I notice it most when I go to Walmart: the way it feels as if I’ve entered another country. A week or so ago, I looked around as I pushed a cart through the store. Though I’m more than three hours from an international border, almost no one around was speaking English.
These Spanish-speaking employees and customers alike mostly aren’t of Mexican descent, as the West Texas Hispanic population generally used to be. Instead, they’re Cuban, Venezuelan, and Honduran, recent arrivals who brought new cultures and dialects with them when they moved to town.
I don’t think it’s evidence of racism to admit that these trips to Walmart can be disorienting—and if they’re disorienting for me, how much more so for a 70-year-old who can’t find an English-speaking employee to help her locate the mayonnaise? It’s okay to be surprised by the effects of the rapid population shift we’ve experienced in the span of a few years here in Midland, Texas, as we’ve grappled with a massive influx of immigrants. It’s even okay to be disconcerted.
The reflexive retort from many on the progressive left to that kind of concern, should our elderly Walmart shopper muster the courage to voice it at all, is that she’s a bigot for daring to complain. But she’s not wrong that our town is evolving. She’s not wrong about the reality playing out before her eyes. And if she is not taken seriously by sober-minded leaders, she may become an easy target for unscrupulous politicians and pundits who want to turn that disconcert into something darker.
Can most of us agree that the national dialogue about immigrants swings between absurd extremes? That both politicians’ rhetoric and public responses have reached a fever-pitched frenzy? After years of what some have argued is a functionally open border, we’re now deporting Iranian Christians to Panama and Venezuelans to El Salvador. As Christians, how do we respond to this chaos and confusion?
On the one hand, the Bible seems to me to be inescapably clear about how Christians are to respond to foreigners: “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them.The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God” (Lev. 19:33–34).
And yet law and order matter too, of course. As a Christian in a border state who has long felt the scriptural command to show compassion to immigrants, I’m trying to find the moderate middle, grounding myself in the reality I see with my own eyes as I develop a more nuanced perspective on immigration. Over the last few months, I’ve tried to pay more attention to the high cost of mass migration for communities like mine that absorb so many new residents so quickly—and I’ve been looking for that cost not only on the surface, where political debates tend to dwell, but also on our very souls.
As I’ve paid attention to the world around me and the world within, I’ve learned that the challenges posed by shifting demographics and culture are real and meaningful and worthy of consideration. But they pale in comparison to the spiritual consequences of allowing illegal immigration to run unchecked. The closer I look at this brokenness, the more I realize that God tells us to care for the stranger (Heb 13:2) and to follow the laws of the land (Rom 13:1) precisely because it is only in this middle space where we all—local and stranger alike—find abundant life.
related
It isn’t only at Walmart that I notice the shifting demographics of my community. I see it in the public schools my children attend. Late last month, my eldest daughter came home saying that a friend of hers from school had missed class because “his mom was getting deported.” At first, she said, she’d thought he was joking, but in the weeks since, I’ve seen her worrying, wondering if it is true. “Surely he has a grandma or someone to live with, right, Mom?” she asked later. “I mean, he’s still coming to school every day. How would he get there if he didn’t have a ride?”
And my daughter’s too-close, too-young introduction to the intricacies and dysfunction of the US immigration system isn’t the only impact immigration is having on her education. Though the district doesn’t release data on students’ immigration status, we’ve seen an influx of non-English speakers in the last few years.
In 2019, Midland Independent School District had 3,133 English language learners enrolled; in 2025, we have 5,728. That’s a nearly 83 percent increase in six years—83 percent more students who are not native English speakers, more than 2,500 children who in some cases arrived not even knowing how to say hello.
Due to zoning and resourcing decisions, these students often end up clustered at a handful of schools. Their presence isn’t a problem, and it’s arguably not adding to taxpayers’ fiscal burdens. After all, through a complicated revenue system funded by property taxes (which Texas residents pay regardless of immigration status when we pay rent or mortgages) our school district receives funding for each student enrolled.
But this large and rapid addition to our school system is inarguably complicated—and again, it’s not racist or anti-immigrant to say so. The academic needs of a child who doesn’t speak English are drastically different than the needs of those who speak English as their first language. I want our schools to meet these new students’ needs and care for them well. But I can also see that the strain of trying to meet their needs without neglecting the students already here is pushing a precarious system over the edge. We are dealing with poor school performance, frustrated teachers, and disgruntled parents.
