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—Miguel A. De La Torre

José was a simple man who worked with his calloused hands. He built things, trying to make a living as a carpenter; but times were hard, and taxes were high. In spite of the foreign military occupation of his homeland, there simply was no time to become involved with any of those revolutionary groups doing maneuvers and hiding in the wilderness. He kept his head down and worked hard, barely keeping food on the table for his rapidly growing family. Although a newlywed for a couple of months, his wife María already gave birth to a child that wasn’t his, a healthy boy. On this particular night, José was scared. He ran through the sleeping town, silently making his way toward his makeshift home, praying and hoping he wasn’t too late. He had to save his family from certain death! He burst into his shack going straight to the sleeping mats on the dirt floor. “Despierta mi amor, wake up my love,” José told his wife as he gently shook her. “A messenger just warned me la milicia, the militia, will be coming for us. I fear we will disappear! Apúrate, hurry up, we must leave this moment for a safer land, far from the reaches of this brutal dictatorship.” There was no time to pack any belongings or personal mementoes, nor was there time to bid farewell to friends and family. In the middle of the night, literally a few steps before the National Guard, José took his small family into el exilio, the exile. They would come to a foreign country, wearing only the clothes on their backs. Even though they could not speak the language, nor understand the idiosyncrasies of the dominant culture, at least they were physically safe. Salvation for this poor family was found south of the border.16

Over two millenniums ago this family arrived in Egypt as political refugees, fleeing the tyrannical regime of Herod. Almost fifty-seven years ago my own father came home to his wife, my mother, with similar news. Because of his involvement with the former political regime, he was now marked for death by the newly installed government. If caught, he would surely face a firing squad. They gathered me, their six-month-old child, and headed north, arriving in this country literally with only the clothes on their backs. Like Jesús, I too was a child political refugee

The story of God’s people is the story of aliens. The stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph are the stories of aliens attempting to survive among a people not their own in a land they cannot claim. If they were living today, we would probably call them undocumented immigrants, or the more pejorative term: “illegal”. The people who came to be called Jews, are a people formed in the foreign land of Egypt. They become a nation while traversing the desert, having no land to claim as their own. They experienced exile in a far-off place called Babylon and disenfranchisement on their own terrain due to colonial military occupation by a foreign empire, Rome.

Throughout the biblical text we are reminded of God’s concern for the alien and the stranger who resides among us. Aliens and strangers in the Bible are those who have been victimized, oppressed, or enslaved by others; those who are vulnerable because they lack family connections or support; and those whose nationality or religion differs from the dominant culture. In the exodus story, God told the Israelites to welcome the stranger because “you were once aliens in the land of Egypt.” Ruth, a Moabite woman “clings to” her mother-in-law Naomi to provide her security in old age even though she could have returned to her own people. The Good Samaritan in Luke does not leave the alien on the side of the road, nor builds walls to avoid seeing his injuries; he takes social and economic risks to attend to the alien’s needs.

According to biblical scholar Leticia Guardiola-Sáenz, “Jesús live[s] between borders, in a hybrid space which is an experience similar to that of Hispanics/Latin Americans in the postcolonial and neocolonial era. [Jesús], the border-crosser, the traveler between cities and villages, between heaven and earth, between suffering and bliss, comes to redeem the border-crosser who refuses to conform to the limits and borders of a society that has ignored her voice, her body and the borders of her identity as Other.”17 Most border-crossers today act out of desperation; Jesús, theologically speaking, acted out of solidarity with the least of these. The biblical text reminds us that although divine, Jesús became human, assuming the condition of the alienated (Ph. 2:6–8). The incarnation’s radicalness is not that the Creator of the universe became human, but rather God chose to become poor, specifically a wandering migrant. This reveals a Jesús who assumes the role of the ultra-disenfranchised. Because God incarnated Godself among the marginalized, Jesús connotes a political ethics lost on those accustomed to the privilege of citizenship within the empire, missing the significance of Jesús the “illegal.”

