If you have followed this column for a while, you will have gathered that there are a lot of books in our house. Even so, should you ever visit, you might be surprised, or startled, or appalled, or delighted, even, to see just how many there are. Though there are plenty of blanks, subjects about which I don’t have even a single book, there is quite a range here. And of course some subjects are very heavily represented.
One of these is immigration. Why so? Have I been brooding for decades about the influx of immigrants since the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965? On the contrary. When I taught at California State University, Los Angeles, as an adjunct in 1977–1980, and again for a one-year stint at the end of the 1980s, I enjoyed the wonderful range of students, many of them immigrants from all over the world, along with others who had immigrant parents. Moreover, my wife Wendy and I and our kids, along with my mom and my brother, lived for many years in Pasadena, in a part of the city where immigrants were very well represented, along with a substantial and deeply rooted African American population.
I began reading a lot about immigration simply because the subject is so interesting, so rich—but also, as time went on, because it is a subject that is so often misrepresented, both by those who want severe restrictions and by immigration advocates. Moreover, the trend in scholarship over the last forty years, say—and increasingly so since the turn of the century—has been to create persistently negative counter-narratives to the valorizing of “the American story,” as unreliable in their own way as the most saccharine, self-congratulatory versions of our national history.
Finally, for American Christians in particular, immigration (broadly construed, and very much including “migrants” crossing the border illegally) is among the most pressing questions of the day. It’s instructive that recent debate on the subject has largely consisted of wild fantasy, bigotry, performative outrage at the bigotry, and so on, without any substantive account of what “controlling the border” would entail and how it might be accomplished.
For a telling example of current scholarly discourse on immigration, take a look at Yii-Jan Lin’s just-published book from the excellent Yale University Press, Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration, which comes with this endorsement by Willie James Jennings: “Once you have read this groundbreaking book, you will not see either American immigration policy or the book of Revelation in the same way. Any conversation about immigration in America that aims to be helpful must now start with Immigration and Apocalypse.” Speaking only for myself, as someone who has studied immigration for decades, I find this statement by a highly respected scholar both preposterous and, alas, all too representative of the “conversation about immigration in America.” The ante has to keep going up.
If you took a walk with Wendy and me in the neighborhoods adjoining our little street in Wheaton, Illinois, where we have lived since the mid-1990s, you would encounter immigrants from several nations in the Middle East, from Africa, from Mexico and Central America, from Eastern Europe. Outside an apartment complex on the other side of town, we have frequently seen residents who appear to be from Central Asia. Elsewhere in Wheaton there are many refugees whom World Relief helped to settle here in apartments. Many churches in Wheaton (including ours, Faith Evangelical Covenant) have shared their space with immigrant congregations.
It is just one town, and it’s certainly not heaven on earth, but neither is Wheaton a wild outlier. We need to keep this reality in mind as we talk about immigrants and refugees and borders, achieving consensus whenever possible, disagreeing in good faith when it is not.
John Wilson is a contributing editor for the Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at the Marginalia Review of Books.
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Image in the public domain. Image cropped.
