Theology in the Raw - 839: Thinking Christianly about Immigration: Dr. Danny Carroll

Episode Date: January 14, 2021

What does the Bible—not culture, not democrats, not republicans, but the freakin’ word of God!—say about immigration? In this podcast, Danny and Preston sit down to talk about what the Bible says about immigration, including how to respond to undocumented immigrants, and also how this intersects with politics and culture on the issue.  Dr. Carroll is half-Guatemalan and was raised bilingual and bicultural. In his youth, he spent many summers in Guatemala and later taught at El Seminario Teológico Centroamericano in Guatemala City for thirteen years. The realities of Central America sparked Dr. Carroll's fascination with the Old Testament. The relevance of the biblical text for the challenges of poverty, war, and politics in those developing countries led him to a passionate focus on Old Testament social ethics and the social sciences. In addition, his studies in English literature and literary theory have generated an ongoing engagement with literary approaches to the Old Testament and critical studies. Experiences in this country and abroad have led him to a deep appreciation for the unique contributions that ethnic minorities, women, and the global church make to the interpretation of the Old Testament. Before coming to Wheaton, Dr. Carroll taught Old Testament at Denver Seminary for many years and founded a Spanish-language lay training program there. At Wheaton, he hopes to model a commitment to connecting careful biblical scholarship with the mission of the church as it engages today’s complex realities. Dr. Carroll has been involved in Hispanic churches and teaching on the Bible and immigration for many years. His research focuses on the prophetic literature and Old Testament social ethics. He has just completed a major commentary on the book of Amos. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I am so excited about this episode because I have on the show the one and only Dr. Danny Carroll. I've been a huge fan of Dr. Carroll for many years, specifically after I read his book, Christians at the Border, which came out in 2018. Dr. Carroll has become kind of evangelicals resident expert on thinking biblical, uh, biblically and theologically about immigration and migration and refugees and so on and so forth. Dr. Carroll is, um, he's half Guatemalan. He was raised in a bilingual and bicultural, uh, household. He also lived in Guatemala city for 13 years where he taught at, I'm not going to try and pronounce this, a seminary in Guatemala City. And he's, I just, I love his posture. I love his wisdom. He's incredibly knowledgeable when it

comes to the Bible. And he has, he's released a more recent book that just came out last year called The Bible and Borders, Hearing God's Word on Immigration. I would highly recommend checking this book out. It's not very long. It's like 150 pages. It's very accessible, but Dr. Carroll is a renowned old Testament scholar. So there's lots of academic credibility that goes into this book, but there's also lots of personal experience in terms of thinking through the topic of immigration from a biblical theological perspective. If you'd like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com. You can support the show for as little as five bucks a month, five bucks a month or more, and you get access to

other premium content that I release throughout the month. And you also get the joy and satisfaction of joining the theology in the raw community. Okay, without further ado, let's welcome to, I want to say new friend, Danny Carroll. But Danny has been a name I've known for a long time. I have assigned his books and courses I've taught over the years and just learned a ton about what the Bible has to say about immigration, which is what we're going to talk about today. So, Danny, thanks so much for being on Theology in the Raw. It's a great honor.

Well, I appreciate it. Nice to see your face for the first time. It's good to get to know you a little bit. Yeah, sure. So, as I said in the intro, you have a new book out, The Bible and Borders, Hearing God's Word on Immigration. And this takes some of the ideas um in your previous book christians um on the border is that uh yeah christians at the border um

i want to jump jump into this the book the topic and everything but uh why don't you just give us a brief background of who you are where you've come from where you've been and what led you to write this book yeah it's a very personal thing, actually. I'm half Guatemalan. My mother was Guatemalan. And so she was an immigrant. She married my father. And they, you know, that's an interesting love story. And then they were in the US. And anyway, I was raised bilingual and bicultural. And so my mother was very intentional about that. And so just about every summer growing up, we'd go to Guatemala. We were in Houston, so it's not that far. And we would also have my grandmother, my abuelita, as we'd say in Spanish, would come up

and spend time with us every year. And then later on, I went and I taught in Guatemala at a seminary in Guatemala City for 13 years with my wife and our kids were born in Central America. And then I moved back to the US and went to a seminary in Denver, Colorado. And we were there for a number of years. And that's where this whole thing began. Because growing up, we never processed any of this. It was just who we were. And my mother made a point of, you know, for birthdays, it was piñatas. And, you know, for Latin culture, Noche Buena, which is Christmas Eve is the big time. And so we have a special meal and Noche Buena and all these kinds of things that we did growing up that I just, we just did.

