Published September 24, 2024
In recent weeks, the dial on the already-heated discourse about immigration in our country has been turned up to its highest setting. Fueled by viral rumors of Haitian refugees eating house cats in an Ohio town, a rising chorus of pundits and politicians have capitalized on public anger over our leaky borders to demand immediate change and even mass deportation. Others have responded by sanctimoniously denying there’s any problem to discuss and suggesting that anyone who raises questions about immigration is a racist—how dare we propose booting desperate migrants out of their adopted home?
The metaphor of adoption can help us think through the ethics and politics of immigration. Indeed, some of those most ferociously hostile to immigration have also attacked international and especially interracial adoption, alleging that just as the family is first and foremost a biological reality, so is the nation. Both parents and civil authorities alone, they say, are responsible for protecting their natural children and not sharing the benefits of their home with outsiders.
Against this, we must contend that Scripture, moral intuition, and historic custom all unite in extolling the practice of adoption. The love and care that a family cultivates within itself is not purely for its own benefit but is meant to overflow into love and care for those deprived of the blessing of a good home. For Christians especially, the practice of adoption testifies to the fact that all of us (of all races) were strangers and foreigners alienated from God and were brought in as His children by adoption in Christ. Moreover, an adoption once complete is final—there can be no disowning an adopted child any more than a biological one, and the adopted children ought to become as truly and fully part of the family as their non-adopted siblings. Just so with immigration: A thriving nation should look for opportunities to share its blessings with those whose own countries cannot care for them, offering them a new national home and integrating them fully into it as equal citizens.
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Brad Littlejohn was a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs from 2022-2025. His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.
