The Biblical View of Immigrants

Dan Beecher What about us sending weapons and arms and training people in other countries to terrorize their own citizens?

Dan McClellan Right. And then they flee those places and come here. We create a lot of problems in the world, and then we close our doors when we don't want to see the problems that we created.

Dan Beecher I love that we're proposing a "you broke it, you bought it" view of- I like that ... of immigration.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's a great way to put it. I love that. I'm going to quote you on that. I love that.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Dan Beecher Things are good, man. We've got some cool guests on the show today, and I am eager to ask some questions. So I'm just going to dive in and introduce who we got here.

Dan McClellan All right. Let's do it.

Dan Beecher These are the two gentlemen that make up "The Lawful Assembly" podcast. This is Cecil Ciccarello and Craig Moosen. That's Reverend Craig Moosen, JD, if you want to get all kinds of crazy about it. Cecil is, like me, a ding-dong with a bunch of other podcasts out here. An atheist, a secular humanist, and Craig, you're a professor at the Grace School of Applied Diplomacy at DePaul University. You're Assistant Minister for Immigrant Justice and at the Wellington United Church of Christ. How many more appellations and affiliations do you need before you're done? That's what I want to know. And hold on now, before Craig goes. You went to all the trouble to ask him. Here's what I want you to say.

Dan McClellan Okay. It's spelled P-O-D-C-A-S-T-E-R.

Dan Beecher That's what I do. You are a podcaster.

Dan McClellan Podcaster.

Dan Beecher That's right. That's potentially pretty much the only thing I do. What I did was I found really smart people to talk to, and that's what I got in Craig. And you're actually a wonderful podcaster. People should check out "Cognitive Dissonance"- ... which is an amazing show. And you're also on "Citation Needed," which is a great show.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So some really good content out there. But today, we're going to be diving into this show, which is "The Lawful Assembly," and sort of talking about one point of crossover that your show and our show kind of have. Regardless of the atheist and the believer dynamic, which I don't know how you guys think that's going to work, because honestly- What, do you guys just yell at each other every episode? Is that all you do? It just seems impossible. I think our listeners would want more of that, actually. Our listeners want more of that, to be honest. They want more yelling.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Everybody that I tell about our show, they think, "Oh, it's going to be a debate show." And it's like, "No, I just defer to Dan on everything." That's what I do, too.

Dan McClellan So- Oh, no.

Dan Beecher Contrary.

Dan McClellan Wait a second there.

Dan Beecher So, the reason that we wanted to have you guys on is because Craig, you have made a particular study of immigration, especially here in the United States. You are a lawyer. You are also a minister who specializes and focuses on issues of immigration. It seems to be a kind of a big deal these days. As we record this, we just had, a couple of days ago, the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and immigration was a really huge issue in that debate and continues to be politically. And I feel like, and I want to hear what your take on this, with apologies to Cecil, I feel like there's a cognitive dissonance happening- ... between the people on the far right who are largely composed of very devout Christians, and it feels to me like their take on immigration is at odds with what I have read Jesus said about immigration. So I want Dan, I want Craig, I want you two to help us understand, first of all, what is the biblical take on the immigrant? I know that there are probably multiple takes, and they're probably conflicting because that's the Bible for you. But also, how do you guys think a Christian in the United States of America should apply those lessons to our current legal system/how we deal with the immigration issue? I'd start with the Good Samaritan story.

Dan McClellan Right from the beginning, where it is Jesus and responding to him, the lawyer said, "Who is my neighbor?" And Jesus pops up with this story about three people walking on a road from Jerusalem to Jericho, and the priest and the rabbi walk by, and the Good Samaritan stops and helps heal. And we learn that the Samaritan was probably what some folks today, I hate the word, but might call an illegal alien in those places.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan Didn't belong, and put himself at risk to even offer aid and comfort because the authorities might have thought that the Samaritan was the one that caused the crime, and he was trying to get out of it. The question, "Who is my neighbor?"

Dan Beecher That's the starting point. And the more you look at that story and study it, that you understand that we're all- walking on that road, and we may be accosted. And who's going to be there for us? And if we start making rules about who takes care of whom, we get in trouble.

Dan McClellan And we've learned in a nation-state scenario that we need certain rules to talk about borders, but we also then realize, we learned in World War II, in the Holocaust, that if the rules are too strict, we turn ships like the St. Louis away and send 700 European Jews back to Europe to face the Holocaust. And therefore, we need rules for refugees and asylum seekers, and we need to figure out how those all adjust there.