all these kind of things that we did growing up that we just did. And when I came back to the U.S., that's when the conversation started, and I started hearing things. And what happened was is that I had a Peruvian pastor in a class. He was taking one of these Bible survey classes. And he was an immigrant married to an American. And he was telling me, oh, you know, we need this all in Spanish. He would say, you know, we need something in Spanish here in Denver for pastors and lay leaders. And I said, well, you know, okay.

And so long story short, we started a program at the seminary, kind of a lay level program. And we had about 35 that first year, we were doing it once a month on a Saturday. And that's where I began not only to hear the national discourse, but to hear immigrants themselves. So I started going to Immigrant Church, Iglesia El Camino in Aurora, to Immigrant Church, Iglesia del Camino in Aurora, Colorado. I joined the Alianza Ministerial Hispana, which would be the Hispanic Pastors Alliance in Denver. I was a member of that for a number of years as well. And so it became very personal. And of course, my own Guatemalan background. So that's when I started to think about it. And then I would hear people talk about it, but even Christians would not give me a Christian discussion. What they would do is give me political reasons, cultural reasons, healthcare, national security. And then at the end, they would

kind of tag, you know, a Bible verse, you know. And so I thought, boy, someone needs to kind of get into this more biblically. I didn't know what the Bible had to say. And so once I got into it, it was just massive. And that's what led to, you know, the book and now that original book. And now I've been speaking and writing on it since about 2007. So it's been a while. But anyway, that's kind of the personal backdrop. So when people say, you know, why do you do this?

I go, it's por mi gente. It's for my people. And so I actually have two surnames, you know, Carol and Rodas. In Latin America, if you're a male, your second surname is your mother's maiden name. So I actually have two surnames, and you'll see this on the book cover and stuff. I have the R, which is for Rodas.

In Latin America, you can either put it as initial or write it out. In this country, no one knows what the initial means. So that's part of my identity and part of who I am. And, you know, I am bilingual, bicultural. I go to Guatemala. I have family there and my dearest friend here and so anyway background I love I love when books and ideas grow out of

somebody's personal narrative it just it just gives so much more flesh to the to what's being said and uh I mean I said it's been right I think I first read your your first book right 10 years right when it came out 10 11, 11, 12 years ago. And I still remember just feeling that. I'm like, this book is written not from a distance, you know. When you first started going back to the scriptures to see what does the Bible say about migration, immigration, even refugees, you know, can you give us a snapshot of what you found? Oh, my gosh. Are there any verses that address this?

Yeah, yeah, verses and narratives and laws. What you find is, I'd say a couple things. You know, first of all, the history of humanity is the history of migration. And that's the story of humans on this planet. And so you would expect it to be in the scriptures, and indeed it is, from beginning to the end. And even in Genesis 1, you know, we're supposed to fill the earth. Well, how do humans do this? Well, we move. And in this country, you know, the U.S., it's very transient. So we're moving all the time. Now, it may be across town. It may be across state lines for family, for a new job, for school, for marriage or whatever, looking for new opportunities.

Well, that's what our new job, that's what migration has always been about. That's what migration has always been about. In this country, it hasn't been so much about fleeing something, whether hunger or war, but that's a common thread throughout human history. And so when you go into the Old Testament, you find all these kind of stories that echo and resonate with migration across the ages and even today. You find legislation, you know, towards the outsider. And what I find, I think, pretty important is that when you get to 1 Peter, so, you know, I'm an Old Testament prof, but, you know, here we go to New Testament. I can do that sometimes. You go to 1 Peter, and he says that all of us, you see, are sojourners. We're strangers in a strange land. So what you see, even in 1 Peter, and it's not the only place in the New Testament, is that migration becomes a metaphor for the Christian life itself. Because now we have a different citizenship.

