theo|digital

Everyone’s reporting this one this morning, but I liked this global take:

Compassion asked for immigration status of missing soldier’s wife
By Yadira Betances , Staff Writer
Eagle-Tribune

LAWRENCE – The potential deportation of the wife of a soldier missing in Iraq has put the spotlight on two of the nation’s most volatile issues – illegal immigration and the war in Iraq.
…

The rest of the article.

Is anyone else confused on where to land on the issue of immigration? Supporting deportation and a fat fence seems so heartless… social compassion is usually my starting place. But as Ron Paul, Republican candidate for President, noted in a CNN debate, “if you subsidize something you get more of it,” speaking of allowing those who enter the US illegally to file for legal status. This makes sense to me… my degree in economics gives me a soft spot for arguments using words like “incentives.” And I was also surprised to find myself agreeing with raging conservative Congresman Tancredo whose hard stance on English-only made more sense when he reminded us how central language is to culture… and how countries with split language issues tend to be unstable.

But the hard part for me isn’t sorting through policy with a pragmatic value system. It’s trying to decide what the moral thing is in the first place.

Years ago I tried to erase the “Christian politics” I had learned growing up, and made an attempt to start over without a mental party affiliation – trying with each issue to wonder at God’s opinion. What does a compassionate and just God think of this? How should we govern if we wanted to match his heart?

This is what makes me both conservative and liberal at the same time (and incidentally what the mainstream press is only just starting to get recently… that the under-25 crowd is not just “moderate politically,” but actually tends to be strongly opinionated simultaneously on both “sides” of the chart. We all know that the polar “liberal” vs. “conservative” feels simply inapplicable).

But illegal immigration? God demanded equal treatment of foreign nationals in the nation of Israel (Numbers 15)… but what else do I have to go on? What would God do? I’m just not sure.