The question of immigration has always been a point of debate in American politics and public life. As the United States heads into another presidential election, the dispute over immigration seems set to intensify. How might American history help Americans respond to the contemporary immigration debate? The Department of Religion, in its third Scudder Lecture of this year, hosted author and speaker Dr. Marie Griffith at the Pugh Hall Ocora on February 6, 2020 to address this issue under the title, “Welcoming the Stranger: Immigration and American Values.”
Dr. Griffith, the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, began by demonstrating that American attitudes toward outsiders wanting to come here have fluctuated over the course of American history. At different historical moments attitudes toward immigrants “and particularly white attitudes toward brown-skinned foreigners have ruptured our social fabric.” Though many of us are descendants of immigrants, we have not always been generous in welcoming those whom George Washington called “the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome.”
Professor Griffith traced the current backlash to the upswing in foreign immigration from primarily Latin America, Asia, and Africa after the 1965 changes in our immigration law. According to Pew Center data, she reported that immigration was at 11% of overall population growth in the 1960s yet rose to 39% in the 1980s. Half of the newcomers were from Latin America and a quarter from Asia. Projecting into the future, 88% of overall population growth between 2015 and 2065 will come through immigration.
The Trump administration’s hostility toward the suffering of these refugees and asylum seekers, Dr. Griffith pointed out, is consistent with some of the attitudes of our nation’s past. Yet so too is the impulse to care.
Turning to our religious traditions for guidance, Griffith acknowledged that “Christianity is a wildly diverse religion with many different interpretations,” and yet it is “difficult to imagine making a credible argument against the proposition that the…the crux of the Christian life involves feeding the hungry, caring for the sick and the poor, and welcoming the stranger.”
Other religious traditions, she argued, have their own versions of such teachings to care for others. Judaism requires hospitality to strangers; Islam teaches welcoming outsiders as an ethical obligation. Moreover, Dr. Griffith continued, though secular humanists have discarded what they regard as the trappings and superstitions of religion, “responding to the needs and sufferings of strangers is often the very core of what binds them together in community.”
Cultivating the virtue of empathy requires practicing it. This at least involves a willingness to expand beyond our ingroup and cross lines of political, religious, social, and other differences to meet people who hold different views than our own and then be willing to listen and learn from each other. “How we listen to one another,” Griffith concluded, “how we diminish the fear that has driven so much of our polarization, and how we restore the commitment to stand united, hold one another accountable, and collaborate with one another across ordinary political divides is the great social question of our time.”
For a video of Dr. Marie Griffith’s lecture click HERE