Looking Beyond Birthplace: A Reflection on Immigrant Stories in honor of International Worker's Day
May Newsletter: Opening our eyes to see each other as beloved. Guided Meditation: From Shame to Embrace, & other resources.
Happy May Day!
May 1st, or May Day, “serves as International Workers' Day, a global day of action that unites labor movements, immigrant rights advocates, and community organizations to demand labor rights, dignity, and fair treatment for all, particularly immigrant workers.” Check out this article from the Quakers for more: https://afsc.org/news/reclaiming-may-day
I write this article, in honor of especially immigrant workers and all activists and advocates today who are exhausted and burning out from the labor, toll, and moral injury of seeking to provide care and advocate for change in this current climate.
Looking Beyond Birthplace
I asked my mom the other day, how far back our Norwegian ancestors are: my mom’s paternal grandfather came as a young adult to the US, and her great grandmother immigrated as a child, passing through Ellis Island. Both sets of parents fled because they didn’t have enough food and to provide a better future for their children. It is all too familiar a story.
The majority of us in this country are descendants of immigrants who have come seeking safety and a better future, fleeing violence and political unrest.
The immigrant story is not as palpable and embodied for many of us, especially those of us who are white or white-passing. And yet a friend of a friend was just deported to a country his family left when he was two years old. He does not speak the language in the country of his birth.
Can you imagine if I was deported to Norway because my ancestors came from there many years ago? Uff da is as close to any Norwegian language I know. I do not know the people and would feel like an outsider. Yet that is what the US is doing all too frequently in our mass deportations. We are deporting primarily people of color to countries, judging them not for who they are, but for where they come from.
Our fear so rooted and informed by institutionalized racism blinds us to the plight of so many being ripped apart from their families and lives as they’ve known them.
“There is no prophet that comes from Galilee.”
Reading through the Gospel of John as Jesus approaches his death and resurrection, I am struck again by how it was misunderstanding about Jesus’ birthplace that led some of the religious leaders to not believe he was the Messiah.
It was partially religious leaders’ judgment against the marginalized that blinded them to see Jesus’ identity.
Part of me longs for them to clarify, to ask Jesus where he was born. For this simple fact of his birthplace, to open their eyes to see that he is the Messiah, as predicted–-born in Bethlehem. But it is ironic that what we now know so well, what Christmas songs declare, O Little Town of Bethlehem, was a barrier to the religious leaders.
How often do we miss the Beloved and the image of God in another because we judge them for who they are or what they have?
Our news spreads the story of a Canadian woman and child who was detained in the US’s Dilley detention center for 19 days. What if we had the same outrage for every Guatemalan, every Mexican? We do not see them in the same way because of their brown skin. We judge people for their country of birth, we scapegoat people who do not look like us, we do not have eyes to see.
Soul care—doing our own inner work—is not just navel gazing, it frees us to live more wholeheartedly and see those around us with more grace and compassion.
Our traumatized and wounded self-protective strategies can lead us to pit people against each other, placing one group in more power than others, and thus using and often abusing others. Yet our wounded ways do not give us permission to keep going and get away with it.
We have done this as a society over and over again. Narratives that ‘they’ are taking our jobs. ‘They’ are the ones that are responsible for making our neighborhood dangerous. And yet that ‘they’ has changed over and over again, as this cartoon by Barry Deutsch (created in 2008!) still speaks so poignantly today in 2026, nearly twenty years later.
In 2014, I did a series of presentations on immigration to churches with my colleague who had emigrated from Mexico. We shared this cartoon and commented on what is still so true today: the current political rhetoric all too closely echoes the voices throughout history that have worried about immigrants ‘draining our economy’. The solution repeatedly proposed is ‘to build a wall’ and keep ‘those immigrants out’!
What if the US religious rhetoric was transformed into viewing strangers as angels, not aliens to be ostracized from society?
What if in each person we saw the potential for mutual liberation, for cross-cultural transformation, and more simply as a precious human created in the image of God?
By the grace of God, may our eyes be opened to see all as our Creator created each to be. May we do the hard inner work, acknowledging our biases and judgments and seeking to see people in Love.
Book Recommendations:
Solito, by Javier Zamora
I just finished the book, Solito, by Javier Zamora, and I’m in awe and so grateful he chose to share his story. Never have I so fully grasped the details of this harrowing journey as I do now. We have been given this gift, Javier entrusting us with his story as the readers. I urge you to read this book to enter into the heart-wrenching journey so many have travelled, desperate for new beginnings, for safety, for food.
Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compassion & Truth in the Immigration Debate, by Matthew Soerens and Jenny Hwang Yang
“In this book World Relief immigration experts Matthew Soerens and Jenny Yang move beyond the rhetoric to offer a Christian response to immigration. They put a human face on the issue and tell stories of immigrants' experiences in and out of the system. With careful historical understanding and thoughtful policy analysis, they debunk myths and misconceptions about immigration and show the limitations of the current immigration system.”
Actions:
To those of you who have the privilege of American citizenship, call your representatives and senators urging against more funding for ICE and border patrol, taking away so many human rights of those who have immigrated here for safety, security, and freedom. See NIJC for more resources.
Guided Meditation:
This isn’t to add shame, but more a movement toward embracing others and receiving embrace. Check out this guided meditation to be led in a practice.
Love this, Bethany! Thank you!
This is so good and needed in the conversation Bethany! I hadn’t noticed before how leaders mistook Jesus’ birthplace and used it against him. A tale as old as time and we must get better at recognizing naming and acting against it. Your voice helps!