Dan Beecher So that's a starting point, if that helps. And it might help more if you need more out of that. But that's my starting point.

Dan McClellan But I'd also point out that I believe very strongly, as a Christian, that the sacred story contained both in the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian scriptures.

Dan Beecher Walter Brueggemann says that at the core of faith for Christians and Jews is the matrix of exile. That we have a story of we are forced into exile over generations, and therefore thinking of that, if we are an exile people, we are a people both a welcoming people, but also a people in exile, and therefore that should be the basis, the matrix of how we think about how to respond to immigrants in our midst. The exile thing's a very interesting thing. Because we don't think of European Americans as exiles. But part of the mythos of Europeans in America is that of the quote, unquote, "pilgrims" coming, and at least the story that I was told when I was a kid was these were people seeking freedom, a place to practice their religion freely, and they were exiled. That was their story, is that they were exiles fleeing to this land.

Dan McClellan Yeah, I always thought the same thing, that they had to come here so they could draw their hand turkeys.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Absolutely. You know when you draw on a piece of paper- Yeah ... a little turkey with the five fingers. I think that that's what...

Dan McClellan No?

Dan Beecher Their buckles, their outfits looked much better than ours. They were pretty dope, to be honest with you. They were really good.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I don't know if any of you have been to Plymouth or Plymouth Plantation. I was there a few summers ago.

Dan Beecher Actually, it's just south of the town of Plymouth, there is a Plymouth Plantation. You can go there as a tourist and sit down at a table with those folks and grab a drumstick and have some- No kidding.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher I'm not sure you can eat it, but they're sitting there- ... they're putting the food out, and you're watching them pull it out.

Dan McClellan Oh, okay.

Dan Beecher Yeah, you get to watch them eat.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher All right.

Dan McClellan Fair.

Dan Beecher All right.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher It's a lot of fun.

Dan McClellan But it's not just Plymouth, right? Catholics came to Maryland seeking religious freedom, and we found others going to Georgia, and who became the Methodists in many ways. But it's a greater issue of a general issue of freedom.

Dan Beecher We have to forget, or we can't forget, that at that time, there were religious wars racking Europe over all kinds of fights over things that today we look and say, "Really?

Dan McClellan You were fighting over that?" But people were dying, and that was the cauldron where people started thinking about those very same Puritans that came to Massachusetts, forced Roger Williams to flee because his brand of Puritanism was different than theirs.

Dan Beecher Mm. And Roger Williams became one of the founding theoreticians of the Baptist religion, and his understandings of religious freedom are totally different than others in a sense.

Dan McClellan But so I don't like the pain, I don't like the harm, but out of that, people start realizing, well, if I'm being persecuted because I have a certain understanding of the Puritan religion, I'm being forced to go to Rhode Island, maybe my theory should be a little more open and not to hurt others. And I hope some of us learn from that. Well, you mentioned the Jewish tradition, and something that they have in the Jewish tradition, there are a variety of ways in which Jewish folks are to remind themselves of that background. For remember you were a gere, you were an immigrant, you were a migrant, you were an exile, you were a slave. That's a part of their tradition to constantly remind yourself of that background, which is something that a lot of Christians, I think, don't do. We don't have a lot of folks who know, well, this is the origin of this particular denomination split off because we were trying to escape from persecution from another denomination that itself was trying to escape from persecution from another denomination. That kind of history is kind of left in the dustbin for a lot of Christians. I don't think that is the kind of identity marker in a lot of Christian identities that it is within the Jewish identity. You've done a lot of work on precisely that kind of understanding of one's sacred past. Do you have any thoughts on why Christianity might be, an awful lot of Christians anyway, might be a little loathed to treat that as central to their identity, whereas within Judaism, it is foundational? Dan, if I knew that answer, I'd really be successful in figuring out how to resolve it. But I do struggle with that because one of the articles I wrote, I contrast...

Dan Beecher A student of mine had given me a photo of some graffiti she saw in Florence, Italy, and it showed Jesus Christ with a crown of thorns, and he had a little placard on his front and said, "Migrant for life." And there, that points out a Christian version of that is a central part of Christianity, that Jesus was a migrant for life. And a few weeks later, as I was working on this story, I saw a photo from January 6th, and there's this very traditional photo that's in probably every Protestant Sunday school of Jesus kind of looking up, and this relatively white Jesus looking up. But in the photo from January 6th, he had a MAGA hat on. And the Smithsonian's actually called that MAGA Jesus.