We have a different king. We have a different set of values. And the world will not understand this. We are strangers. The problem with us sometimes is that, you know, this isn't a strange place anymore. We kind of like it. And so we try to keep the strangers out. And we've got it all backwards, you see. So that just shows you, not only is it a common thread throughout Scripture and history itself, but it actually becomes a metaphor. And so what I tell people is that the more we understand about migration, maybe the more we'll understand about the Christian faith. And what I tell people, too, is, you know, immigrants know what it means to be strange, whether it's their accent or their food or their, you know, nonverbal language or how they dress or whatever. And so they get it.

For them, it's not a metaphor. I mean, it's their lived life. And so when I'm talking to, you know, Latino groups, you know, I'll say, I mean, the Anglo church actually needs us to remind them, you know, what it means to be strange. And so now what you begin to do is just change all the kinds of conversations based on the Bible itself. You know, one of the things that I was, I learned,

I mean, I learned a ton from your first book, in particular, the, some of the laws in the Old Testament. I mean, it's one thing to have narratives about people migrating and stuff, but there's built into the very code of God's law. Like if you want to be holy, if you want to follow Yahweh, if you want to be faithful, then you need to care for the alien, the stranger, the sojourner. Off the top of your head, do you have a few examples of that? Yeah, I think. But there's reasons for this, you know, in the sense that this was part of their historical story.

So basically what he's saying is remember where you came from. historical story. So basically, what he's saying is, remember where you came from. And because once you forget, you'll kind of begin doing what other people did to you. Now, this is what we see in this country. I mean, this country has kind of amnesia in terms of its immigrant stories. And we've actually twisted them in many ways. My father was a son of Irish immigrants. Well, if you know the story of Irish immigration, they were Catholic and poor. And they were marginalized and put into ghettos, you know, New York City, Boston, and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, so you've got those kind of stories. The Chinese, you know, the first major piece of legislation in this country was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which excluded the Chinese from coming in until 1943. We have all these stories, you see, and we've forgotten them or we sanitize them.

So St. Patrick's Day, Irish, it just means wearing green, you see, and having a parade and then maybe drinking green beer or something. I mean, it totally has sanitized it, you see. So this is what we've done. And what God does in the law is he says, don't ever forget that you were slaves in Egypt, you see. And so what you find then is that historical memory becomes a motivation to care for the outsider, because that was their story. And the second motivation, which is even more profound, is in Deuteronomy 10, 17 to 19, when God says, you will love the foreigner because I do. And he says, I give them food and clothing. Well,

how does he do that? Well, he does it through his own people. So when people say, why should we care for the foreigner? I say, because God does. I can't give you a better reason than that. So what you find then in the law are efforts to express this in tangible ways. So you'll find legislation about leaving, you know, because it was basically an agrarian world. So leaving room, you know, on the, on the harvest, you see, for the immigrants to be able to go in,

you know, this is the Ruth story, right? There's an idea about giving them Sabbath rest, you see, because what do people do even today? You take advantage of the vulnerable foreigner in terms of their labor. And so God says, no, they will get rest too. So if you read the Sabbath laws, it specifically mentions the foreigner. There is laws about they will have equal standing before the law. So you get that.

Again, if you're an immigrant, that's one of the things you fear the law. So you get that. Again, if you're an immigrant, that's one of the things you fear the most. If I go in any kind of legal way, do I have any chance of fairness? Well, the law says, yes, you do. And then one last thing real quickly is they're allowed to come into a large number of the Israelite feasts,

which was the very heart of their culture. Now, it expects them to begin to integrate. See, if you're going to work in Israel, you would have to learn Hebrew, for instance. So there are expectations. Deuteronomy 31, there's expectation that the foreign will be present when the law is read, you know, they read it aloud. Well, that would make sense. If you want them to understand Israel. They need to hear

the laws and how it works. And so all that's kind of ingrained. So I think what we can learn from that is that there's some basic commitments of God expressed through those laws. And that to me is the bridge to today, if

you ever want to talk about that. How do we make that bridge? We don't imitate those laws, which would make no sense. Right. But we try to make those laws tangible in ways that fit the 21st century. Or even like, I mean, it's almost, I mean, I'll ask you, do you think that the New Testament, which is, you know, no longer is the people of god a theocracy they're a multicultural you know kingdom spread among the nations rather than being a nation state so you

have kind of differences there i almost feel like the new testament is a nice segue a bridge to the contemporary application where believers find themselves and yeah even in the new testament it seems that those the very underlying principles that drove the theocratic laws in the old testament you see those principles played out really clearly and blatantly and pervasively in the new testament all the way from jesus migrating and and um you know even the metaphor you brought up first peter 2 and others would that be an accurate way of everything I said in the last 30 seconds? Would you want to expand on that? Yeah, I'd agree. I would just go further than that.

