What did Jesus say about immigrants?

At a Glance

What I said: I was a stranger, and you took me in (Matthew 25:35). I told a story in which the hero was a foreigner from a people my hearers despised (Luke 10:30–37). I said nothing about borders or papers.

What the rest of the Bible says: More than almost anything else in the law of Moses: The stranger who lives as a foreigner with you shall be to you as the native-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you lived as foreigners in the land of Egypt (Leviticus 19:34).

When today’s view appeared: Nations have always guarded their lands. The fear that strangers will replace the people already here is old too. It has been preached in my name before, and it is preached in my name now.

The short answer: I was a refugee child, and I said that whatever you do to the stranger, you do to me. I wrote no immigration law. I told you whose face you will see when the stranger is at your door.

I was a refugee as a child.

When I was a small child, the king of Judea, Herod, heard that a child had been born who would be called king, and he set out to kill him. An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, “Arise and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and stay there until I tell you, for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.” He arose and took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt (Matthew 2:13–14).

That is how Matthew tells it. My family fled a violent ruler, at night, into a foreign country. We lived as strangers there until it was safe to go home.

Even at my birth, as Luke tells it, I was laid in a feeding trough, because there was no room for them in the inn (Luke 2:7).

What I said

When I told my friends how the nations would be judged, I said the King would welcome some and send others away. To the first he would say: I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in (Matthew 25:35). To the others: I was a stranger, and you didn’t take me in (Matthew 25:43).

Both groups were surprised. Neither had known it was me.

When a teacher of the law asked me who is my neighbor?, I told him about a man beaten and left on the road. A priest passed by. A Levite passed by. Then a Samaritan stopped, bandaged him, and paid for his care. Many of my people despised the Samaritans and treated them as foreigners. They worshiped on the wrong mountain, my people said, and came from the wrong blood. The Samaritans called themselves Israelites. I asked the teacher, which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers? He said, He who showed mercy on him. And I said, Go and do likewise (Luke 10:36–37).

I did not tell him the foreigner deserved help. I told him the foreigner was the one who knew how to give it.

And I will tell you something about myself that the gospels did not hide. A foreign woman, a Greek from the region of Tyre, came begging me to heal her daughter. I answered her hard: it is not appropriate to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs. She said, Yes, Lord. Yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs. And I said, For this saying, go your way. The demon has gone out of your daughter (Mark 7:27–29). She would not be sent away, and she was right.

What the rest of your Bible says

Few commands in my people’s law are repeated as often as this one: care for the stranger.¹

You shall not oppress an alien, for you know the heart of an alien, since you were aliens in the land of Egypt (Exodus 23:9).

The stranger who lives as a foreigner with you shall be to you as the native-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you lived as foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God (Leviticus 19:34). That is the same chapter that says love your neighbor as yourself, and it says it twice, the second time about the foreigner.

God loves the foreigner in giving him food and clothing. Therefore love the foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt (Deuteronomy 10:18–19). You shall have one kind of law for the foreigner as well as the native-born (Leviticus 24:22). A foreign worker was to be paid on time, like anyone else (Deuteronomy 24:14–15). And God said of the land itself: the land is mine; for you are strangers and live as foreigners with me (Leviticus 25:23).

My own family line ran through an immigrant. Ruth was a Moabite, from a people the law kept out of the assembly, who crossed into Judah with her mother-in-law and said, Your people will be my people, and your God my God (Ruth 1:16). She became the great-grandmother of King David.²

Your Bible was written mostly by a people who remembered being slaves in one foreign land and exiles in another, and who were often strangers in their own. It never lets them forget it.

What came after

Every nation guards its land. That is not new, and I do not pretend it is.

But the fear of the stranger has a long history in lands full of my followers too. In the United States, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese workers by race.³ The Immigration Act of 1924 set quotas meant to cut sharply the number of Italians, Jews and others from southern and eastern Europe, and barred most Asians entirely.⁴ In 1939, the ship St. Louis, carrying 937 passengers, most of them Jews fleeing Germany, was turned away from Cuba and then from the United States. It sailed back to Europe. Of the passengers who were returned to the continent, 254 died in the Holocaust.⁵

My followers have been on both sides. In the 1980s, churches across the United States sheltered refugees fleeing the wars in Central America, in what was called the Sanctuary Movement, and some church workers, among them a pastor, a priest and a nun, were prosecuted for it.⁶ Catholic charities, Lutheran and evangelical relief agencies, and countless local churches have resettled refugees for decades.

And in a 2022 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, 65 percent of white evangelical Protestants said that the growing number of newcomers from other countries threatens traditional American customs and values, compared with 40 percent of all Americans. Fifty-one percent of white evangelicals agreed that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,” compared with 30 percent of all Americans.⁷

I was one of those newcomers once. So were the people who wrote your Bible.

What You’ll Hear Back

“Nations have a right to borders. God set the boundaries of the nations.”

Paul said in Athens that God made from one blood every nation of men … having determined appointed seasons, and the boundaries of their dwellings (Acts 17:26). Read the first half of that sentence: one blood. And Paul said it to explain why every people should seek God, not to tell anyone how to guard a border.

I did not forbid nations to have borders, or laws about who may live where. That is for you to decide together. But whatever law you make, the law of Moses already told you how to treat the stranger once he is there: as the native-born. You shall love him as yourself.

“They should come legally.”

Many do, and wait years to do it. Many others have no legal way to come at all, or are running from a danger that will not wait. In my parents’ day there was no line to stand in and no papers to apply for. They ran.

Laws can be just or unjust, and you are free to argue about them. What you are not free to do, if you follow me, is forget that the person on the other side of the law is someone I said I would be.

“Charity is for individuals. The government is not the church.”

Christians may argue about how to do it. But notice that the law of Moses was not only a set of private kindnesses. It was the law of a nation: one kind of law for the foreigner as well as the native-born. And notice what I said in Matthew 25. It is all the nations who are gathered before the King (Matthew 25:32), and he does not tell them the stranger was someone else’s business.

“Nehemiah built a wall.”

He rebuilt the walls of a ruined city to protect the people inside from enemies who plotted to come and fight against Jerusalem (Nehemiah 4:8). It is true that Nehemiah was hard on foreigners too. He shut the gates against traders on the Sabbath, separated all the mixed multitude from Israel, and rebuked men who had married foreign wives (Nehemiah 13:1–3, 19–27). But a city wall is not a law about how to treat the stranger who lives among you. That law is in Leviticus, and it says love him as yourself.

“We have to take care of our own first.”

I understand that. People are afraid, and some of them are poor themselves. The law of Moses put the stranger beside the widow and the orphan (Deuteronomy 10:18), and beside the poor (Leviticus 19:10). It did not set them against each other. When you are told that the stranger is the reason you are poor, ask who is telling you, and what he is selling.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Leviticus 19:33–34 and Deuteronomy 10:17–19.

You will find: the reason the law gives for loving the stranger, and it is about who you used to be.

Then read Matthew 2:13–15 and Matthew 25:31–46, and ask who the stranger was.

The Short Version

• I was a refugee child, carried into Egypt at night to escape a king.
• I said I was a stranger, and you took me in, and made a despised foreigner the hero of my story about the neighbor.
• The law of Moses says to love the stranger as yourself, and gives one law for the foreigner and the native-born.
• David’s great-grandmother Ruth was an immigrant.
• My followers have both sheltered strangers and feared them. The fear is old. Preaching it in my name is not something I taught.