Dan McClellan And that's the group that you're suggesting is not thinking of the founding principles of Christianity being in exile, forgetting that Jesus was an illegal immigrant coming back after his parents took him to Egypt.

Dan Beecher Can you imagine Joseph trying to prove he was the biological father of this young baby when they're coming back from Egypt into Israel?

Dan McClellan I did another paper much earlier on every major protagonist in the Bible.

Dan Beecher If you used the current prism of American immigration law, every major figure from Adam and Eve to St. Paul would've violated US immigration law. Everyone would've been deported and excluded.

Dan McClellan Everyone.

Dan Beecher Noah. You know how Noah broke immigration law? One, he went to another land without a visa, right?

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. So he ends up in Turkey. But the more important one, we have anti-smuggling laws. And the smuggling laws say, you bring someone across a border, you're guilty of an immigration violation, but we'll exempt your family.

Dan Beecher Oh, wait, wait. We'll only accept the children. The daughters-in-law made Noah a smuggler, which would've made him deportable, right?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan He didn't fill out the little strip of paper that they hand you when you're coming in. No, he didn't. Yeah, he goes- I don't know how to fill this out ...

Dan Beecher "What do you have to declare? I don't know, two of each?"

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So, to me, that whole history there is that foundational bit. But we forget it.

Dan McClellan We get caught up into the other side of Christianity, that we've been chosen by God as an exceptional people to be in this land- Mm-hmm ... and to hold onto this land as ours. And that was a debate in the Jewish and Christian Bible of what part. King David was certainly monarchical, and one of the big debates I had with former Attorney General Sessions, he really liked Nehemiah. Why did he like Nehemiah? Because Nehemiah built a wall.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Mm.

Dan Beecher And as he was quoted saying, "That wall wasn't to keep people in. It was to keep people..." Well, I've done some research that Nehemiah had one version, but there were a lot of folks in Israel at that time that had a different version.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. And there's a tension. So what happens is we start grabbing different parts of the Bible that we seem to like our part of, "Let's build that wall and wall ourselves in."

Dan Beecher Yeah. That's- We've never encountered people grabbing the same part of the Bible but deploying it differently for their own purposes.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher We've never seen that on our show.

Dan McClellan This is news to me.

Dan Beecher Can I point out just a... Oh, go ahead, Dan.

Dan McClellan Oh, I was just going to say, one of the things that I think this reminder that you were this way, this is about restricting the use of power. It's about suggesting that you need to keep that in mind in order to appropriately treat people who are marginalized, minoritized, oppressed. And we have that reminder throughout, particularly within the prophetic critique that we find in the prophetic literature. The orphan, the widow, and the immigrant. And these are intended to function as kind of caps on the abuse of power. Whereas when it comes to a lot of Christianity today that wants to focus on how we can maximize our power, and it always seems to reduce to structuring power and values and boundaries to serve our interests. I don't think an awful lot of Christians are interested in putting a governor on that power. Their primary goal seems to be to find ways to maximize it. And that's troubling for me. Folks who try to leverage Christianity to try to maximize their power have lost the plot. And I think that's something you talk about in some of the papers that you've published, the central Gospel message. Even when we go back into the Hebrew Bible, and those figures who are unrelated to the Christian message, it's about the fact that we're in a land that is not our own. Even within the Christian gospel, we're here on Earth, which is not our home. We're supposed to be elsewhere. And to kind of sideline the concern for the other, for the neighbor, doing exactly what the lawyer in Luke 10 is doing. Why did he ask, "Who's my neighbor?" Because he wanted to justify himself. He wanted to rationalize his reduction of that population of people who might be his neighbor, whereas Jesus, one, identifies it as kind of a behavioral vector rather than anything else. But two, is trying to expand the boundaries of that population. But I'm sorry, I interrupted you. Where were you headed?