If we understand the law as something that God wanted to be a light to the nations, and he says this explicitly in Deuteronomy 4, verses 5 to 8. It says the nations will look at your laws and they'll go, oh, what a great God and wise laws. So if we understand that, and if we see God as the God of the vulnerable, and in the law, it's this quartet of the vulnerable, right? It's the widows and the orphans, the poor this quartet of the vulnerable, right? It's the widows and the orphans, the poor, and the stranger to this day, you see. And so what God does is He responds to vulnerable people. And so if that's an underlying biblical value to ask or to say, and I hear this a lot, well, we're in the New Testament, so Old Testament law doesn't carry over.

Well, in one sense, you're right. We're not going to imitate ancient Israelite law. But what does carry over are these transcendent values. So then the question becomes, if we're called to be a blessing to the world, part of our way of being a blessing to the world is communicating these values to vulnerable people. Yeah. You know, Christians don't seem to have a problem helping widows and orphans.

You know, but when it gets to immigration, it gets a little more touchy, right? Yeah. Now you begin to see really there's maybe some political motivations, some cultural motivations, you see. So that's how I would see it. One last thing is that I think all of us, if we were to give our testimony, as we come to faith, we come because something bad happened to us. Usually if you're middle class, it was something existential, right?

A disease, a relationship, something happened to your parents or something. And in your vulnerability, you come to God. Well, fine. But in the Bible, it's not only existentially vulnerable people, it's people who are vulnerable socially, politically, economically, the widows and the orphans and the poor, you see, and the stranger that God is reaching out to as their God, a God who loves and cares for people who are vulnerable in whatever kind of vulnerability that might be. You've been, yeah, no, that's super helpful.

I forgot you're an Old Testament scholar. So you've been, I mean, writing on this talking about it for many years now. What would you say is the number one way in which American Christians have considered these questions through the lens of their political or social context rather than the Bible? the Bible? Is it the national security kind of concerns or maybe the right wing or left wing rhetoric? I would say it depends which Christian group you're talking about.

If you're talking about white evangelicals, because the faith that has been preached to them has been a very individualistic faith, very inside you. And the culture actually, you know, will underscore this, you see, you know, keep religion out of the public square, that kind of idea. that kind of idea. So what happens then is when you get to the bigger issues of human life, because they, we have not been taught to actually go to the scriptures for those things. We go to the scriptures for our marriage or our children or something like that.

So when we get to those things, the default then is to go to your ideology, because you don't even know what the Bible can do with that. You never heard the Bible speak about those things. So you default to your ideology, but because you're a Christian, you know you have some Christian things. So then on the other side of it, on the end of it, you look for some Bible verses. Now, I'll find the same thing among mainline white Christians, except it's going the other way. They have this kind of Christian impulse to take care of X, Y, and Z people. And it's defined by a political party, oftentimes. And then they'll go and they'll go to, you know, Matthew 25, Leviticus 19. On the right, they'll go to Romans 13.

Those are the classics that I hear all the time. Now, on the other hand, what if you're a Latino Christian, which are in the millions? Now, what happens there is that they haven't been taught to engage the Bible as immigrants either. So in their sermons,

they'll hear kind of systematic theology about faith and life and maybe their families. They may have a bit of a sermon about, you know, be careful when you get out there. I actually heard a sermon in the church I was attending, you know, at Iglesias Camino in Denver, where part of the sermon was, you know, obey the traffic laws because you don't want to get pulled over. Okay, you don't hear that in an Anglo congregation. But yeah, but what happens then is that when they begin to see that the Bible has a lot to say about their experience, you see, then they begin to engage it differently than a non-immigrant audience, you see, because now the scriptures are actually theirs in a very particular close kind of way. So, you know, I think that the root of it is we have so individualized Christian faith that it's been co-opted by the left and the right for political agendas.