Did Jesús cry himself to sleep as I did? Feeling the same shame of inferiority imposed by the dominant culture? Did he have to become the family translator, as I did, between a dominant culture who looked down with distain at parents not fluent in the lingua franca, witnessing a role reversal of having to learn from children about the wider world? And of course, the shame felt by the child-translator toward those parents for appearing less-than the dominant culture who masters the language; and yet simultaneously, the tremendous fear and burden of knowing a mistranslation can lead to precarious situations as some within the dominant culture seek an opportunity to defraud the migrants. For some of us who have been the intermediates between the dominant culture and our families, discover in Jesús a savior, a liberator who knows our anxieties and frustrations. But why was Jesús physically present in Egypt? While a link between the Jesús crossing the border into Egypt, and the Jesús crossing the border into the United States exists; I rather explore why Jesús crossed borders in the first place. To answer this question is to answer why I too crossed borders. Why am I here?

On June 21, 1960, I received the government’s affidavit—a toddler, too young to understand the letter’s importance. At the time my parents and I were living in a roach- and rat-infested one-room apartment in the slums of New York City, sharing one bathroom with the other tenants on the floor. Two months earlier, we arrived in this country with a tourist visa. The letter, citing Section 242 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, notified me deportation procedures were imminent; and I should therefore “self deport” in lieu of forced expatriation. Ironically, I found myself in the country directly responsible for my original exile from my homeland. Truthfully, I would have preferred to stay and live in my own country, among my own people, rooted in my own culture. And yet, when this life comes to an end, my bones will be interned in this foreign soil, a land which never fully embraced me, regardless of the decades of contributing to its welfare. So why am I here? Why do I reside in what my intellectual mentor, José Martí called “the belly of the beast”? Contrary to popular mythology, we did not come seeking liberty or pursuing economic opportunities; we came because of sugar, rum, and tobacco (the three necessities of life). We are in this alien land as a direct result of U.S. foreign policies designed to deprive my country of origin, Cuba, of political and economic sovereignty during the first half of the twentieth century.

The reason I—and many of my fellow Latinxs—are here is a paradox conveniently ignored by politicians and absent from the current immigration debate. Rather than wrestling with the causes of immigration from south of the border, we instead batter around red herrings like anchor babies, the taking away jobs from real Americans, or seeking to unfairly use up generous social services provided by taxpayers. Or, more politically correct, we come in search of the American Dream, hoping for a better life for our families. Unfortunately, these narratives are all erroneous. We are forced to leave our homelands for the insecurity of border crossing because the United States empire—like all colonizers—created political and economic uncertainty in our countries of origins due to a foreign policy designed to secure the avarice of multinational corporations.

In an unapologetic attempt to garner votes, right-wing politicians rile against illegals, presenting the undocumented as a threat to U.S. security and a danger to everyday “real” Americans. Donald Trump best illustrates this with his campaign announcement speech where he refers to Mexicans as “bringing drugs. . . bringing crime. . . [and being] rapists.”18 Unfortunately, this type of bigoted anti-immigrant rhetoric is the norm of a current neo-nativist attitude. During the 2016 presidential elections, Republican candidates—speaking to their base—engaged in a one-upmanship of outdoing their opponents by proposing greater life-threatening intolerance to the cheers of approving crowds. All advocate weaponized drones targeting border-crossers, constructing a 2,000-mile fence stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf, and building more private prisons to accompany the entire family (including babies and children).

