What Does the Bible Say about Immigration?

if immigrants have a culture that accepts rape and theft, then they are invaders.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1246415670867632 

To summarize, the reel is about an immigrant who kidnapped and raped a 12 year old girl and his "community" asked for leniency because he did not understand the culture of the United States yet.

We are also being told that theft and fraud (Minnesota) are part of certain cultures and that we ought to learn to accept it or we are racist. The scripture does not teach that we are to accept rape, fraud, and theft from the strangers who dwell among us. Instead, we are told that they are to be held to the same standard. In Bible times, they would not have survived long in Israel with those sorts of behaviors.

I am on the same page as you that Scripture never excuses rape, theft, or fraud—by anyone. The stranger who dwells among God’s people is held to the same moral and legal standards as the (Ex. 12:49; Num. 15:16). On that, there’s no disagreement.

Where I struggle with this argument is its reliance on undefined claims and unnamed speakers. Statements like “we are being told that theft and fraud are part of certain cultures” or that “we ought to accept it or else we are racist” raise an important question: who is actually saying this? Without identifying specific people, institutions, policies, or arguments, it’s difficult to evaluate the claim or respond meaningfully. Scripture warns against answering a matter before it is clearly understood (Prov. 18:13).

Even if such claims are being made by someone somewhere, Scripture still rejects the leap from individual crimes to cultural guilt. The Bible consistently locates moral responsibility in persons, not peoples (Deut. 24:16; Ezek. 18). To reason otherwise is a hasty generalization and a form of collective judgment that Scripture explicitly forbids. This is what some on the far-left did who took CRT to its "logical" conclusions. They judged all white people as racists with the cultural guilt of whiteness.

Your repeated use of the word “invaders” is telling. Again, in Scripture, invaders are armed enemies in a context of war—not migrants, asylum seekers, or criminal defendants in a civil legal system. In modern political rhetoric, that language owes far more to figures like Pat Buchanan and late-20th-century nativism than to biblical exegesis. Importing war language into civil immigration debates predisposes us to fear rather than discernment.

In all of my interactions with you, you are conservative in your theology, except in this case. Ironically, your interpretation of Scripture when it comes to invader language feels less like conservative exegesis and more like the kind of hermeneutical move used in the Social Gospel from 100 years ago and the Secular Social Justice movement except instead of accommodating Scripture to progressive secular assumptions, you seem to be accommodating Scripture to right-wing secular narratives. In both cases, Scripture ends up serving an ideology rather than correcting it.

Further I do not believe we should just open our borders without any vetting process- especially when there are people all over the world who are hostile to the USA and to our way of life and to our rule of law.

Further, I agree we are not under the OT theocracy, but if we are going to apply the OT principles for how to treat strangers from foreign lands, then we need to at least look at the whole picture. In other words, we should not pick and choose which parts we are going to emphasize and then ignore the rest.

I would argue that America did not have a formally “open border” under Biden, but it did experience a breakdown in enforcement capacity that made the border functionally more open in practice, creating a catastrophic failure. Immigration laws remained in place, and migrants were identified, fingerprinted, and screened. However, record-high encounters overwhelmed the system with too few judges, too little detention space, and massive backlogs, which meant that many were released into the interior while waiting years for their cases to be heard. That’s not the same as no law, but it eventually became a failure of deterrence.

Vetting also varied sharply by type. Refugees were among the most heavily vetted people entering the United States, often undergoing years of security, intelligence, and biometric screening. Asylum seekers were screened at the border and placed into legal proceedings, and humanitarian parole was temporary and conditional. Ironically, it is tourists, students, and business travelers, who enter in far larger numbers, that face far lighter vetting, even though some individuals hostile to the U.S. have entered through these lawful visa channels which we've seen in many of the protesting and hating on America.

In the end, the scale of enforcement itself explains the failure. Roughly 4.4 to 4.7 million people were stopped, expelled, returned, or deported during the Biden years, which is an extraordinarily high figure. That level of enforcement only occurs when far more people are attempting to enter than the system can effectively process or deter. Although the border was not legally open, the combination of unprecedented numbers, backlog, and limited enforcement capacity resulted in a de facto open border in practice.

The Bible consistently locates moral responsibility in persons, not peoples (Deut. 24:16; Ezek. 18). To reason otherwise is a hasty generalization and a form of collective judgment that Scripture explicitly forbids.

You are correct to point out that the children are not to be held accountable for the sins of their fathers. At the same time the scripture consistently lumps the Philistines, Amalekites, Moabites, Ninevites, Chaldeans, and others together as a group when representing those who posed a threat to the nation of Israel. Of course, there were individuals among those groups that were not antagonistic to Israel, but they were rare.