Day 5 - O'Keefe - Deeply Rooted Principles

Day 5 – O’Keefe

Mr. Parrott argues that Maryland voters should restrict our welcome to immigrants.  This is contrary to the forceful mandate in Jesus’ words: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me …”  My point today is that these words of Jesus burst out of a long strong tradition of hospitality to immigrants, an urgent ethical demand that stretches from the Torah right through to the last prophet, then into the Gospels.

The Torah is loaded with careful distinctions of all kinds.  But on the matter of treating strangers, the teaching gives details and then promptly and repeatedly points to an underlying principle that is more expansive than the specific detail.  When you harvest your olives, don’t shake the branches a second time, but leave some for widows and orphans and immigrants: this is a clear and specific command.  But then there’s an explanation: Remember that you too once were a stranger in a strange land (Deut 24:20-22).  The idea behind the law is explicit, and is much more expansive than the olive rule.  Moses reaches for memory, imagination, and sympathy. 

What Moses says is simple at heart.  There’s US, and there’s THEM: how do we think about THEM, how do we treat THEM?  Remember our experience as strangers, and do not do to THEM what was done to US.  Remember, remember, remember – and sympathize because you remember. 

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus does the same thing.  A scholar asks him a legal question, and they discuss it, then the discussion moves to a definition of “neighbor.”  Jesus responds with a story about a man who was attacked and beaten by thieves, and left on the roadside.  A priest and then a Levite pass by and decline to help.  A third man, a Samaritan, comes upon the victim, has compassion, and helps.  The scholar asked, who is my neighbor?  Jesus carefully shifts the perspective and asks, who was neighbor to this victim?

The word “neighbor” is the opposite of “stranger.”  So Moses’ discussion of the extent of our obligations to a stranger and Jesus’ discussion of obligations to a neighbor – that’s the same discussion.  Jesus, like Moses, doesn’t parse the difference between US and THEM, between neighbor and stranger.  His approach to the question is not to define the line and list the rules.  Like Moses, he urges sympathy.  In the story, the priest and Levite apparently have a defined and somewhat exclusive concept of neighbor.  The Samaritan has a broader concept of definition of US: he hears and feels the appeal from the victim in the road.

In this simple story, Jesus does the same thing that Moses did: he asks his followers to see the question of US versus THEM through the eyes of the person on the other side of our border. 

The teaching that Mr. Parrott urges Maryland voters to reject is not a single verse that we might misunderstand.  It’s a central teaching running through all of Scripture.

Mr. Parrott?

Day 4 - O'Keefe - Immigration and Abortion

Day 4: argument from John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe

Immigration and abortion are very similar questions.  It is hard, perhaps impossible, to argue against welcoming immigrants without justifying abortion.  Welcoming strangers is similar to welcoming babies.

Mr. Parrott, the argument I make today begins with an assumption that may be wrong.  I know what you have said about marriage, and I know you are serious about your faith – so I assume that you are pro-life. If I’m wrong about that, you should score today as a solid Parrott victory – without lifting a finger!

On Day 2, I argued that you have few arguments (or none) against welcoming immigrants that would not apply to Irish immigrants after the Famine.  Today, I argue that you have few arguments against welcoming immigrants that are not pro-abortion arguments. 

First, there’s the standard rhetoric.  Some immigrants are “illegal.”  Some babies in China are “illegal.”  Immigrants might be undocumented.  Unborn babies are un-named.  Some immigrants are unwanted, unwelcome.  Ditto babies.  Your allies complain bitterly that immigrants are dirty, smelly, lazy.  I dispute that vigorously – but note that babies never wipe themselves, produce foul-smelling puke and pee and poo on a daily basis, and don’t start to pay their own way for about 18 years (maybe 14, maybe 30 – but years).  Your allies complain that they are parasites.  Which are parasites, I wonder?  In general, the language that is used to dehumanize immigrants and justify inhospitality is the same language that is used to dehumanize babies and justify abortion.

Second, there’s the Biblical mandate.  For many people, the Bible is irrelevant, but not for you or me.  Scripture demands: “Choose life that you and your children may live.”  Scripture also demands, “Welcome strangers.  Remember that you too once were strangers in a strange land.”  If you ignore half of that, can your neighbors ignore the other half?  Does Scripture have authority: yes or no?