Dan Beecher Well, I was going to get back to your earlier point about forgetting about being in exile, but I was going to cite perhaps a very particular American story about a man named Joseph Smith who finds some documents and material in upstate New York and then decides that he is not welcome in that community and starts to head west and gets to Nauvoo, Illinois, and all of a sudden gets a little persecuted there because he's not really welcome, and then gets to Missouri and loses more people, and eventually finds a home in Salt Lake City, Utah. And I've been to Salt Lake, I've been to the temple, and I've watched this wonderful film about that trip.

Dan McClellan And I'd urge people, just it's worth watching this beautiful presentation. And I sit there as a asylum lawyer, a refugee lawyer, watching a people being persecuted as they pursue their ways across this country. And totally the American experience, right? Mm-hmm. In the time of the States. And very important to that faith tradition, and very important to where they are. But I sit there and think, how do they reconcile that with the current folks who are being persecuted coming to our border?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan That they had that tradition, and they fortunately made it to a place.

Dan Beecher It's especially poignant that the Mormons, when they made their way here to Salt Lake City, which is where Dan and I are based, they were fleeing the country. They were coming to Mexico. This was all part of Mexico at that time. And one year later, it was suddenly not Mexico anymore. But to me, that reversal where you can know that part of your history, part of your lore, is fleeing one country to go and seek refuge in another country, and then as you point out, so many current Mormons are build the wall MAGA people. And that was 150 years ago. That wasn't that long ago when they came here.

Dan McClellan On January 6th, I was watching footage live, and I spotted what seemed to me to be Captain Moroni with his Title of Liberty in the crowd, and I was like, "Wait a damn minute."

Dan Beecher That's a deep Mormon cut right there.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I was watching this on my computer, CNN or something, and I went back and I got a screenshot, and I was like, "Holy crap." And this is a hero from "The Book of Mormon" who tears down some fabric and writes on it basically this patriot kind of quote, and waves this flag around called the Title of Liberty, and this person was dressed more like a Roman centurion, but carrying- It wasn't good cosplay, but it was cosplay. And there are an awful lot of Latter-day Saints who, as Dan said, are all in on the MAGA worldview, which just is all kinds of depressing. But that's another part of our own history, which is not very old, that we also tend to overlook because, and this is something I am wont to say frequently, everyone's negotiating with the Bible, with their history, with their identities, with their exigencies and their goals for the future. Everybody's negotiating. So it's not a question of whether or not any of these things can find representation in the text. You can find all of that in the text. You can find rationalization for kicking the Mormons out in the history. There were some odd things going on within Mormonism as well. So for me, the interesting question is, why are people prioritizing the parts of their history that they're prioritizing? Why are they centering and giving priority to certain things and then marginalizing or reinterpreting away other things? And I think the reminder is, like I said, about limiting power, and for a lot of people, that's a non-starter. We're not here to try to limit power. And even Latter-day Saints, I think we hitched our wagon, in a lot of ways, to an evangelical American worldview in an effort to try to access the power and the resources that are available through evangelicalism. And in a lot of ways, have adopted a worldview that is more concerned with power than it is for what most Latter-day Saints every Sunday in church are hearing is our duty as a follower of Jesus. And I've worked with a number of Latter-day Saints who I'm very proud to call my friends, and I know there's generosity and kindness and outreach as well. And I've had this debate with them as well, and been invited even to Provo to put forth some of my immigration views and been very kindly welcomed there, and I'm very grateful for that.

Dan Beecher But I think you're right. Let me add another element to the power because I've really struggled, as you have, with trying to talk to family members or neighbors who disagree with me. And obviously, one of the things that Cecil and I, one of the arguments we've had, or debates we've had- Debates.

Dan McClellan Debates, yeah.

Dan Beecher Mild debates ... are the Ten Commandments, right?

Dan McClellan What's the place of the Ten Commandments? And one of the issues of religion is to help give us some order out of chaos, and we see that even in the creation story in Genesis. And then people gather, and in my tradition, have a covenant with a God that says, "If you live this way, there'll be more order." And that God says, "Oh, by the way, part of that covenant is to be kind to the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and to show justice and mercy." He should've wrote that down then instead of the Ten Commandments. Well, let's go back to Genesis. Let's go back to Leviticus.

Dan Beecher I can point them out if you want that lesson, Cecil.

Dan McClellan That's fine. Maybe put that in stone.

Dan Beecher That seems like a great idea, to be honest.

Dan McClellan I would put that in stone.

Dan Beecher Dan, maybe you correct me, but I think Jim Wallace has counted, what, 62 times to welcome the stranger. It is written in- Sure ...

