The True Gospel On Immigration
About this fellow Jesus, who is the object of much commercial attention right now: If you care a whit about his moral teachings, you’ll share my beliefs regarding the immigration dispute. According to the Good Samaritan parable in the New Testament’s Gospel of Luke, the divinely inspired message on obtaining safe passage to heaven is unequivocal: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
But when some smartass lawyer asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus’s answer was firmly explicit: It is the foreigner in our midst to whom we must extend ourselves, as the Good Samaritan did. It is a message that not only retrograde neofascist Donald Trump but also the rest of the Republicans’ Presidential wannabe flock should take seriously before bashing the undocumented Mexican immigrants Trump demonized as rapists and drug dealers.
To be clear, the neighbors Trump had in mind went beyond those Mexicans who pick your vegetables, wash your car and raise your children. The danger, he stated, is “coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably—probably—from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection, and we have no competence. We don’t know what’s happening.”