Third, there’s the issue of cost.  An unplanned pregnancy is often experienced as a personal earthquake, threatening to change life in a long list of ways, re-arranging a woman’s life on every single level of human experience.  In the midst of the earthquake, money isn’t the only hassle, but it’s a major hassle.  Giving birth and raising a baby costs half a million dollars, give or take a decimal point.  Abortion costs a couple of hundred dollars.  I would argue that every mouth comes with two hands (quoting a butcher, but it’s a good insight).  I would argue that babies are a good investment – are the best investment possible, on almost every level of human experience.  Shifting to immigration, do you realize what you sound like when you urge Maryland voters to dig in and refuse to pay for education for children of undocumented immigrants?  A child of God wants an education, and you want the problem to go away – and you have demanded a state-wide referendum on whether to give the student in-state tuition rates? 

The Bible demands, “Welcome unexpected arrivals.”  Your response: “Too expensive.”

Day 3 - O'Keefe - Rooted in Eugenics

Day 3: argument from John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe

Mr. Parrott is working hard to protect shreds of the eugenics movement’s agenda from the 1920s.  That destructive agenda is mostly dismantled, and the remaining evil will also be dismantled.  But why does he cling to it?

At the beginning of the 20th century, the eugenics movement, which sought to breed a better human race by social control of reproduction, was successful in passing laws with three goals: (1) prohibiting racially mixed marriages, or “miscegenation,” and (2) permitting and carrying out government-ordered sterilization of some of the children of God whom the eugenicists called “feeble-minded,” and (3) restricting immigration.

The new wave of anti-miscegenation laws pushed through by the eugenics movement strengthened the old patchwork of anti-black laws. They were state laws, not Federal, but it was a national movement. The point was not so much to keep slaves and their descendants in place, as to maintain the purity of the “white race.”  In 1967, the Supreme Court struck them down (in Loving v. Virginia). 

The forced sterilization laws gave health departments the authority to identify people who they believed were likely to have babies with mental problems, and to sterilize them as a public health measure.  During the next 40 years, hospitals in 30 states destroyed the reproductive ability of over 60,000 people.  The “proof” of their “feeble-mindedness” was remarkably sketchy, targeting people with tuberculosis (not genetic), or in one famous case (Carrie Buck’s mother in Buck v. Bell) for being an uppity bag lady with a smart mouth.  The laws were never over-ruled by the Supreme Court, but died out by the 1960s.

The third major push of the eugenics movement was restricting immigration.  Before the 1920s, there was a messy patchwork of laws – one law to keep out the Chinese, another against the Japanese, another against Filipinos, another against Indians.  In 1921, there was a reform that set up a quota system, favoring northern Europeans and restricting everyone else in varying degrees.  That law, refined in 1924, kept out Jews fleeing from Hitler.

In 1965, President Johnson pushed through a reform of immigration policy.  He described the old eugenics policy as “un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.”  Unfortunately, he left some key principles in place.  The scandal of America turning away refugees from China’s forced abortion policy was after Johnson’s gutsy reform.  The scandal of Southeast Asian refugees drowning by the boatload for years before America decided we could help old allies was after Johnson’s brave but partial reform.  And in the same year that he signed the bill, new forms of discrimination – now focused on Latinos – took shape. 

So today, we are still dealing with bitter leftovers from the 1920s eugenics movement.  Mr. Parrott adamantly refuses to welcome millions of immigrants, extending some of the worst practices of our proud but checkered history.

Why?

Mr. Parrott?

Day 2 -- O'Keefe -- resisting Irish immigration

Day 2: argument from John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe

Does Mr. Parrott offer a single argument against welcoming immigrants that was not also made against Irish immigration after the Potato Famine?  I have not heard it.

At this point in our history, it would make sense to me to lay down a rule in policy debates: if you make an argument that applied to Irish immigrants after the Potato Famine, we should just ignore it.  What do you think, Mr. Parrott?  Are you comfortable recycling the arguments from the Know-Nothings, or do you have some other argument to offer?

James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian, wrote a great study of the Civil War era, entitled Battle Cry of Freedom.  It’s available from Amazon for 12 bucks, or on Kindle for 10 bucks.  In chapter 4, “Slavery, Rum, and Romanism,” he offers a clear description of the anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment on display in America in the 1850s.  It’s great reading!

