For many years, migration was both invisible to me and everywhere all at once. In retrospect, it seems impossible that I did not notice it in over a decade of living in Central Texas. But it was only on leaving Texas to teach in Florida that I realized how little I had seen.
In Florida, my students were from Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, and our next-door neighbors hailed from Lebanon, Senegal, and Haiti. We lived in Florida in 2015, when the world watched as thousands upon thousands fled conflicts in the Middle East. In this season, migration forever became part of my world.
Upon returning to Texas in 2016, I came to see that migration is among the most significant social questions for Christians. It brings into focus not only what it means to love our neighbors but also what it means to do justice to all our neighbors. It knits together history, philosophy, political science, and theology. It requires us to pull together insights from psychology, economics, business, and ethics. It tangles up our politics, faith, and culture and demands we give better answers than I, for one, am usually equipped to supply.
Migration scrambles our thinking because it scrambles all these categories. The challenge for Christians seeking to contend with it faithfully is to resist the urge to oversimplify, to imagine we can unscramble what we cannot.
Isaac Samuel Villegas’s Migrant God: A Christian Vision for Immigrant Justice enters this difficult conversation not as a policy proposal but as a testimony. I note this at the beginning because testimony is a theologically significant starting point. As Christians, so much of our faith is built around bearing witness to the testimony of others—of Jesus (John 5:36), his apostles (1 Cor. 1:6), and fellow Christians—and only then establishing how we will live. Faithful testimony invites us to encounter reality.
Villegas’s testimony begins with asking questions about death at the southern US border. Beginning in 1994, an approach called “Prevention Through Deterrence” was put in place, and it directed migrants from the South through a portion of the US-Mexico border with particularly dangerous terrain. This policy has resulted in hundreds of migrant deaths .
By redirecting migrants through more dangerous terrain, Villegas explains, the policy intended to deter migrants: The crossing is so difficult, especially in extreme weather, that perhaps they simply would not come. But they do still come, and some die on the way. Often, when the remains of migrants are discovered, their bodies are unrecognizable and unreturnable to their loved ones. And so, when a group gathered at the border wall in Arizona to hold a vigil in memory of those missing and presumed dead, Villegas gathered with them to bear witness to their names.
By beginning with this account of witnessing the deaths of migrants, Villegas sets the tone for the remainder of the book. We begin to understand migration by attending to those who migrate.
Each chapter in the book is grounded in this way, built less on abstract theory than on names and places. The effect is deeply humanizing, giving flesh to a frequently inhuman debate in which faceless migrants and unknown citizens living in the borderlands are sidelined in favor of convoluted policy debates and legal procedures.
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But Migrant God is also grounded in Scripture, as Villegas recounts the stories of migrants as caught up in biblical stories. He describes meals of arroz y frijoles with the undocumented as mirrors of the Last Supper, and remembrances of loved ones lost in the borderlands echo Christian liturgies. Public laments for lost kinship with those on the other side of the border mirror the laments of the Psalms, and protests against divided families echo the prophets’ cries for God to act. Villegas frames words and deeds that might otherwise look like matters of politics alone as deeply theopolitical. He invites us to see God at work in the world.
At the heart of Villegas’s account is a call to recollect God’s care for and history among migrant people. It is this theme that enables Villegas to see the world of Scripture come alive in contemporary testimonies. As he writes in the conclusion,
We believe that our neighbors—regardless of citizenship status, residency documentation, or whether they live on this side or the other side of the border—are held in God’s care. The Bible reminds us that God has been known to join caravans in the wilderness. The Spirit of God dwells with people on the move. A migrant God for migrant life.
In addition to stories of migrant life in the United States, then, Villegas writes of the migrants of Scripture: Israel on a journey through the desert, the holy family fleeing from Herod. These familiar stories are used not as cudgels but as provocations, to invite the reader to connect them to present-day testimonies.
In this evocation of Scripture, this seeing of the present through the lens of the past, Villegas’s work becomes most potent. He reminds the reader that migration is not a new question, nor is migration necessarily a crisis. Through personal accounts, he reiterates that migrants are not irrational or erratic—that no one leaves a home country without a reason and that dwelling in a foreign land comes with great difficulty. Though we may miss it in “invasion” rhetoric, migration is always about humans leaving old homes and trying to make new ones.
Villegas leaves some aspects of migration unexplored. God’s care for migrants is also concerned with finding them homes, with making it possible for the migration to end. Villegas does not make this connection, leaving unexamined what Scripture has to say about belonging, about building a home across borders, and about what role borders play in helping to establish our homes.
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I raise the question of migration’s end not to challenge the testimonies Villegas offers but to suggest that there is another dimension to these stories: that God’s presence to migrants is ultimately for the end of their journeying.
Beginning with this end in mind helps us to see more clearly why death is such an affront and what migrants long for in their laments. But it also invites us to consider the testimony of migrants alongside another group of testimonies: the testimonies of those among whom migrants will dwell. Beginning with mercy is appropriate, but moving toward justice invites us to consider testimonies of people of good faith who may want to welcome migrants but have honest questions and honest concerns.
Villegas explicitly states that he is not trying to change anyone’s mind about immigration policy or the ethics of immigration. His aim is to give a human face to an issue often obscured by policy. At times, however, the book strays from this premise and stretches into analysis—theorizing about policing, the nature of borders, and the violence migrants suffer. This is, I think, inevitable: Beginning with testimony leads us to ask more questions about the dynamics underlying those stories. It is natural to turn to thinking about how we might remedy the suffering to which Villegas witnesses.
Yet whatever quibbles we might have over the place of testimony in deciding difficult political and moral questions, Villegas’s work stands out for never losing view of the migrants themselves. This is a habit to be widely imitated if we want more constructive debates about how to humanely and mercifully respond to immigration—if we want to do justice to those seeking a new life elsewhere and to those who are there already.
Migrants are witnesses to a life many of us do not know. That’s not to suggest that their testimonies shouldn’t be subject to scrutiny or that those testimonies generate unassailable policy conclusions. But it is to say migrants cannot be reduced to obstacles or objects of pity or fear. Migrant God offers readers clear eyes and scriptural vision about God’s care for migrants, putting before us the stories and faces too often lost in our debates, mistreated by our laws, and diminished in our politics.
Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together. He writes at Taking Off and Landing and teaches at Abilene Christian University.
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