AMNESTY PITS LAW VS. RELIGION

AMNESTY PITS LAW VS. RELIGION

Anonymous Attorney, Ohio

If nothing else, President Barack Obama’s executive decision to grant amnesty to a large subsection of illegal immigrants has polarized the country more than any other action he has taken in his six years as president. Praise from his constituent left has been as joyous as condemnation from his antagonist right has been shrill. As a Catholic lawyer, my own thoughts about this action are deeply conflicted. Powerful, persuasive commitments pull me both ways.

On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the argument that the president is flaunting the rule of law. In his speech Thursday night, he said that illegals “can come out of the shadows and get right with the law.” But that is not what will happen. The law has not changed, and will not change. The people that will benefit from this action will still be in the United States in violation of laws in the U.S. Code.

Their presence here will still be illegal.

The president is simply not going to execute these laws, despite his obligation under the Constitution to do so, and despite his oath that he would do so faithfully. Let us not parse it: This is a lawless act by what many see (and perhaps rightly so) as a lawless president. The president’s cynical caveat that this does not open the door to citizenship because “only Congress can do that” is laughingly disingenuous. The president has hurt himself and his office in deeply significant ways. On the other hand, I write these words on the weekend that a broad swath of Christians celebrate as the Feast of Christ the King. This feast reminds Christians that our first allegiance is to God, who is not bound by, or interested in, national and political boundaries. Indeed, this is a God who has no regard for such boundaries.

This is a God who has commanded Christians and Jews to welcome, love, and embrace the stranger, motivated by the powerful narrative of the Egyptian captivity. “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you,” says Leviticus 19:34; “you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” Why does the accidental place of my birth give me a privilege over those who, by similar chance, found themselves citizens of a hostile, oppressive, or hopelessly impoverished country?

And of course, this is also the threshold of Advent, in which Christians begin to anticipate the arrival of a stranger among us. This was a stranger born to two immigrants, who found themselves in an inhospitable and unwelcoming land that was not their own. And he was a stranger who soon was forced to flee to an even stranger land, in order to avoid death from a jealous ruler.

Of course this analogy is far from exact, and I have already lamented the president’s lawlessness. But as a Catholic Christian, I cannot avoid the power of the narratives of Israel’s escape from, and the Holy Families’ refuge in, a strange land.

I invite others to join me in not simply having a knee-jerk reaction to immigration as a political issue, but in taking inventory of our priorities and prejudices, and balancing those against our commitment to the rule of law and the need for orderly progress.