It's almost like that individualization has left a vacuum, right? And then that's just going to get filled with political rhetoric, which is all about social concerns. Can you help us think through the, I guess, touchier debated or hot topic of undocumented immigrants? And this could take, I probably have several questions here. I mean, we can jump in. Let's just think of the ethical question of should,

if a Christian came across an undocumented family, for instance, should they help them, protect them, or turn them in? Well, actually, under U.S. law, they are not actually required to turn them in. So that's not— So there's no Romans 13 tension here. No, no. Now, if you're an employer, okay, that's something else. But what I would say is this.

Two things. One is from the legal side, and one is from the biblical side. Let me do the legal first. One is from the legal side and one is from the biblical side. Let me do the legal first. When people talk about immigration, oftentimes they don't even know what immigration law is. They know nothing about it. They just assume it must be good because it's U.S., right?

And the U.S. immigration law is antiquated, inefficient, and in many ways unjust. Because it was elaborated over decades, and it's just an accumulation of laws that are a total mess. And I'll give you one example, two examples, and then I'll move to the biblical side. So, for instance, most people don't know, under current U.S. law, that if you were inside the country without papers, there is nothing under current law that you can do to rectify your legal status. There is nothing. Under current law, the only alternative available is deportation. So you have over 11 million people in this country

and the mean stay now is over a decade. All right. So there's nothing they can do. Literally, there is no fine, no paperwork, no office,

nothing they can do to rectify their situation. Most people don't even know that because the U.S. law never contemplated people being here without papers. And most people don't even know that because the U.S. law never contemplated people being here without papers. And most people don't know that over 40% of the people who are undocumented came in legally, not in the border, they came in the airports. Student visas, temporary worker visas, tourist visas, your state, over 40%. So you can see the U.S. doesn't have a system that actually can track them once they're in.

I mean, so people don't know U.S. law. And the second thing about the law they don't understand is that it's built on quotas. All right. So they just assume there's this infinite amount of visas you can go. No, it's all quoted. So to show you how ridiculous it is, the annual quota for unskilled labor in this country, this would be construction, landscaping, nannies, cooks, all this kind of stuff. For the country, it's between 5,000 and 10,000 a year.

Wow. Well, we need about, you know, a number that I saw a couple years ago, we need about $500,000 a year. Wow. So, I mean, the whole system just doesn't work. So that's the legal side, you see. It doesn't work. It's antiquated, inefficient, etc.

So on the biblical side, what we see is that God's not asking anybody to show the legal status before he shows concern. I mean, I would give the example, these are radical examples, but the radical example actually makes the point. So what if you're in Nazi Germany and the Jews? God's not asking, you know, okay, you know, let's follow, you know, the regime's laws on the Jews. You know, Romans 13 doesn't work really well in Nazi Germany. or let's say you're in Birmingham, Alabama in about 1950, where racism is legal and sanctioned, and all kinds of things happen to African American people,

and it's part of the culture, and it's so ingrained that even today after the Civil Rights Act and all that kind of stuff, even after the Civil War, after the 13th and 14th Amendments, a century later, we still need a Civil Rights Act that gives them the right to vote properly. And now, 50 years after that, we're still dealing with racism. that, we're still dealing with racism. So what you're seeing is God's not doing the Romans 13 like we do. You know, Romans 13, I think, reads a very different way than most people think. But what you're seeing is that the ultimate question is, what do we do with vulnerable people? The first thing we do not ask is their legal status. The first thing we ask is, how are they vulnerable? The nice thing about this country, and this is where I think we can put these two together,

we change laws we don't like all the time. We do this all the time. That's why we have a Congress. That's why we do things locally, state, and federally. We're changing laws all the time, laws that we don't like. So immigration law needs to be changed. Both sides have recognized this for the last 20 years, but the politics are getting stuck. So this is where, as we move into helping the change, we do it with our set of Christian values.

