Photography by Jimmy Galt

For Louis, Colombia was a place to catch his breath after fleeing political violence in Venezuela. He reluctantly left his home and family as the only remaining option for all of them to survive. His audacious hope in God and international asylum law propelled him on the treacherous journey through Panama and Mexico. Louis believed that his suffering under the brutality of Venezuela’s authoritarian regime would earn him mercy at the hands of the U.S. border patrol.

“I put all my trust in God,” Louis told me through a translator at a day shelter just over the U.S./Mexico border in Tijuana. In a room full of anguished families stranded there, he explained, “Venezuela became a torment. It cost $30 a day for a person to eat and that’s the amount of a month’s wages,” he said.

“I have a degree in industrial engineering. But there are no businesses — the government has made everyone dependent on them to secure power. And the government is cruel. Escaping Venezuela felt like God had rescued me.”

A Change of Heart

If you had told me Louis’ story 20 years ago, despite the fact I considered myself a biblically-educated believer in Christ, my response would have been: “Go back to where you came from. The United States is not your home. You are not our problem.” I might not have said the words out loud, but that was the state of my heart. I did not see a poor, desperate Venezuelan man as a neighbor to be loved, but as a burden to our country.

I call myself a “convert” on immigration. I see now that for many years my outlook on the poor was shaped more by my American political identity than by my Christian one. Over the last 20 years, God has changed my heart and mind to the extent that I now direct Hope for San Diego, an organization serving the poor and marginalized in San Diego, many of whom are immigrants and refugees. What led to my “conversion”? My views were shaped through deeper understanding of the complexity of immigration and a better grasp of the undeserved grace of the gospel.

The Complexity of Immigration

Louis is trained as an engineer, but in Tijuana, he’s installing windows. His dream is to return to Venezuela and start a business to transform his town because currently there are no jobs for his family and neighbors to sustain themselves. But before he could do anything for his town, he had to leave it. As the only single person without kids among his siblings, he left the only home he’s ever known to join the 2.5 million other Venezuelans seeking safety in Colombia. Itself entrenched in violence and poverty, Colombia has little to offer migrants. To Louis, the idea of working for $15 per hour in the United States sounded like luxury. 

Louis did not try to sneak across the border into the United States. Proper documentation from Panama and Mexico demonstrated that he followed the available legal pathways. Walking from Juarez, Mexico to El Paso, Texas, he flagged down the U.S. border patrol and told them he was seeking asylum. 

For many years my outlook on the poor was shaped more by my American political identity than by my Christian one.

What happened next came as a shock to him, and to me upon hearing it. Under international asylum law, Louis should have received a “credible fear interview.” Instead, he received chains around his hands and feet. Locked in a U.S. Customs and Immigration Service detention center, he waited for an answer to his question: When will someone listen to my story? But when he asked, agents replied, “We don’t want crybabies here,” he told me. After five days, Louis finally received an answer: a flight to San Diego, a bus to the border, and a destination of Tijuana. No explanation.

Returning home to San Diego from my short visit to Tijuana, I couldn’t reconcile my hopes for our country with the reality of Louis’s story. “Is this the United States? What happened to the melting pot of America that was a safe haven for those fleeing persecution and authoritarian regimes?” Contrary to media reports of an “invasion,” I met stranded moms traveling alone with kids and pregnant women sleeping on the streets of Tijuana. They escaped horrific violence and endured a treacherous journey with only a sliver of hope to provide food and safety for their children. How could we greet them with chains and bars?

“People are coming to the U.S. border with their hands open, saying, ‘I’ve heard this country will help me flee a dictator, is that true?’” says Matt Soerens, U.S. Director of Church Mobilization for World Relief, a Christian international relief organization. “I want that to still be true. That doesn’t mean we can take everyone. But we should be thinking about people as made in the image of God with inherent dignity and potential.”

On the contrary, many in our country disdain the plight of immigrants and disregard their dignity. In 2018, San Diego’s convention center housed hundreds of “unaccompanied minors.” But they were “unaccompanied” only because their parents were detained when they crossed into the U.S. Families seeking asylum in Texas were imprisoned, and border patrol agents wrested children, even as young as one or two, away from their parents. The U.S. separated nearly 5,000 children from their parents between 2018 and 2021 without a system in place to reunite them following legal proceedings. Nearly 1,300 children under the age of 18 were shipped hundreds of miles away to San Diego, where it took months to place them with a sponsor. More than 1,000 parents were deported without their children, many of them falsely promised that their children would follow.

Cuban asylum seekers who have fled persecution are particularly vulnerable when the U.S. deports them to the border region. U.S. immigration officials remove seekers’ shoelaces while in custody so that they won’t hang themselves. When deported Cubans arrive on the Mexican side of the border, organized crime targets those they can easily identify by their accents and shoes without laces. Because many Cubans have relatives in Miami who have built a successful life in the U.S., criminals kidnap them with the hope of securing ransom money or target them for sexual assault or petty robbery.

Recently, asylum seekers from Venezuela — the small proportion who made it into the U.S. — were bussed from Texas and Florida to D.C., New York, Chicago, and Martha’s Vineyard. Offered jobs and free rent, people agreed to the journey, only to discover a deception designed for political optics. Border states are overwhelmed and want to make a point, but they make it at the expense of human beings and their dignity.

