Before You Vote, Remember: God Sides with the Immigrant

Readings for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Exodus 22:20-26; Psalm 18:2-3, 3-4, 47, 51; 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10; Matthew 22:34-40

Before we cast our ballots in the coming midterm elections, we should ask a question that rarely appears in campaign advertising: Whose cries does God hear? This Sunday’s liturgy of the word answers that question.

Today’s first reading supplies an answer so direct that politicians who campaign on their Christianity might prefer we skip it. It says that God hears the immigrant, the widow, the orphan, and the poor neighbor whose necessities someone else has taken away. The passage warns those with power that their treatment of these vulnerable people matters enormously to God.

That makes today’s readings (please take the time to click their links) an uncomfortable guide to the approaching election. The political right has made immigration a dependable instrument of fear.

Americans worried about housing, wages, medical bills, and their children’s futures are encouraged to direct their anger toward people with comparatively little power over those conditions. Apparently, the people who pick our vegetables, clean our hotel rooms, repair our roofs, and care for our elderly parents have somehow acquired the ability to ruin the richest country in the world.

Pew estimated that fourteen million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States in 2023. Whatever the precise number today, they remain a small minority in a nation of more than 340 million. Are we seriously supposed to believe that workers who may be afraid to report an abusive employer are responsible for the insecurity afflicting the rest of us? That accusation deserves scrutiny every time a candidate repeats it.

Today’s first reading gives Christians a different starting point: “You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.” The command makes memory a moral obligation. Remember what it means to be vulnerable. Remember what happens when a powerful society values outsiders’ labor while despising the people performing it. Let that memory shape how you exercise power—including the power of your vote.

When I began teaching at Berea College, I was surprised that colleagues who (for all their admirable qualities as scholars) were not friends of liberation theology, nevertheless recognized one of its foundational biblical insights: Israel’s fundamental understanding of its God came through the Exodus, not Genesis — i.e., through the story of deliverance of slaves from Egyptian bondage. Here was a God first encountered in the cries of exploited people and in the struggle to free them. Today’s reading asks the formerly enslaved to build a society that refuses to reproduce the arrangements of Egypt.

That is a serious challenge for an election campaign. Candidates invite us to imagine the country they would build. Christians must ask what place immigrants will occupy in it. Will they receive fair treatment and protection from exploitation? Will their children live in fear? Will their vulnerability become an opportunity for employers, political operatives, and others who benefit when people cannot safely defend themselves?

We also need to ask how people became migrants in the first place. Campaign speeches commonly begin the immigration story when a poor person approaches our border. An honest account would begin much earlier—when our corporations crossed theirs.

Consider Mexico. Under NAFTA and related economic reforms, U.S. agricultural exports gained expanded access to Mexican markets. Corn, soybeans, and other commodities moved south. Large producers and trading companies gained business. Small farmers faced competition within a system whose advantages were distributed very unevenly.

Research connects the expansion of agricultural imports and other rural economic changes with the displacement of workers who subsequently sought livelihoods in Mexican cities, border factories, and the United States. Trade was one factor among several others (including U.S. authored regime and climate change throughout the Global South), but it belongs in the immigration story.

For a farming family, losing a livelihood can mean losing the possibility of remaining where generations have lived. Young people leave. Families separate. Local businesses lose customers. Communities struggle to sustain the customs, relationships, and knowledge built around working the land. What appears in a corporate report as a market opportunity can appear in a village as the disappearance of its future.

Then comes the moral reversal that election rhetoric so often conceals. When a corporation crosses a border seeking greater profits, its movement is celebrated as enterprise. When a displaced worker crosses a border seeking a livelihood, the movement becomes a threat. The investor’s ambition deserves protection; the worker’s ambition becomes grounds for suspicion. We defend the freedom to sell the corn while condemning the movement of people whose livelihoods the new arrangements helped undermine.

Before voting, we should ask candidates to explain that double standard. Why should capital enjoy broad freedom to seek favorable conditions while workers must accept whatever conditions capital leaves behind? Why does “free enterprise” so often require freedom for investors and enforced immobility for people struggling to survive?

Those questions also expose the dishonesty of claiming that poor immigrants uniquely threaten local cultures. Fact is, economic power can destroy cultures much more thoroughly. Outside interests can undermine a community’s livelihood, take control of its resources, and subordinate its needs to distant profits. A village emptied of its young people has suffered cultural disruption long before any of those young people reaches our border.

Americans have particular reason to approach the language of “invasion” with humility. European settlement and the expansion of the United States involved the brutal dispossession of peoples already living here. Native nations endured forced removal, massacres, and campaigns against their cultures. That history includes acts of genocide. Descendants of the settler society should hesitate before treating a migrant family’s search for work as an unprecedented assault on an innocent national history.

Exodus calls us to remember honestly. Our own history should deepen our obligations toward vulnerable newcomers. It should make us suspicious when politicians manufacture national innocence by placing national guilt upon impoverished outsiders.

The lending instructions in today’s reading make the same demand in economic terms. If a poor neighbor gives a cloak as security for a loan, the lender must return it before sunset. “What else has he to sleep in?” Scripture asks. In other words, the borrower’s need places a limit on the creditor’s power. A recognized financial claim cannot justify leaving a human being exposed to the cold.

That principle belongs in our voting decisions. A policy may be legal and still be cruel. An enforcement program may have funding and still inflict unjustifiable suffering. A contract may be valid and still exploit desperation. Christians must examine what these arrangements do to actual people, especially those least able to protect themselves.

In the Gospel, Jesus joins love of God with love of neighbor and says that the whole law and the prophets depend on them. Today’s first reading gives that love its concrete content. It concerns the immigrant’s safety, the worker’s wages, the borrower’s debt, and the child’s security. We cannot profess love of God while supporting the deliberate humiliation of people God commands us to protect.

Paul describes conversion as turning from idols to serve the living God. An election season offers plenty of idols: national greatness, wealth, party loyalty, the supposedly indispensable leader. Each becomes dangerous when its claims override our responsibility toward other human beings. Christian conversion requires the freedom to judge our preferred party by the Gospel, even when that judgment costs us something.

No party escapes that scrutiny. Democrats must answer for their immigration policies and their participation in economic arrangements that contribute to displacement. Republicans must answer for making vulnerable immigrants targets of collective blame and presenting harshness as evidence of leadership. Calling a policy Christian cannot exempt it from the commandment to love.

Before voting, then, ask concrete questions. Does this candidate protect workers or make them easier to exploit? Does this proposal provide fair procedures or encourage indiscriminate punishment? Does it address the causes of displacement? Does it help communities receiving newcomers obtain the resources they need? Does it recognize immigrant families as human beings whose security matters as much as ours?

Our ballots are one way we authorize the use of power over other people’s lives. Today’s readings ask us to exercise that authority with the immigrant, the widow, the orphan, and the indebted neighbor clearly in view. Their cries must reach us before campaign slogans drown them out.

Before you vote, remember whom God hears. Remember the history that brought us here. Remember the workers whose labor sustains our daily lives. And remember that the commandment to love our neighbor remains binding when we enter the voting booth.