Dan McClellan the language.

Dan Beecher Sure. Ten's a nice number to rally around.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher But I want to be fair that I'm a parent, and I live in Chicago, which has a lot of wonderful, beautiful elements, and we have some violence.

Dan McClellan And so I have the worries that most parents have when my children go out on the street.

Dan Beecher And so religion helps give me that order and helps give a sense, and so then I have some rules. And then- How do you keep people following the rules unless there's an enforcement mechanism?

Dan McClellan And then, I think, Dan, you mentioned earlier that word stewardship. God gave us the Earth to be stewards of, and sometimes we overdo the stewardship, right? Well, if I'm supposed to be a steward, I better keep out people who will take too much, right?

Dan Beecher So, I do think there is that tension. I have people ask me, "Well, Craig, do you lock your doors at night?"

Dan McClellan Right?

Dan Beecher "So how is that different than locking our borders?"

Dan McClellan And I think that's a good question.

Dan Beecher Let's talk about how vulnerable I want to be as an individual to welcome the other. But I do want to talk to folks who have that fear, right?

Dan McClellan And then that gets back to the education on, are most of the people who are fleeing violence really coming to take from us, or they're just trying to escape the harm, and that our ancestors had escaped also?

Dan Beecher Well, Craig, I'm going to guess that you have some numbers at your fingertip that could shed some light on that question, the question of... Because I think I've looked at figures of criminality in the immigrant population versus criminality in the citizen population here in the US, and it doesn't seem to shake out the way Trump would have us believe it shakes out.

Dan McClellan Not even close.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Not even close.

Dan Beecher So talk to us a little bit about what your vision for... Look, let's not do a whole Craig Mson Project 2025 here, but like- ... what do you think as someone who's legally informed and sort of informed by your religious leanings, what would a good policy look like for you? Let me ask one quick question, a little quiz here. I think Cecil may know the answer because I've probably asked him before. How many people lawfully immigrate to the United States every year?

Dan McClellan Do we ever hear that in the debate?

Dan Beecher Right. That's a great question. How many lawfully come in and enter our society? What do we have, 300 million in the United States?

Dan McClellan 300 million, yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I have no idea.

Dan McClellan I don't want to put you on the spot.

Dan Beecher Well, that's a fair answer.

Dan McClellan It's right. Often when I do public speaking, I do an auction.

Dan Beecher What do I hear there? I hear 10,000. I hear 100. How many there? We hear numbers about unlawful immigration.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And they're spouting numbers in the- Right ... 20 million or whatever.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Which sounds absurd to me, and I don't think is correct, but- So that's why I asked the question, because we forget that immigrants have fueled this country from our very beginning days, right?

Dan McClellan So up till recently, almost a million people come in a year lawfully.

Dan Beecher Wow. About 600,000 family-oriented, about 125,000 through employment, another 100,000 or so refugees, and it all adds up in good years, 700,000, a million or something. But that's a big number- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan that a lot of people don't know, that we have had the capacity to accept, and absorb, and welcome, and become fruitful members of our society.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I think that's even a low number of what we could do.

Dan Beecher Several years ago, I was working with Syrian refugees in Jordan, and Jordan had over a million refugees in Jordan itself.

Dan McClellan Oh, wow.

Dan Beecher And someone commented to me, "Gosh, if America took per capita the same number of refugees, we could welcome-" Yeah, because Jordan's a tiny... Compared to us- That's right ... they're a very small country.

Dan McClellan And obviously many were living very poorly in camps and in overburdened apartments. But the fact that that country could even welcome and try to deal with the food and care of a million, we could do probably 50 or 60 million and not even feel the same pain was being felt in Jordan.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan So starting point for me is we have the capacity to be more generous.

Dan Beecher Right. I'm also enough of a realist that we can't take in everyone.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher And part of what Cecil and I have been trying to do in our Lawful Assembly podcast is talk about, could we, your very question, work with the other nations of the world to say, how do we have a system that works for everybody? Part of that is helping folks where the climate change... We put 60% of the carbon that's causing climate change, and where's the impact being felt?

Dan McClellan In a lot of the sending nations.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Guatemalan farms that are getting drought, or floods in other countries, or rising sea levels in Bangladesh.

Dan Beecher We have some moral and just practical obligation to help those folks. So part of the immigration issue is, can we help solve some of the problems that are sending?

