The (Biblical) Words used for Immigrants (Part 1)
What does God say about Immigrants? A lot. Does the Bible have principles on how I should be treating/speaking about immigrants in this current political era? I believe it does. We can’t even agree on the words we currently use for immigrants, let alone what words were used in the Old and New Testament, so first let’s generally define the words we use now, and then move on to Biblical words:
1. Asylum Seeker: “An individual who is seeking international protection. In countries with individualized procedures, an asylum seeker is someone whose claim has not yet been finally decided on by the country in which he or she has submitted it. Not every asylum seeker will ultimately be recognized as a refugee, but every recognized refugee is initially an asylum seeker.”
2. Refugee: “A person who, owing to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it. (1951 convention definition) Note from Rachel: There is then an official process for a person to go through to prove they get the official term “Refugee.”
3. Immigrant: “From the perspective of the country of arrival, a person who moves into a country other than that of his or her nationality or usual residence, so that the country of destination effectively becomes his or her new country of usual residence.”
4. Migrant: “An umbrella term, not defined under international law, reflecting the common lay understanding of a person who moves away from his or her place of usual residence, whether within a country or across an international border, temporarily or permanently, and for a variety of reasons. The term includes a number of well-defined legal categories of people, such as migrant workers; persons whose particular types of movements are legally-defined, such as smuggled migrants; as well as those whose status or means of movement are not specifically defined under international law, such as international students.” These terms are from the UN
Here is a graph I put together from my study:
There are few enough times that “Stranger” is used in the New Testament that you can just look them up for yourself if you’d like: I simply used a Strong’s Concordance for that. For the Old Testament words, it is more tricky. As soon as I started studying “Nochri,” I quickly fell into a part of the internet I never wanted to find: horribly racist people using the Bible to justify their ugly hierarchy. It got really bad, really fast. They immediately jumped to the idea that white Christians were the chosen people (Israel), “Ger” were other white people, who weren’t Christians, and “Nochri” were people of color. It made me sick to my stomach:
“A common interrogatory leveled towards CI pastors is, “Can other races be saved?” Perhaps one of the greatest travesties of the divine message is the distortion of the Great Commission in carrying the gospel of salvation to the ‘Nokriy’ (another form of Nochri) strangers. Let’s not forget the Law was and is to be read before all Israel and the “Ger” strangers, not “Nokriy” stranger (Deut. 31:12) …You can take the savage out of the jungle, but you cannot take the jungle out of the savage.” This isn’t some old confederate preaching—this was posted in July 2013 under “Don’t Talk to Strangers” on the kinsmanredeemer.com website. And there is more—a lot more.
It is interesting to note that I searched long and hard for the other end of the spectrum. I know I’ve heard people decrying any border or impeding of people immigrating to America “Anti-Christian.” It is thrown around that “Jesus was a refugee- you would have never let him in.” But when I tried to find a solid Christian case for open borders, I couldn’t find it. There was plenty of posts about the issue, but not with Christ or the Bible attached to it. In fact, I scrolled through pages and pages of things that said something like, “While we do need more compassion (and whatnot), open borders is not the answer.”
Luckily, I did find a guy in Germany, Dr. Hans-Georg Wuench, who from the abstract of his article, seemed to be doing the same kind of thing I was (but I was all over the place and not so scholarly). The title of his study is “The Stranger in God’s Land- Foreigner, Stranger, Guest: What can we learn from Israel’s Attitude toward Strangers?” and it was written in 2014 at this location.This article was incredibly helpful to me, and though long, I would totally suggest reading it (that is where I got the information for the above graph).
I’ve read through the Bible enough to know that there are many verses about welcoming the stranger…but I’ve also read verses that made me cringe—about annihilating the stranger, and bashing their children’s heads on rocks. This wasn’t just about wanting a Biblical answer to why the hateful rhetoric against immigrants by our next and former president is wrong: this was about understanding something that has been tangled throughout history by different people into different things: caste systems set up by people that God sent His son to destroy—not uphold. Something that sinful people created—not God. The caste system of white over color is easy to reject, but seems too dangerously close to how people are responding to a rhetoric of citizen over non-citizen. Something inside me is begging for answers, not just to help towards positive action, but to calm my heavy heart and remind me that God is good.