The Bible has much about nations and sovereignty

Mollie Hemingway writing at The Federalist has a worthy article extolling that:

Believing In National Sovereignty Doesn’t Make You A Bad Christian 
There’s nothing immoral about wanting border security and its enforcement.

Here is an excerpt:

Are Pro-Nation-State Policies Morally Just?

Most people agree that citizens of a nation have a right to protect their culture and defend their economic and security interests by regulating immigration. Most people also probably recognize the obligation that citizens in free and prosperous countries have toward those seeking asylum for humanitarian or other serious reasons.

Balancing those interests is not immoral. Citizens of a country should be mindful of the cultural and economic changes that immigration can bring and particularly how the downside of those changes tends to be borne by those with lower incomes and less power than the ones who tend to make immigration policy. Unfettered immigration can strain the resources of schools, hospitals, and local communities. Poorly managed immigration policies can also lead to disruptions in the political order and culture.

As Peter Meilaender has written, “The world, after all, contains countless needy people who require assistance. How are we to know whom to help? So we begin with those to whom we stand in special relationships. The neighbor whom we are commanded universally to love takes particular shape as the aged father in need of regular attention, the cousin whose husband is away fighting in Iraq, the fellow parishioner who has lost his job. Immigration regulations are a way of embodying in policy a preferential love for our own fellow citizens and the way of life that we share. Such a preference can be overridden, but it is not inherently suspect.”

The Founding Fathers explained that the Constitution itself was put in place to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

Immigration laws defined the United States’ borders and boundaries. They ideally foster community for all the people contained therein, including the community benefits from following the rule of law. When immigration laws are flouted and people not lawfully present in the country observe problems with immigration enforcement, they and others can reasonably conclude that consequences for crimes are non-existent and that the government is weak.

In light of all this, ending an unlawful program such as DACA can encourage enforcement of immigration laws and demonstrate the importance of rule of law, a key ingredient in the functioning of a healthy republic.

Progressives who dismiss all manner of Biblical admonitions on so many other subjects, nevertheless, when they find a few that they like on immigration (out of context of course) try to play them to the hilt. Perhaps their favorite as regards immigration is to imply that the Bible uses the same words for immigrants, a conflation, that there are no distinctions as to “strangers in ones land”.  Objective translations and research shows that there are distinctions between the Biblical equivalent of guests , legal and illegal immigration, travelers etc . Reading these essays reinforces that that the Bible does not call for what amounts to open borders as interpreted by leftist clerics:

Jeff Sessions got it right on immigrants and the Bible   By James K. Hoffmeie

Michael Shannon:  Illegal aliens? Listen to the Bible, not The New York Times 

What Bible says about illegal immigration :  Joseph Farah makes distinction between ‘strangers,’ ‘trespassers’

Immigration and the Gospel

What is God’s Perspective on Immigration?  (Biblical Archeology publication)

A Torah Perspective on National Borders and Illegal Immigration
By Nochum Mangel and Shmuel Klatzkin


R Mall

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