Storing Treasures on Earth: Immigration and Protecting What’s “Ours”
“Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country…” – Donald Trump, June 19, 2018
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““Infest” is the essential, and new, word here…It drives full-throttle toward the dehumanizatioour n of immigrants, setting aside legality in favor of a division between a human us and a less-human them. What are infestations? They are takeovers by vermin, rodents, insects. The word is almost exclusively used in this context. What does one do with an infestation? Why, one exterminates it, of course.”
The first passage above is obviously from Donald Trump himself, and the second passage comes from an Atlantic article which discusses Trump’s detestable “zero tolerance” immigration policy that is allowing for children to be ripped away form their parents for attempting to cross the U.S. border. Thus far Trump has called immigrants “animals,” “thugs,” and now essentially thinks of them as vermin. What a sick and monstrous way to speak about fellow human beings…
Thinking about this honestly, I really have never understood the animus in the U.S. toward immigrants, legal OR illegal (and rest assured, I’ve experienced quite a bit of this xenophobia and vehement hatred of immigrants from white people I’ve known throughout my life: “they’re lazy,” “they take our jobs,” “they’re criminals,” etc. are common refrains I’ve heard). I just don’t get it; for one thing, borders are so capricious and abstract for crying out loud! Accordingly, when we zoom out, borders are certainly not visible from space! Why all the anxiety and worry over where one nation stops and another begins? Why the hell not just let people come and go as they please? Oh right, I forgot, it’s because of all of the “criminals” and “thugs” who want to take our stuff; we need to protect our wealth and precious private property, that’s mostly why.
Ethnocentrism, supremacy (white supremacy in the U.S. context), greed, and xenophobia are perhaps no more prevalent than in immigration debates. It seems that the fear of “losing what we have” is so strong for some conservative minded people that Jesus’s warning against storing treasures on Earth, where moths and vermin destroy and where thieves break in and steal, is completely lost on them. It seems logical to me that if we truly did store our treasures in Heaven (living a humble and righteous life focused on equity and justice and adopting a more cosmically inclusive worldview vs. an exclusory ethnocentric one, for instance) and refused to fret about protecting our material riches (i.e. private capital accumulation and private property), I venture to say that there would be much less of a need for borders. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
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