A lot of political matters are debatable, but some things are just wrong.
Among our associates we know of more than one person in the U.S. legally who has now been ordered to leave the U.S.—even though each is married to a U.S. citizen. To maintain a normally functioning marriage, the U.S. citizen now must quit their job and make plans to leave the U.S. too. In one of these cases, the noncitizen married the citizen several years ago, when they were students in the U.S., but she must now leave the country.
Is this an oversight, or are Americans no longer going to be allowed to marry outside our nationality? (Full disclosure: my wife and I are from different countries, though we’re now both U.S. citizens.) It would be a step backward. Interracial marriage between blacks and whites (like my wife and me) became legal in all 50 states only in 1967. Happily, Médine and I were too young to get married back then (though one state constitution still prohibited it until the year 2000, and we were grownups by then). Interracial marriages between Asians and whites was still illegal in some U.S. states in 1950. Marriage normally starts a process that can lead to citizenship over the course of three years.
Presumably much more widespread right now is a situation I already protested in on April 6 (https://craigkeener.com/concerns-about-some-current-u-s-policy-trajectories/), many others here legally because of danger in their homelands are being ordered to leave the U.S. within about a week. Where does one get a plane ticket and, if needed, a visa that fast? Many have fled their home countries because of intense dangers there, such as war or religious persecution (I am speaking of real cases of which I have been apprised, not hypothetical ones). Whether the Supreme Court stops such plans or not, no one should have ever even proposed such plans. We still remember as a crime against humanity the U.S. turning away a ship of Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust (250 of whom subsequently perished in Nazi-run death camps).
Although I live in a country where we are free to speak our opinions, I am not a public policy expert and certainly not an economist. My opinions in such areas carry no weight. I am just a Bible scholar. But from the latter standpoint, I learn some ethics and God’s response to violating such ethics. I suspect these sorts of actions risk increasing my nation’s liability to judgment. God didn’t judge Sodom just for sexual immorality, but also for hostility to travelers who merited instead hospitality (contrast Gen 18 and 19) and Sodom’s neglect of those in desperate need (Ezek 16:49, NASB: Sodom “had arrogance, plenty of food, and carefree ease, but she did not help the poor and needy”).
And I confess, for those who like to stereotype all U.S. evangelicals as the same, that I didn’t vote for this administration. Nevertheless, I certainly pray for it as I also pray for other leaders. I have good friends who did vote for this administration (or, in some cases, against the alternative) and I understand why they did. But in terms of current iterations of deportation policy, how any of us voted currently seems beside the point. Many, possibly most, who did vote for the current administration did not vote hoping specifically for expelling legal residents married to U.S. citizens, or for legal residents being returned to potentially deadly settings. (I don’t suppose everyone within the administration necessarily seeks such outcomes, either.)
These sorts of actions, whether deliberately xenophobic or simply quota-driven negligence, are immoral and need to be stopped.
