immigration – Protestia

Immigration: 78% of Evangelicals Want Secure Border and Pathway to Citizenship

(Christian Headlines) A large majority of evangelicals describe legal immigration as “helpful” to the United States, according to a new Lifeway Research survey that also found that evangelicals support a balanced approach to immigration reform.

The poll, sponsored by Evangelical Immigration Table and World Relief, found that 83 percent of self-identified evangelicals describe legal immigration as “helpful,” with 40 percent saying it’s helpful and that the U.S. should maintain the current number of legal immigrants and 25 percent calling it helpful and saying the nation should increase the number of legal immigrants. Another 19 percent call it helpful but believe the U.S. should decrease legal immigration. A total of 17 percent of evangelicals describe legal immigration as “harmful.”

Meanwhile, evangelicals support an approach to immigration reform that is best described as “balanced.” For example, 90 percent of evangelicals say they support legislation that would “guarantee secure national borders,” and 78 percent back legislation that would “establish a path toward citizenship for those who are here illegally, are interested, and meet certain qualifications for citizenship.”

Asked the best way for Congress to address immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, only 25 percent of evangelicals say they should be deported “to…to continue reading, click here.

Editor’s Note. This article was written by Michael Foust and posted at Christian Headlines.

An article appearing on The Gospel Coalition describes God’s incarnate son as a “downwardly mobile migrant” and “middle eastern refugee” who faced “daunting pressures of exclusion and insecurity.”

The post, written by Jenny Yang, serves to link legal and illegal migrants and immigrantsto the experience Jesus had when his parents fled to Egypt.

If the name ‘Jenny Yang’ sounds familiar to you, it should. She’s the senior vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief and has been platformed by Russell Moore and the ERLC many times before, being a frequent conference speaker.

She’s the same woman who said at an immigration conference that “Human relationships are more important than theology” and that almost every major Biblical figure was a refugee.

In her post she writes:

God’s incarnate Son was both a downwardly mobile migrant––he left the realms of heaven and pitched his tent among men (John 1:14)––and a refugee fleeing a genocidal edict (Matt. 2:13). He intimately knows what it feels like to be a stranger in a foreign land. He identifies so much with strangers that when we welcome them, we are welcoming him (Matt. 25:31–46).

and

Every Christian is led by a Middle Eastern refugee who faced the daunting pressures of exclusion and insecurity and yet carried forth his duty to obey his Father and love his people. Jesus’s birth gives us hope that despite the challenging circumstances we face personally or societally, we can always find healing––and a home––in him.

Yang says that when she reads her bible, she sees a “theology of migration from Genesis to Revelation.” She concludes in her article:

Sorrow and joy are intermingled markers along a refugee’s journey, but the Christmas story is a reminder that our challenging circumstances don’t have the final word. Jesus does.”