That's super helpful. What would you say to the person that's, you know, brings up the kind of national security concern saying, you know, legal or documented immigrants come in their screen and they're, they're going to contribute to the good of society, but undocumented immigrants, not all of them, but many of them, most of them, a good portion of them might be you know criminals or drug dealers or you know and gangs or whatever is that um and you know um and i honestly don't even know the political kind of answer to that if that's factually true or not i mean i think that kind of sidesteps the ethical theological question um of caring for, not because they're a saint, but precisely because they're not. But yeah, well, is there anything to that on maybe a political level, or is that not really verified by evidence? Let's say a couple things again. On the one hand, let me think with you theologically, for instance. As a Christian, I would believe in what we call original sin. So it doesn't matter what race you are or where you're from, there's going to be a certain percentage of bad people.

Right. Right? Whether you're a citizen or not. I mean, that's just reality of human life. And they're entering a country full of bad people, just to be clear. Yeah. And so, you know, if there are bad immigrants, my answer would be, you should expect that. I don't know why you're surprised theologically, but what you don't do is then project the

stories of a few bad ones into the whole population. And there's a biblical example of this. You know, it's an extreme one, but, you know, you think of the book of Esther and Haman. Okay, so he gets angry at Mordecai because Mordecai doesn't show him the respect that he's due. So because of his anger at one man, the response is to kill all the Jews. So what you're seeing is projection to all of them based on a bad experience. So what I say, sometimes we see this Heyman effect, where you get the bad immigrant, you're going to have some,

and then it gets projected to the whole population. Now, that's kind of the biblical side. On the statistical, what you call political side, if people look into it, there is a lower crime rate among immigrants than there is in the general population. Now, the reason for that is because they're keeping their head down. They don't want to get in trouble. I'm talking about the moms and dads and kids going to school. They don't want to get in trouble. And I'm talking about the moms and dads and kids going to school. They don't want their life disrupted. They're not going to get involved in bad things,

but there will be a percentage that will, which we would expect. But this is why you have actually lower crime rates among immigrants than among citizens, because they're keeping their head down and trying to do the best they can. That's super helpful. I've heard people also say that the people who are most opposed to undocumented immigrants are immigrants who went through all the steps they needed to come in legally. Is that a true, I mean, that's a very broad brush kind of statement, but is there anything to that? And is that, how should we think through that?

He came in undocumented, but he came and was granted amnesty under Reagan. Reagan in 1986, you know, does this amnesty where he just gives amnesty to a couple of million people. So that's how he got legal status. And then he was telling me that when he began pastoring a Latino congregation, that's how he started. He was kind of, look, I'm here legal, you know, why don't you do this right? Of course, he had come undocumented and got the amnesty, right? But anyway, so, but he said it was when he began to pastor these people and began to see that they're just trying to make a living doing the things that this country actually needs, make a living doing the things that this country actually needs, that that's when he changed his mind.

So do you find people like this? Yes. It's a natural reaction. It's not just something in this country. I've traveled a lot. It's a different country around the world. The same phenomenon, the phenomenon that we see here, we're seeing everywhere. And even the pushback of those who came in, quote unquote, legally, they get very jealous of their status, you see.

So yeah, there is some of that. I would say, yeah, that's out there. And for some people, let's say in the last election, like in Florida, it depends on what Latino group you're talking about. So if you're in Miami, largely Cuban, you see, they will be more interested in what the administration, either Trump or Biden at that point, were saying about Cuba than they were about immigrant status. Because that was their experience and that was going to override, you know, the whole immigrant debate, which surprised the democratic party. They just assumed the Latinos, this is where everyone in this country thinks the Latinos are just all the same. Well, they're not. So, you know, the, the, the Tex-Mex on the U Sexican border are very different than what you find in Miami,

which are largely Cuban. Their history is different. Their immigrant story is very different. And so they're going to react differently. So do you find it among Latinos? Do you know what you were saying? Yes, you find it among them. But it's very varied.

I've heard you brought up the Tex-Mex versus the more Florida-Miami contingency. Is it a generalization? But I've heard it's generally true that the Tex-Mex Latino would lean more Democrat, whereas the Cuban-Miami Latino would lean more Republican or more pro-Trump. I heard that in passing somewhere,

largely because some of the rhetoric, I say the radical left, more the radical left, the Bernie Sanders types, they left a country that had actually tried that. And they were like, no, it didn't work. Whereas the Tex-Mex might hear some of Trump's rhetoric and be more like, not really into that. Is there any merit to that? Well, it's more complex.