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Well, what about us sending weapons, and arms, and training people in other countries to terrorize their own citizens?

Dan McClellan Right. And then they flee those places and come here. We create a lot of problems in the world, and then we close our doors when we don't want to see the problems that we created.

Dan Beecher I love that we're proposing a you broke it, you bought it- ... view of- I like that ...

Dan McClellan immigration.

Dan Beecher Yeah. That's a great way to put it. I love that. I'm going to quote you on that. I love that. But let me get... I'm kind of getting around your... So partly, I used those numbers before.

Dan McClellan We are fast approaching the problems of Italy and Japan, that we don't have enough children being born in our nation to solve Social Security or even...

Dan Beecher I'm a baby boomer, and I'm part of that generation that's going to be expecting people to keep working to keep the retired folks working.

Dan McClellan We need more immigrants, period, let alone refugees.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So I think first we could up some of those numbers of family immigrants coming in. Think of all the new jobs that have been created by the inspiration of new ideas of both in the Silicon Valley, but in the other areas that are trying to replicate the electronic knowledge and bringing people in. So 125,000, when they try to fill that quota for employment visas in this country, that gets filled almost immediately.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan There are people wanting to come. We're losing some of the best and brightest minds who are going to Canada or going to New Zealand because they're more open. So in one sense, we can up that. Now, the big issue is the refugee issue.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And, depending what numbers you look at, there can be close to 80 million to 100 million, both displaced persons, which in the legal definition is people who are still in their nation, but they're not able to live in their home. They're in a camp at the other side of the country, and refugees who are technically people outside of their nation seeking a new safe place.

Dan Beecher But if you put them all together, the UN and the UNHCR, United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees, can get up to 100 million people.

Dan McClellan It could be 60 to 100 depending on the displaced persons.

Dan Beecher Just anywhere in the world?

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Total. So we're talking about people crossing the Mediterranean. We're talking people crossing the South China Sea, going over to Australia or New Zealand or finding places like that. And then people coming across to our land bridge with Mexico. And as you mentioned earlier, a lot of those folks are coming to what used to be Mexico.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Yes. But now we call it Arizona, Utah, New Mexico.

Dan McClellan Exactly.

Dan Beecher We have this mentality of the only way to fix it is to build a bigger wall, to build more detention camps, and exclude and make barriers out of any kind of barrier, both a physical and a legal barrier. And Cecil and I have been discussing if we, instead of putting a lot of money, what's it, a million dollars a mile or a million dollars a foot to build the border wall and disrupt wilderness areas, and we could do better processing with much more expeditious discernment if someone is a true refugee, if we had the right place to train lawyers to be available to help people explain why they're fleeing. And- Yeah, it does seem like the system is so wildly overburdened and wildly underfunded that it's designed, and I think this is true, I think we can say it is designed to be a disaster that then politicians can run on look at the disaster there. Not run on fixing it, not proposing any way to actually fix it, just saying, "Look at how bad that is."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher All you got to do is just keep pulling away toothpicks until it falls down.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And then point at how terrible it is.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Well, this is one of the- So, and that gets back to our starting, my premise at least, is my faith calls me to become an advocate for welcoming the stranger, as Dan had mentioned in the Levitical and other parts of the Hebrew scriptures, and even the New Testament. But how do we do that in a way that doesn't put all this money to the, what do they call now, the immigration industrial complex?

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Project 2025 wants to expand the detention facilities from 30,000 beds to over 100,000 beds.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan All that money going into putting facilities up with barbed wire and buildings and guards and locking human capital in buildings that they can't express their lives.

Dan Beecher And isn't it funny that if they didn't take that approach, they love to tout that they're the side of fiscal responsibility, but if they just let these people in and let them work while they were waiting, they would be adding to our economy. They would be building our economy. We wouldn't be paying for their housing. We wouldn't be paying for their food and everything. It would literally be the opposite. Rather than a net suck on our economy, we would be building our economy while they're waiting to be processed, while they're waiting to be dealt whatever. And they want to work. Almost everyone that comes through, they're ready to work. They want to be productive members of society.

Dan McClellan Well, one thing is- 25% of our building trades are immigrants who are undocumented.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And we have a housing shortage.

