Abstract
The Bible’s first confession of faith begins with a story of pilgrimage and migration: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien” (Deuteronomy 26: 5). We might ask, did that “wandering Aramean” and his children have the proper documents to reside in Egypt? Were they “illegal aliens”? Did he and his children have the proper Egyptian social security credentials? Did they speak the Egyptian language properly?
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.
—Derek Walcott, “The Schooner ‘Flight’”1
To survive the Borderlands
You must live sin fronteras
Be a crossroads.
—Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera2
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Notes
Derek Walcott, “The Schooner ‘Flight,’” in Collected Poems, 1948–1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 346.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999, orig. 1987), 217.
Quoted by Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, and Jung Mo Sung, in Beyond the Spirit of Empire (London: SCM Press, 2009), 45.
Franz Fanon, Peau Noir, Masques Blancs (Paris:Éditions du Seuil, 1952).
Pyong Gap Min, ed., Encyclopedia of Racism in the United States, 3 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005).
A classic text on American nativism is John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1968).
Richard Rodríguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (New York: Viking, 2002).
See also Patrick J. Buchanan’s book, with the inflammatory title, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2008).
David Leonhardt, “Truth, Fiction and, and Lou Dobbs,” The New York Times, May 30, 2007, C1.
George M. Fredrickson, Diverse Nations: Explorations in the History of Racial & Ethnic Pluralism (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2006).
Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1775–1882 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
Mark Potok, “Rage in the Right,” Intelligence Report, Southern Poverty Law Center, no. 137 (Spring 2010), accessed April 17, 2010, www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/spring/rage-on-the-right.
Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929–1939 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974);
Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).
Matthew Soerens, Jenny Hwang, and Leith Anderson provide a succinct and precise summary of the most recent failed attempts to enact a comprehensive immigration legislative and juridical reform in their book Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compassion & Truth in the Immigration Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2009), 138–158.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 192.
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22–49; The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Hispanic Challenge,” Foreign Policy (March/April 2004): 30–45.
Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
Dilip Ratha, “Dollars Without Borders: Can the Global Flow of Remittances Survive the Crisis?,” Foreign Affairs (October 16, 2009), accessed May 10, 2010, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65448/ dilip-ratha/dollars-without-borders. “[R]emittances are proving to be one of the more resilient pieces of the global economy in the downturn, and will likely play a large role in the economic development and recovery of many poor countries.”
This is a serious flaw in many ethnocentric critiques of immigration issues according to Francisco Javier Blázquez Ruiz, “Derechos humanos, inmigración, integración,” in Ciudadanía, multiculturalidad e inmigración, ed. JoséA. Zamora (Navarra, España: Editorial Verbo Divino, 2003), 86, 93.
A substantially more nuanced and intellectually complex analysis of the different aspects of immigration in the United States is provided by Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait, 3rd ed. rev. and exp. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (London: Continuum, 2003).
Dale Irvin, “The Church, the Urban and the Global: Mission in an Age of Global Cities,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 33, no. 4 (October 2009), 181.
Yet, at least Huntington recognizes the critical urgency of the substantial Latin American immigration for the cultural and political integrity of the United States (Huntington, “The Hispanic Challenge”). Cornel West, in another key text published in 2004, remains cloistered in the traditional white/black American racial dichotomy and is unable to perceive the salience and perils of xenophobia and nativism as a chauvinistic reply to immigration. Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). Is there any possible conceptual manner of bridging the concerns of the African American ghettoes, struggling against color-coded racism, and the growing Latino/Hispanic barrios, facing an insidious cultural disdain? Both communities suffer of lack of recognition of their genuine human dignity, which should imply more than mere tolerance for their distinctive cultural traits, of socioeconomic deprivation and political powerlessness. An always complex and difficult to achieve dialectics between cultural recognition and social-economic redistribution might be the key clue for solving this dilemma.
Cf. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London and New York: Verso, 2003).
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe emphasize this dialectics in the preface to the new edition of their famed text, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (2nd. ed.) (London: Verso, 2001), xviii: “One of the central tenets of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is the need to create a chain of equivalence among the various democratic struggles against subordination… to tackle issues of both ‘redistribution’ and ‘recognition.’”