Okay. As always. Yeah. What you find among Latino populations, they would be pro-life. Okay. Because of their Catholic background. Right. And they would be pro-nuclear family of the traditional sort.

But if you're talking about the Tex-Mex, let's say, they would be pro-immigrant because that's their story and those are their children. Right. Now, when you go to Florida and Miami, particularly, until Obama, if a Cuban touched U.S. soil, they're automatically legal. So that's why, for a while, the U.S. Coast Guard was trying to keep those boats from landing, because once they landed, they were automatically legal. Wow. from landing because once they landed, they were automatically legal. Wow. That was a specific dispensation for the Cubans and really because of Fidel Castro, right? But Obama took that away.

So what you find is that the Cuban immigrant experience until very recently has been very different. The legal issue was not their issue. It was what they left behind. On the Texas-Mexican border, it is their issue. It's their life, it's their children, it's their work. And so that part of them would have followed the Democratic agenda. Now what happens is a lot of, you know, Democrats would assume, well, if you're pro-immigrant, we assume that you buy into our agenda. Well, they don't. Right.

large Latino organizations of churches that would have been very opposed and are very opposed to the democratic, you know, pro-choice platform and would be very conflicted and feel like they have been used. I have heard that over the last two elections. They feel that they're being used by both parties, the Republicans using them on the pro-life and pro-family, but they're going to ignore the immigration piece. And then the Democrats using them because they're going to do the immigration piece, but they're going to ignore the pro-life and family piece. So they feel like they've been used by both parties. That's so sad. What's sad about that is I'm sure that there's a decent percentage of

Christians who have been guilty of that, who might, again, play into the political rhetoric rather than embodying the Christian ethic. No Latino person, documented or undocumented, should feel used by a Christian because of the Christian's political rhetoric. And as we've already said, I think whenians get too steeped into the read this whole conversation through the political lens that just it just skews the christian ethic um we we can't keep talking without mentioning the wall i don't even know if that's a thing anymore it's used to well he's not you're not gonna be here much longer but how should christians think about building the wall? Which I'm not partisan.

I'm not political. So I don't know if that's a thing anymore. But I know that was a big kind of debate whether people should be pro-wall or against the wall. Do you have any thoughts on that? Help us think through that as a Christian. I think it's a response to a real issue. It's just maybe not a good response. So what is the issue?

The issue is that under current law, handling the numbers that are coming in isn't possible under current law. So the answer should have been reforming the law instead of building a wall because building a wall can be a deterrent, obviously, up to a point. And the other thing that happened with the wall that's interesting is that before, until very recently, you would have, let's say, seasonal workers coming across.

Okay. And then once the season of harvesting was over, they would go back, you see. But once you build a wall and they come in, they're not going to go back. So in an interesting kind of ironic way, at some level,

it kept a number of them in who would have gone back. On the other hand, it didn't really get to the core issue, which is the law itself doesn't work. And let me give you an easy example. Most people don't even know this. Under current law, and this is actually international, an immigrant is not a refugee, is not an asylum seeker. Those are three different legal categories.

refugee is not an asylum seeker. Those are three different legal categories. Under current U.S. law, if you present yourself at a port of entry, doesn't have to be the southern border, but at a port of entry, and ask for

asylum because people are trying to kill you, you're allowed to cross. And that kicks in a legal process to prove that you're actually under threat of death, okay? Now, that would normally take six months, what I've heard, to two years to prove your case. Now, what's happened at the southern border is that instead of having the occasional person say, I'm going to serve death, and you can process them, now you have tens of thousands presenting themselves to the border and saying that. Well, there's no way the system can even

handle that. So what do you do? Well, if you haven't reformed the law, what do you do? Well, you detain them. What have we done? We've detained them, which creates its own problems, because now you're looking into thousands of detainees who are asylum seekers, and the system cannot process them. Then what you do, if you haven't reformed the law, you try to keep them from getting to the border to present themselves. Okay. So this is the whole Trump thing about, you know, they have to stay in Guatemala. You see? For instance, you see, to keep them away so they can't ask for asylum because they have a right to ask for asylum.

You see, they have the right to do that. The problem is the system can't handle it. they have a right to ask for asylum. You see, they have the right to do that. The problem is the system can't handle it. So instead of working with the system, we entrenched the system, fortified the wall, and it just made everything worse. But it's a real problem. You see, it was a response to a real problem.