Dan Beecher If they were working there... The other key you didn't mention is Social Security. They'd be putting money into Social Security for all those people in millennial generation worried that there won't be a Social Security system out there. Paying in and not- We have some ways to fix it ... and never having the opportunity to draw it out. That just goes in.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's- Yeah. That's just an input.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's free money for us, and they don't even get to keep any of it. Now that's probably- Well, if we do have a lawful process, then eventually they would, but that's still three or four decades down the road.

Dan McClellan Right. I think one thing that is being leveraged by the folks who want to continue to be able to wave undocumented immigrants as a boogeyman in the face of other Americans, you mentioned earlier that birth rates are going down, and there's an awful lot of push on the part of Christian nationalists, and particularly white nationalist-leaning folks, to get white families to have more kids because they would like that to be the means of overcoming this declining birth rate rather than bringing in non-white citizens. I think there's an awful lot of white supremacy underlying a lot of the utility of this anti-immigration rhetoric because a lot of the immigrants are coming from the Global South, and the great replacement theory is very widely deployed by the folks who are fighting against immigration. In my previous employment, I was a scripture translation supervisor for the LDS Church. I spent plenty of time Working on languages associated with refugee communities. I worked on a language called Karen, which is spoken by refugees from Myanmar. And I've spent time on the islands of Kiribati, which are some of the lowest-lying islands in the world, the places where the sea level change has already entirely deleted some of the islands from that nation. And these are folks coming from the Global South who are already taking up space in the US, and people are not even aware that there are millions of immigrants from these places who are contributing members of society, who are living among them. I don't think they pay attention and realize that they're there until they have someone come and lay concrete in their backyard or something, and are like, "I don't know what language this person is speaking." And sometimes they grow an appreciation for some of these folks who are coming here and have skills that they don't have. But one of the things that frustrates me, particularly from the point of view of Christianity, is the fact that white supremacy and this fear of non-white populations coming into the States is so popular. Particularly with Donald Trump and the rhetoric that he's used, what kind of immigrants are good immigrants versus what kind of immigrants are bad immigrants. There's a very conspicuous color line that divides that for so many folks, which is, for me, one of the most aggravating parts of all of this.

Dan Beecher Absolutely. And Dan, my church, we would call it the grace of God, but we had an old building in Chicago, and a lot of deferred maintenance, and the boiler was hardly working in the wintertime. And we, by the grace of God, sold it in March of 2020 and didn't have to take care of that after that.

Dan McClellan And we've sort of been a church in exile, so every six months, we've been renting a different space to try to figure out where we want to end up locating.

Dan Beecher But our current place on the North Side of Chicago, we have our worship space. There's a Karen congregation on the floor above us, in the chapel above us.

Dan McClellan There's an Hispanic congregation that's worshiping in the fellowship hall, and there's the Baptist congregation worshiping in the main.

Dan Beecher And when I go in on a Sunday morning to help prepare for worship, it's glorious that there's different music, different sounds, different praises. And I just get so filled with different groups of folks being in that same building but making a joyful noise. And it's like, this is what flourishing could be like when we allow that to happen.

Dan McClellan And just so the fact that you mentioned the Karen community, that they're there, they're vibrant and participating in Chicago, and just wanted to share that. And I also agree with you, the race line is just really... The mention about the debate this week about the Haitians and our treatment of Haiti from the very... A lot of people don't realize that when the Haitian Revolution happened at the time of Thomas Jefferson being president, the slave owners in Haiti fled to this country for safety and from the perceived persecution that the slaves were going to have against them.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And we welcomed the slave owners into here to give them protection, and then immediately set about to try to undermine the government of Haiti.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And we forget that trade-off that's happened in our history, and it's just tragic. You can go on every decade against how this country has tried to make Haiti a weaker country, and now we say, "Why are you coming here?"

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher There's an interesting thing that we talked about on our show.

Dan McClellan Craig often will say that the people who are afraid are afraid that someone's going to take a piece of their pie, right? Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So there's sort of a limited pie, and people who are afraid of immigrants are afraid they're going to take their section.

Dan Beecher They're going to take my piece.

Dan McClellan And what we talk about on our show is not the great replacement theory, but the great inspiration theory, right? Mm-hmm. So we should be inspired by migrants. We should be inspired because they bring innovation.

Dan Beecher They bring, like Craig was saying, they bring energy, a different culture. And I told Craig once, I said, "We shouldn't think of it like everybody trying to take one single piece of one pie.