See the poignant article by Jeremy Harding, “The Deaths Map,” London Review of Books 33, no. 20 (October 2011): 7–13.
John Bowe, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy (New York: Random House, 2007);
Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004);
Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
Branko Milanovic, “Global Inequality and the Global Inequality Extraction Ratio: The Story of the Past Two Centuries,” The World Bank, Development Research Group, Poverty and Inequality Group (September 2009); Peter Stalker, Workers Without Frontiers: The Impact of Globalization on International Migration (Geneva: International Labor Organization, 2000).
Cf. JoséE. Ramírez Kidd, Alterity and Identity in Israel: The “ger” in the Old Testament (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999).
Sodom’s transgression of the hospitality code was part of a culture of corruption and oppression, according to Ezekiel 16: 49—“This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” The homophobic construal of Sodom’s sinfulness, which led to the term sodomy, is a later (mis)interpretation. Cf. Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
JoséCervantes Gabarrón, “El inmigrante en las tradiciones bíblicas,” in Ciudadanía, multiculturalidad e inmigración, ed. JoséA. Zamora (Navarra, España: Editorial Verbo Divino, 2003), 262.
For a sharp critical analysis of the xenophobic and misogynist theology underlining Ezra and Nehemiah, see Elisabeth Cook Steicke, La mujer como extranjera en Israel: Estudio exegético de Esdras 9–10 (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial SEBILA, 2011).
Naim Stifan Ateek, A Palestinian Christian Cry for Reconciliation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009), 132.
Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984).
Soerens, Hwang, and Anderson, Trang Welcoming the Stranger; and M. Daniel Carroll R., Christians at the Border: Immigration, the Church, and the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008).
See Clark, and Jesse Lyda’s moving documentary, The Least of These (2009), http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/the_least_of_these.
Peter Phan, “Migration in the Patristic Age,” in A Promised Land, A Perilous Journey: Theological Perspectives on Migration, ed. Daniel G. Groody and Gioacchino Campese (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 35–61.
Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000).
Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1997), 5.
Cf. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996).
William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics in The Time of Many Worlds (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
Giovanni Sartori, Pluralismo, multiculturalismo e estranei: saggio sulla società multietnica (Milano: Rizzoli, 2000). Sartori perceives Islamist immigration as irreconcilable with, and thus nefarious for, Western democratic pluralism. His thesis is a sophisticated reconfiguration of the multisecular adversary confrontation between Christian/Western (supposedly open, secular, and liberal) and Islamic/Eastern (allegedly closed, dogmatic, and authoritarian) cultures, a new reenactment of what Edward Said appropriately named “Orientalism.”
Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992, orig. 1979), 176.
Some scholars, for example, argue that the North American Free Trade Agreement, which came into force on January 1, 1994, created havoc in several segments of the Mexican economy and deprived of their livelihoods approximately 2.5 million small farmers and other workers dependent on the agricultural sector. The alternative for many of them was the stark choice between the clandestine and dangerous drug trafficking or paying the “coyotes” for the also clandestine and dangerous trek to the North. Ben Ehrenreich, “A Lucrative War,” The New York Review of Books 32, no. 20 (October 2010): 15–18.
Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, ed. Migration and Interculturality: Theological and Philosophical Challenges (Aachen, Germany: Missions wissenschaftliches Institut Missio e.V., 2004); Jorge E. Castillo Guerra, “A Theology of Migration: Toward an Intercultural Methodology,” in Groody and Campese, A Promised Land, A Perilous Journey, 243–270.
Fernando Oliván, El extranjero y su sombra: Crítica del nacionalismo desde el derecho de extranjería (Madrid: San Pablo, 1998).
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© 2013 Elaine Padilla and Peter C. Phan
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Rivera-Pagán, L.N. (2013). Xenophilia or Xenophobia: Toward a Theology of Migration. In: Padilla, E., Phan, P.C. (eds) Contemporary Issues of Migration and Theology. Palgrave Macmillan’s Christianities of the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031495_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031495_3
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