And then, you know, the dark side of it, if you want to call it that, is that it's big business. So you have companies offering, you know, subcontracting out, you see, the material, the building, you know, the surveillance issues, all the electronics. And so now it becomes also a multibillion-dollar business, like detention centers. A lot of detention centers are actually privately-owned businesses. So in Denver, for instance, the detention center with over 1,000 beds is owned by GEO, which is an international security firm. and beds is owned by GEO, which is an international security firm.

And the U.S. government pays them over $100 a day per head. So you can begin to see that nationally and internationally, this is big business. So you've got all these things going on that the public just isn't aware of, left or right right because of the politics the politics will go to the emotive you know political thing and not get to the issues well what's the deal that was going on with um at the border you know locking up kids in cages and just some of the ways people were being treated, um, because everything's been so politicized.

I just, I don't know. I don't know. You, you, you read one news outlet. It says one thing, you read another, it says another thing. I just, I don't, I don't know until I go down there and see, I don't know, really know what's going on, but, uh, was there something to that where people were kids being locked up in cages was, um. Well, actually that started under

obama most people don't know that and that's what i know i i heard that actually is that true that's yes that's true but how come trump's getting people make it sound like donald trump's down there single-handedly like locking kids up in cages or something i mean mean, well, I think he made it worse. Okay. And he extended it. Uh, but he didn't come up with it. Well, I think it's because of the, um, the anti-Trump hysteria in this country that we've witnessed for four years. Um, but, uh, you know, what happens then when you have, you know, you had all these unaccompanied minors in the tens of thousands showing up. Okay, so you have to detain them because they were asking for asylum.

So you're going to have, quote unquote, kids being locked up because they're there in the thousands. And then when you have families coming across, and this is where it got more tricky, of course, is that you had families or let's say a mother with small children or something like this. And so now, you know, do you house them all together? How do you do that? And under current law, there is a law that actually will be more lenient about how long an unaccompanied minor can stay versus the adult. So you've got all this kind of stuff going on that's separating the families. But again, it's a real issue. And so instead of trying to reformulate the law to engage the issue,

both sides entrenched. And so this is another thing I hear from, you know, Latinos, is that each side will make immigration a political platform on either side, but basically immigrants are a political football. Well, we're coming up on an hour here. Why don't you, let's just bring it back to the Bible, Christianity, a Christian posture. Yeah. How would you want to challenge Christians to think through issues surrounding immigration?

We've hit on several different kinds of hot button topics that often come up in the political sphere, but bring us back to the Christian sphere and, yeah, take us home. Yeah. I would say that I say this to, you know, when I speak is I think if we are Bible-believing Christians, and that's who I'm speaking to now, get to know what the Bible says about it. Now, the Bible is not a blueprint for legislation or action. It doesn't tell you what to do on the basis of those values. But what it does do, it begins to present to you what those values are. And it goes throughout the entire scripture. So that's where, you know, a plug here, the book, The Bible and Borders,

you can get it on Amazon, is it'll walk you through that. And it's not a big book because it was designed, you know, for people to read. So I think once people begin to reformulate their moral compass, then they can engage the issues differently. And if we understand the Bible, it's not going to give you a blueprint, but how to then becomes the negotiable. Not only negotiable, it has to be pragmatic. So that's a secondary, second-level discussion we have to have.

But we need to establish our biblical framework to be able to have constructive conversations as Christians about the kind of things a local church can do, an individual can do, a city can do, and a nation can do based on those underlying moral principles. So that would be what I would say. Begin there. Just get acquainted with the Bible. You'll be surprised how much is in there. Again, the book is The Bible and Borders, Hearing God's Word on Immigration, put out by Brazos Press, imprint of Baker Publishers. Danny, thanks so much for being on the show. This is, I mean, I've been waiting 10 years to have this conversation with you. And I know, yeah, I'm going to predict my audience is going to be really excited about this conversation. So thanks so much for speaking into this and doing so with such, yeah, humility, wisdom, and thorough biblical knowledge. I really appreciate it.

Well, I hope it's not the last time. Yeah, absolutely, man. I'll have you back on. Okay, brother. Take care. you