Dan McClellan Instead, we should think of this more like a potluck." So everybody brings something to the table, and we all share in that new cultural experience instead of all just saying, "We just want to protect this one sliver of pie."

Dan Beecher Yeah. And I got news for you. They have better pie.

Dan McClellan Dude, 100%.

Dan Beecher 100%. Our pie is not as good as their pie.

Dan McClellan Not even close.

Dan Beecher Hey, my mother made a pretty mean apple pie. I will say a banana cream pie with Nilla Wafers, pretty solid, but...

Dan McClellan And that brings up the issue of assimilation. A lot of folks are hammering the assimilation issue. It's like, I don't want to live in the kind of America that has no contributions from a lot of the cultures that have come in- Yeah ... to our nation. And I don't know if the studies have been done recently on this, Cecil, you may know better than I do. But from what I understand, within three generations from coming into a nation, generally, the food, the clothing, and the language all tend to be lost. Three of the most central markers of ethnic identity tend to be lost within three generations of an immigrant coming into a country, just because that's what's required to survive, particularly in the US. And there are an awful lot of people who wish that were probably one generation or less these days, which I don't think it's fair to people who are trying to look for a better life. I don't think that's the American dream. But I also think that That is a liability to us as well. I would love to see more. My experience as an American in this country has only been enriched by my encountering other cultures around me. And unfortunately, I think geographically, linguistically, in so many different ways, we're so isolated in the US, we tend to think that's the best way or the way it should be. And there's so much out there for folks to learn by coming into contact with other cultures.

Dan Beecher We invite both of you to come to Chicago.

Dan McClellan My wife teaches in a local elementary school, and there's probably 40 different refugee groups that she has to teach, and she's a music teacher. She teaches anti-racism global curriculum through music and has written a couple songs that she has translated into, like, 30 different languages.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan So when someone comes in from Myanmar, she's able to welcome them with their song, and their eyes get like this that the teacher's singing a song in their language, or the same song in Bosnian or whatever.

Dan Beecher And then she puts on a show at the end of the year where the kids get up and sing from their cultures. And so come on out here next March, and we'll invite you to go to that show because it really is inspiring.

Dan McClellan She comes home at night with tears in her eyes with stories about what one little person was scared to death, and then the kids talk back in their language.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan And it's amazing.

Dan Beecher I love that. Think of that in contrast- I want to just quickly, I want to invite you guys to also come to Salt Lake City sometime because I saw a Black guy just the other day. So, we have diversity too. It hit with me, bro. It hit with me.

Dan McClellan That was me. Think of that in contrast, though. I was just going to mention, you talk about their eyes opening up and how excited they are and how that changes them. Think of that in contrast to the people who you see these videos of these people getting yelled at for speaking another language, right?

Dan Beecher Yeah. You see these videos of someone being accosted because they are speaking a different language than someone else, and they're saying, "Speak English while you're here." Even though there's no actual national language in the United States.

Dan McClellan English is not our national language.

Dan Beecher There isn't one.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Don't be giving them ideas.

Dan McClellan But- They've tried.

Dan Beecher They're trying. I guess maybe we shouldn't mention it, Dan. That way we won't give them ideas.

Dan McClellan You're absolutely right.

Dan Beecher I won't do that again.

Dan McClellan Well, this is something that when I worked as a scripture translation supervisor, one of the things that I tried to emphasize when it came to... Well, one, for a bizarre reason, we sometimes found ourselves having to justify our existence, because a lot of people thought everybody should be learning English. But a message that I found inspiring and very useful was that the entire, returning to the concept of the scriptures and the Bible's message, the whole Christian gospel is a message of translation, because the New Testament only originally existed in Greek. It is translated from, or at least the message as it originally circulated was being circulated in Aramaic, had to be translated into Greek so that it could be proliferated more widely than the Aramaic-speaking community. The message is about expanding the borders beyond linguistic boundaries and beyond national boundaries as well to every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, as the Great Commission says. And so folks who want to try to reel all that back in and say, "No, we all need to be isolated to our different ethnic groups, our different national groups, our different linguistic identities," are counteracting the work that the wheel that began in motion with the New Testament. So for folks who are committed to the Christian gospel, it just strikes me as just radically hypocritical to try to follow someone whose message was overcoming those boundaries by trying to tighten those boundaries down.