We should not be surprised that conservative-leaning politicians are hostile to Latinx immigration. But rather than rehash their blatant racism, I will instead focus on the problematic rhetoric normatively expressed by liberals who engage in the rhetoric of hospitality. During the 2016 democratic presidential primary debate, Martin O’Malley approached immigration by stating, “We are not a country that should send children away and send them back to certain death.” He called “hospitality to strangers” an “essential human dignity.”19 Who could argue against hospitality? After all, this virtue becomes a religious and civic duty to assist (bring salvation) to these poor unfortunate souls. It’s what Jesus would do. Hospitality is a biblical concept meaning more than just opening one’s home to the stranger and inviting them for a meal. The Hebrew Bible God consistently reminds us to remember Abram the alien, or the Hebrews’ time in Egypt as slaves; and thus, offer justice to the sojourner residing in our midst. The New Testament God reminds us how some who showed hospitality to strangers, entertained angels without realizing (Heb 13:2). The biblical terms “stranger” or “sojourner” captures the predicament of the today’s U.S. undocumented immigrant from Mexico or Central America. The term connotes the in-between space of neither being native-born nor a foreigner. As such, the alien lacks the benefits and protection ordinarily provided to those tied to land due to their birthplace. Vulnerable to those who profit from their labor, aliens derive security from the biblical mandate of hospitality. Alien’s treatment is based on three biblical presuppositions: 1) the Jews were once aliens who were oppressed by the natives of the land of Egypt (Exod 22:21); 2) God always sides and intervenes to liberate the disenfranchised (Exod 23:9); and 3) God’s covenant with Israel is contingent on all members of the community benefitting, regardless if they are Jewish or not (Deut 26:11).

The importance of the New Testament passage of José and his family seeking refuge in Egypt, is often lost on those with the privilege of citizenship. Yet for those who are or have been undocumented, they read in these verses a God actively connecting with the hopelessness of being uprooted. Responsibility toward aliens is so paramount, God incarnated God’s self as an alien fleeing the oppressive consequences of the empire of the time. Herod’s responsibility was to ensure profits, in the form of taxes, flowed to the Roman center with as little resistance as possible. Obviously, he also benefited financially, as do many Latin American elites today who sign trade agreements destructive to their compatriots. To ask why Jesús, a colonized man, was in Egypt is to ask why Latinxs today are in the United States.

Colonization during the time of Jesús brought about a push factor where his family, out of fear for their lives, fled toward Egypt; just as it pushed my own family northward due to the same reasons. The economic, political, and foreign policies of the United States caused this push factor in Latin America, specifically Central America, as people either lose their farms and livelihoods or fled in fear of the governments established in their countries through the might of Washington. Simultaneously, in the quest for cheap labor within the U.S., a pull factor is also created. Crossing the border, described as a festering scar caused by the First World rubbing against the Third, becomes a life-threatening venture. The U.S. has a Latin American immigration problem because for the past two hundred years, its wealth was based on stealing the cheap labor and natural resources of its neighboring countries.

As Rome benefited by pax romana20 brought about by territorial expansion, North Americans benefitted by pax americana, known throughout the ninetieth century by its jingoist religious ideological term “Manifest Destiny,”21 which justified Anglo territorial expansion. Acquiring land had more to do than with simply divine inspiration. With the new possessions came all the gold deposits in California, copper deposits in Arizona and New Mexico, silver deposits in Nevada, oil in Texas, and all of the natural harbors (except Veracruz) necessary for commerce along the California coast. By ignoring the provisions of the peace treaty signed with Mexico; the U.S. government was able to dismiss the historic land titles Mexicans held, allowing white U.S. citizens to obtain the natural resources embedded in the land. These natural resources, along with cheap Mexican labor fueled the U.S. industrial revolution allowing overall U.S. economy to develop and function, while economically dooming Mexico by preventing the nation from capitalizing on its stolen natural resources.

We must consider the nineteenth century policy of Manifest Destiny. This pseudo-religious ideology believed God gave whites a new promised land encompassing the entire Western Hemisphere. Perhaps the staunchest supporter was James K. Polk, eleventh president, who while on the campaign trail promised to annex Texas and engage Mexico in war if elected. Once taking office, he deployed troops into Mexican territory to solicit the desired response of having the Mexican army first fire upon the invading U.S. army. The Mexican–American War ended with Mexico’s capitulation, ceding half her territory. A surveyor line was drawn across the sand upon an area which, according to the archeological evidence, has historically experienced fluid migration. This expansionist war against Mexico was minimized by the false creation of the U.S.’s historical mega-narrative designed to mask the fact it was the empire who crossed the borders—not the other way around.