In contrast to this political posturing, a recent study by LifeWay Research showed that 70% of evangelical Christians affirm that the U.S. has a moral responsibility to refugees and 69% believe that Christians have a moral responsibility to care sacrificially for refugees and other foreigners.

But that moral responsibility is not adequately reflected in our immigration system. Right now, the immigration court backlog means that the average wait time for an asylum hearing is four years. People usually wait a year before they receive work authorization. Unless they have family and friends who can support them, asylum seekers depend entirely on private charitable support or work without authorization to provide for their families. 

To seek asylum, people must present themselves on U.S. soil — there is no process to apply for asylum in Colombia or Cuba or Venezuela. “It’s in the interest of the United States to offer more legal options to people closer to home,” says Soerens. Advocates such as the Evangelical Immigration Table are lobbying Congress for many reforms, including what Soerens suggests would be the best first step: rebuilding and utilizing the refugee resettlement process. Through that system, people would not come to the U.S. before they are designated as refugees and complete the rigorous screening process. Once they arrive, a resettlement agency ensures they actively work toward self-sufficiency, including finding jobs since they receive immediate work authorization.

Thousands of evangelical pastors and leaders have affirmed consistent principles for immigration reform since 2012. Through the Evangelical Immigration Table, they call for a bipartisan solution that: 

• Respects the God-given dignity of every person.

• Protects the unity of the immediate family.

• Respects the rule of law

• Guarantees secure national borders.

• Ensures fairness to taxpayers.

• Establishes a path toward legal status and/or citizenship for those who qualify and who wish to become permanent residents.

But perhaps more than anything, reforms to the immigration system can bring more humanity to how the U.S. treats people looking to our country for help. It is possible to institute policies that are more in line with our human rights values without sacrificing safety. Jose Serrano of World Relief’s Southern California office says even current laws are not enforced consistently.

As a scared, vulnerable stranger who has endured a horrific journey with hope for a new life in a new country, how would I want to be treated?

He recounts two brothers seeking asylum from Colombia. They both sought the same benefit for the same kind of persecution. “They were separated because they were adults,” says Serano, “but one was allowed to enter the U.S., the other had to return to Mexico. There is something wrong with our system if there is not the same outcome with the exact same situation.

“We can do the same practices of verifying information, without dehumanizing people,” says Serano, who represents immigrants in legal proceedings. He insists we are safer than we think because of the strict processes required to admit refugees and asylum seekers. “Extra precaution is needed,” he agrees, “but we can create a system that is more humanizing.”

The Undeserved Grace of the Gospel

Stories like Louis’s and others I’ve had the privilege to hear have softened my views on immigration. As I saw the diversity of reasons people come to the U.S. and the broken system that often treats them poorly, my eyes were opened to the many nuances of the issue. However, what ultimately changed my heart was Jesus and my eyes opening to the implications for loving my neighbor. Jesus rescued me. When I had nothing to offer Him, He became my friend. In order to save me, He became a refugee, a stranger in this world. And, apart from Him, that is what I am as well. When I was a stranger to God, He welcomed me in.

I didn’t deserve God’s favor, yet somehow, He chose to be gracious to me — not just spiritually, but in this life. I didn’t decide to be born in the U.S. I didn’t pick my parents or how much money they made. I didn’t select my high school, and I certainly didn’t pay my chemistry tutor. A whole network of people helped me get into college, find a job, learn to budget, and buy a car.

When I see all that Christ gifted to me, at infinite cost to Himself, I can see myself in the eyes of a Venezuelan refugee fleeing political oppression. In fact, apart from God’s grace, I could be her. As a scared, vulnerable stranger who has endured a horrific journey with hope for a new life in a new country, how would I want to be treated? 

Out of the abundance of what Christ has given us, God urges us to show that same generosity to our neighbors. Throughout the Old Testament, God commanded the Israelites to remember what God had done for them and respond with love. Leviticus 19:34 says, “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.”

Welcoming the stranger, alien, foreigner, and sojourner is one of the most repeated commands in the Old Testament, as showing love to neighbor is in the New. Often God shows special concern for the foreigner alongside orphans and widows. His heart aligns with the most vulnerable among us. 

Pat Hatch, director of Mission to North America’s Refugee and Immigrant Ministry, says these imperatives are not an accident. “When God gives us a command, it is for our good as well as the good of others,” she says. “He wants to do something in us when He commands us to love the stranger.” 

However, most American evangelicals are like me 20 years ago, LifeWay Research finds. They cite friends and family and the media as the biggest influences on their thinking about immigration. Only 36% of Christians say the Bible is their top influence. Myths and misinformation are more likely than biblical commands to shape how they view immigrants.

Hatch says her hope is that churches would go back to basics. “Each of these people is created in the image of God. If we are to love our neighbor and these people are in our country, it’s clear that compassion is required.” She adds, “There shouldn’t be an asterisk that releases us from the command if people look different or are from a different country.” 

Even after years in my role with Hope for San Diego, I am still trying to understand immigration. The global crisis, American politics, and the unique challenges of San Diego are all intertwined in a complex web. God has brought thousands of immigrants and refugees through complicated channels to be our neighbors. The more of them I meet and the more I learn, the more I realize how little I understand. Yet, what God asks of me as a Christian is pretty simple to grasp: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Susie Fikse is executive director of Hope for San Diego, which aims to care for the least of these in Christ’s name. She and her husband, Jonathan, attend Trinity Presbyterian Church in Rancho Bernardo.