McPherson explains the “tensions between native and foreign-born workers which had sparked the riots.”  (In this context, “native” means white Protestants, not Native Americans or Indians.)  The riots and tension were especially bad during a depression.  And then “the volume of immigration quadrupled following the European potato blight.”

McPherson writes: “Immigration during the first five years of the 1850s reached a level five times greater than a decade earlier. Most of the new arrivals were poor Catholic peasants or laborers from Ireland and Germany who crowded into the tenements of large cities. Crime and welfare costs soared. Cincinnati’s crime rate, for example, tripled between 1846 and 1853 and its murder rate increased sevenfold. Boston’s expenditures for poor relief rose threefold during the same period. Native-born Americans attributed these increases to immigrants, especially the Irish, whose arrest rate and share of relief funds were several times their percentage of the population.”

Does that sound familiar? 

McPherson offers a fascinating insight about recent immigrants who resented the brand-new immigrants.  “Natives were not necessarily the most nativist. Earlier Protestant immigrants from England, Scotland, and especially Ulster had brought their anti-Catholic sentiments with them and often formed the vanguard of anti-Irish rioters and voters in the United States.”

One of the great concerns about Latino immigration is that drugs are flowing across the same leaky border.  Back then, the Temperance movement had a similar concern.  They tried to persuade “the Protestant middle and working classes to cast out demon rum and become sober, hard-working, upward-striving citizens. As such it had enjoyed an astonishing success. But conspicuous holdouts against this dry crusade were Irish and German immigrants,” especially the Irish, who were perceived to be the cause of a “rise of drunkenness, brawling, and crime.”

The Know-Nothings tried to discourage new immigrants, and tried to keep the Irish off the voter rolls.  They resented and feared the rapidly growing political power of immigrants.

Mr. Parrot, do you have an argument against Latino immigration that was not aimed at the Irish after the Potato Famine?

DAY 1 - O'Keefe

Day 1: opening argument from John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe

Mr. Parrott rejects the Bible – accidentally but firmly.

The Maryland Dream Act is about education, not immigration.  We have students here whose parents are undocumented immigrants, in our schools; and unless there is a huge change in policy somewhere, they are staying.  They will be a part of our lives, our neighborhoods, our workforce.  I am so pleased they are here!  The question is, if they have been here for years, why shouldn’t they get in-state tuition rates for college?  Mr. Parrott argues that their parents entered the country illegally, so Maryland taxpayers should not have to pay for them. 

Mr. Parrott’s ideas about the rights of immigrants, which affect this education bill, are profoundly opposed to Biblical teaching.  Jesus Christ asked in very clear language that his followers welcome immigrants.  Many Christians, not just Mr. Parrott and his friends, overlook the clear teaching of Jesus Christ asking that we welcome immigrants.  There are three details to this common oversight.

#1: SKIP IT. Most Christians, including people who love Scripture and are pretty familiar with it, make the same interesting mistake about the Last Judgment passage in Matthew 25.  About nine people out of ten, recalling Jesus’ words about service, remember that we should feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty and, and … what’s third?  Most people simply skip #3, which says: “I was a stranger (or immigrant) and you welcomed me,” so meet my Father.  Most people just skip that one, and go on to the next. 

There’s nothing particularly awful about forgetting a line in the Bible, as long as you live by it.  But if you forget the line and reject the idea, both, that’s a problem.

#2. WATER IT DOWN.  When people do remember the third item in the Last Judgment list, they often use a weak translation: “shelter the homeless.”  Sheltering the homeless is a great idea, and it is pretty close to what the line says.  But if that’s the translation you use, you miss the real message.  The original Greek word is xenos, which means a person from another country. 

#3. A NEW WORD.  Many people rely on an old and very reliable translation, the King James Version, which refers to “strangers.”  That was an excellent translation at the time.  The problem is, 200 years the KJV was published, a new word came into the language: “immigrant.”  With this new word, the old word – stranger – did not always mean the same things it had meant.  In 1650, the word stranger was the best word to use for a person from a distant land (“a strange land”).  Today, we don’t use the word that way.  When we want to talk about people from another country who have come to live here, we call them “immigrants.”  The KJV does not say “welcome immigrants,” because the word wasn’t in the language at that time.

Jesus’ words are clear: welcome immigrants.

Mr. Parrott?