We must also consider how the twentieth century policy of “gunboat diplomacy”22 unleashed a colonial venture depriving Central American countries of their natural resources while providing the U.S. with an unlimited supply of cheap labor. President Theodore Roosevelt laid the foundation for the enrichment of today’s multinational corporations. Roosevelt’s foreign policy placed the full force of the U.S. military, specifically the marines, at the disposal of U.S. corporations, specifically the United Fruit Company, to protect their business interest. Nicknamed “El Pulpo”—the Octopus—because its tentacles extended into every power structure within Central America, the United Fruit Company was able to set prices, taxes, and employee treatment free from local government intervention. By 1930, the company had a sixty-three percent share of the banana market. Any nation in “our” Hemisphere which attempted to claim their sovereignty to the detriment of U.S. business interests could expect the U.S. to invade and set up a new government (hence the term “banana republic”—coined in 1935 to describe servile dictatorships). It is no coincidence the rise of U.S. banana consumption coincided with the rise of U.S. imperialist actions throughout the Caribbean Basin. During the twentieth century, the U.S. invaded at least twenty-one countries and participated in at least twenty-six CIA led covert operations throughout the Caribbean basin to institute regime change, even when some of those countries, like Guatemala had democratically elected governments.

More important than territorial expansion during the nineteenth century, was the U.S. hegemonic attempt to control economies of other nations during the twentieth century. While empires of old, like Rome, relied on brute force, the U.S. Empire instead relies on economic force—not to disregard the fact it also has the largest military apparatus ever known to humanity. Through its economic might, the United States dictates terms of trade with other nations, guaranteeing benefits continue to flow northward toward the center and the elites from the countries who signed the trade agreements. Consider the consequences of implementing the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which destroyed the Mexican agricultural sector. Dumping U.S. surplus corn on Mexico (about $4 billion a year during the first decade of NAFTA)23 meant a 70% drop in Mexican maize prices, while housing, food, and other living essentials increased by 247%.24 In the first ten years of NAFTA, at least 1.3 million Mexican maize farmers lost their small plots of land unable to compete with cheaper U.S. subsidized corn.25 When Mexican farmers were squeezed out due to their inability to compete with U.S. subsidized corn, U.S.-owned transnational traders, like Cargill and Maseca, were able to step in and monopolize the corn sector through speculating on trading trends. They used their power within the market to manipulate movements on biofuel demand and thus artificially inflate the price of corn many times over.26 Worsening the plight of the maize campesino were the structural adjustments imposed on Mexico by the World Bank in 1991, eliminating all government price supports and subsidies for corn.27

These sufferers of neoliberalism are Jesús in the here and now. God chooses the oppressed of history—the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the alien, the sick, the prisoner—and makes them the cornerstone, the principal means for salvation for the world. In fact, whatsoever we do to these, the very least among us—we do it unto Jesús. And because the undocumented crossing the borders are usually the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, and of course the alien; because they are often the sick due to the hazards of their journey, and when caught by the Border Patrol become the prisoner; if we want to see the face of Jesús, we just need to gaze into the face of the undocumented. God does not appear to the Pharaohs or Caesars or Prime Ministers or Presidents of history; for leaders of empires whose policies cause death and migration are more aligned with the satanic than with the divine. God appears as and to their slaves, their vassals, and those alienated by their empires.

