice.

No wonder that McCarran would express such sentiments. His nickname was the “Senator from Madrid.” At the time, Spain was under the regime of the fascist/militarist dictator Francisco Franco, and McCarran was an admirer of Franco. He was convinced that Franco’s system of forcing cultural uniformity on a whole nation is the superior social and political system. He spent much of his political career lobbying for foreign aid to Franco’s regime. (“If the system was superior, why did it need aid?”, we can ask.)

The act of 1952 expanded the Federal bureaucracy, for it included a provision for admitting immigrants with special skills, and it also legislated ban on immigration for people who were “fellow-travelers” of Communist parties around the world. Whole new departments were needed now to be able to determine what skills a potential immigrant has, and whether his “sympathies” (the definition for a “fellow traveler” was one who “sympathizes”) lied with some Communist party.

This openly fascist period in the US immigration policy lasted for 13 years, when another group of Democrats—Emmanuel Celler, Phillip Hart, and Ted Kennedy—gave the start to the last, socialist, period, the period that continues until now, and its policies are eagerly supported by modern so-called “conservatives” (and many church-goers) in the United States. It was entirely based on the ideology of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the ideas of the American liberal political elite for social engineering. The Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 removed the National Origins Formula but it affirmed the firm grip of the Federal Government over immigration. The ideology of “adapting to the culture” became the ruling ideology of the US immigration policy, but what American culture was was left entirely to unelected Federal bureaucrats to decide. The Act also removed the decision locus for immigration admissions from American soil to US consulates around the world; understandably, for thus the immigration bureaucrats were now safe from any oversight and challenges by the American taxpayers. So now, unelected bureaucrats in the US determined what immigrants the government wanted, and unelected bureaucrats outside the US decided which individual immigrants would reach the US soil. Eventually, the consulates were given the power to control not only immigration but also business and personal travel.

What just a generation before was ridiculed by American journalists in Nazi Germany, the obsession with “Show me your papers,” became the established policy of the Federal government concerning non-US citizens. It would take another generation for the policy to develop and become the established policy for US citizens as well. Try to go anywhere without your papers today, as a US citizen.

As any socialist policy, it didn’t work. Immigrants continued to use loops in the system to arrive, and by the 1980s America had millions of “illegal immigrants.” (Immigration restrictions work just like gun bans and prohibitions against alcohol and drugs.) An un-Biblical and unconstitutional law was not working—as was to be expected. By the 1980s the law was under severe criticism by many conservative politicians, including Ronald Reagan. In 1981, a few months into his first term, President Reagan delivered a special statement on immigration, announcing his goal of immigration reform which would return America back to her original purpose of city on a hill (his phrase was a “shining city”). He declared that he was seeking amnesty for illegal aliens:

Illegal immigrants in considerable numbers have become productive members of our society and are a basic part of our work force. Those who have established equities in the United States should be recognized and accorded legal status.

In the 1980s, it was the liberals in this country who were fretting about “immigrants destroying our culture.” If you told a conservative at the time that immigration was dangerous to the culture, they would laugh you out of the room. Immigration to conservatives was a proof for the superiority of the American culture. Why would anyone leave their miserable conditions and come to America with the purpose of replicating the same conditions here?

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 did not meet all of Reagan’s expectations. It did give amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, as Reagan wanted, but it also placed burdens on and limited the freedom of employers: They were now banned from hiring illegal immigrants, and were under obligation to report the legal status of their employees. The reason may lie in the fact that the law’s architects were two extremely liberal legislators, the Democrat Romano Mazzoli and the Republican Alan K. Simpson. (Simpson was an outspoken advocate for the legalization of abortion and sodomy.) After the end of his political career, Ronald Reagan expressed his original vision in the following words:

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get here.

Somewhere between 1989 and today, something happened to the conservative American mind. It was brainwashed to accept as a “conservative value” a policy that has always been a racist, liberal, fascist, socialist, statist policy: restricting the movement of individuals for the purposes of the state. And in the next lecture we will see what the situation is today, how it compares to the Bible, and what arguments are used by conservatives in support of it