The undocumented attempt the hazardous crossing because our foreign and trade policies from the nineteenth through the twentieth-first century have created an economic situation in their countries where they are unable to feed their families. When one country build roads into another country to extract, by brute force if necessary, their natural resources; why should we be surprised when the inhabitants of those same countries, myself included, take those same roads following all that has been stolen. I am in the United States because I am following my stolen resources: my sugar, my tobacco, and my rum. To ignore the consequences of colonialism leads to the virtue of hospitality. For many from the dominant culture with more liberal understanding of the biblical text, hospitality undergirds how they approach and treat the undocumented. While it may always be desirable for all to participate in this virtue, caution is required least the practice of hospitality masks deep-rooted injustices. This virtue of hospitality, I argue, is not the best way to approach our current immigration crises.

The U.S. has an immigration crisis, yet a failure exists in recognizing the reason we come is because we are following what has been stolen from us. We come to escape the violence and terror the U.S. historically unleashed upon us in an effort to protect pax americana, a needed status quo if American foreign business interests are to flourish. An immigration problem exists because, for over a century and a half, the U.S. has exploited—and continues to exploit via NAFTA—their neighbors to the south.

To read the Jesús narrative through white eyes is to respond to the immigration moral crises by advocating hospitality. But hospitality assumes ownership of the house where Christian charity compels sharing one’s possession. To read the biblical narrative of Jesús from the perspective of the undocumented alien is to argue Latin American cheap labor and natural resources are responsible for building the house. My sugar, my rum, and my tobacco built it, and I want my damn house back. Due to U.S. sponsored “banana republics” throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century; Latin Americans holds a lien on this U.S. house’s title. Rather than speaking about the virtue of hospitality, it would historically be more accurate to speak about the responsibility of restitution.28 Maybe the ethical question we should therefore be asking is not “why” are they coming, why I am here; but, how does U.S. begin to make reparations for all that has been stolen to create the present economic empire? The Jesús biblical narrative forces us to ask: What does the U.S. colonial Empire owe Latin America for all it has stolen?

16. De La Torre, Reading the Bible from the Margins, 112–13.

17. Guardiola-Sáenz, “Border-crossing and Its Redemptive Power in John 7:53—8:11,” 151.

18. Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Donald Trump’s False Comments,” Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/08/donald-trumps-false-comments-connecting-mexican-immigrants-and-crime/?noredirect=on

19. Hing, “Who Would Win an Immigration Debate.”

20. Latin for “the Roman peace”

21. John L. O’Sullivan is credited with coining the term “Manifest Destiny” in his 1839 newspaper essay, “The Great Nation of Futurity.” By synthesizing a romanticized ideal of nationalism with the economic ideology of unlimited progress, O’Sullivan ushered in a national myth which impacted American politics from 1840 to the early 1900s. Anglo-Saxons were believed to be destined by God to settle the entire North American continent; called to develop its natural resources and spreading liberty, democracy, and Protestantism. Besides justifying westward expansionism, Manifest Destiny’s racial overtones influenced the conquest and removal of indigenous people from their lands. Today Manifest Destiny is understood to be the ideology behind U.S. colonialism and imperialism.

22. Gunboat diplomacy, like big stick diplomacy, refers to the U.S. pursuit of foreign policy objectives through the display of military might, specifically through the use of naval power in the Caribbean basin. This normative 20th century U.S. international policy constituted a direct threat of violence and warfare toward any nation who would choose to pursue its own sovereign destiny by refusing to agree to the terms imposed by the superior imperial force.

23. Barrionuevo, “Mountains of Corn.”

24. López, Farmworkers’ Journal, 7–9, 41.

25. Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA), Another America Is Possible: The Impact of NAFTA on the U.S. Latino Community and Lessons for Future Trade Agreements, Product ID 9013 (Washington, DC: Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, 2004), 4–8.

26. Bello, “World Bank, the IMF, and the Multinationals.” See also Barrionuevo, “Mountains of Corn.”

27. López, Farmworkers’ Journal, 7–9, 41.

28. De La Torre, Trails of Hope and Terror, 9–14.