For many families in the Midland area with children in one of the schools that have absorbed these students, the single most identifiable pinch point comes at 3:00 p.m. on weekdays. It may seem like a small thing, but new immigrant parents unfamiliar with the highly orchestrated customs and mores surrounding the American Elementary School Car Pickup Line are prone to cutting in and cutting off, a sure-fire way to exasperate the locals. Is that as important as how you teach all these children math? Of course not, but like a pebble in a shoe, it is a real irritation nonetheless.
There are other, larger, more expensive complications too. A friend of mine who works in an area hospital—an immigrant herself—told me she sees a recurring pattern: People come across the border and go to the ER complaining of chest pains or arm numbness and get a battery of tests to rule out myriad health concerns. Then they head back to Mexico with their medical records and a clean bill of health in hand, leaving US taxpayers to foot the bill.
“It’s almost like they have a playbook explaining what they need to say to get free health care in the US,” she told me. She was quick to add that she doesn’t judge—that there’s no way to instantly know who has a real emergency and who doesn’t, so the Hippocratic oath compels her and her colleagues to care for all without question.
Her impression is that this practice is less common among more recent waves of migrants from Central America than it is among Mexicans with Texan families, who can cross the border with relative ease. But that’s a distinction lost on your average American taxpayer, and it’s certainly not a distinction teased out by our governor, who leads a state where residents pay hundreds of millions of dollars every year to cover the treatment of uninsured migrants.
Another one of my acquaintances owns an oil-field service company. His competitors often hire undocumented workers, paying them below market wages and leaving them unprotected in dangerous jobs by failing to properly train and outfit them with the necessary safety equipment, like monitors to alert them to deadly H2S gas. “The immigrants are expendable to them,” he told me.
These practices also hurt his business because he can’t compete with lowball bids from companies paying unfair wages. He’s frustrated less by the flood of illegal immigrants in our community than by the locals who profit off them. As a small countermeasure, he’s begun to offer free oil-field safety trainings in Spanish to educate workers other companies left unprepared.
Living where I do, encountering immigration stories as I do, it is impossible for me to swing to one political extreme or the other on this, to countenance the absurd reductions of complicated realities that I hear from left and right alike.
It is just not true that any concern about the cost of immigration expressed by conservative border communities is racist—a fact some on the left only seem to realize when large numbers of migrants get deposited in their cities, at which point talking costs suddenly becomes reasonable.
But it’s also just not true that the people speaking Spanish at Walmart might knife you in the parking lot—that immigrants are disproportionately murderers, rapists, and “bad hombres,” as President Donald Trump tends to claim. They’re overwhelmingly normal people, also there for mayonnaise. Many have been given legal permission to stay in the country while they pursue asylum claims, and they deserve due process.
Here’s where I’ve landed in my months of paying attention: I want to welcome immigrants, but I also want to be honest about the meaningful costs borne by our schools, hospitals, and small businesses and about the demographic shifts that make what was once familiar seem a bit foreign. And as I’ve paid closer attention, I realize that maybe most of all, I want to take care and responsibility for how living here and now is shaping my soul.
What if the greatest cost to a community—or a nation—that allows immigration to run unchecked is not about money or medical care? What if the way we’re handling immigration runs the risk of dehumanizing us? What if it’s making it harder for us to imitate Jesus?
What if it makes us callous toward the people delivering our DoorDash and cleaning our houses and mowing our yards and picking our strawberries and butchering our meat? What if we grow ever more entangled, often in ways we don’t even notice, in economic systems that benefit us at their expense? And what if, when we do start to notice, we blame the victim instead of admitting that this arrangement does not—and should not—sit well with our souls?
In 2023, I wrote at CT about my conservative pastor friend who likes Trump’s border policies and also cares for migrants. The argument I made then remains true two years later. Both sides of our politics use migrants as political fodder, doing little to resolve the immigration crisis, perhaps because our whole culture has come to rely on the fruits of migrants’ ill-paid labor, including the labor of children. Individually, we do not know how to change any of this, so we pretend we do not see, like the travelers who passed the injured man before the Good Samaritan came along (Luke 10:25–30).
God has harsh words for those who live in comfort by “grinding the faces of the poor” (Isa. 3:15). A commentary on this verse from the Theology of Work Project says, “The exploitation of the poor for the advancement of the social elite was a breach of God’s covenant claims on his people to be his people.”
God’s people “were called to be different from the surrounding and competing cultures,” the commentary adds. God knew what they did not: that exploitation doesn’t only hurt the exploited. “Whoever is pregnant with evil conceives trouble and gives birth to disillusionment,” as David wrote. “The trouble they cause recoils on them; their violence comes down on their own heads” (Psalm 7:14, 16).
A few weeks ago, I sat in a ramshackle building alongside the Rio Grande river in Juárez, Mexico, where I’d traveled with a friend of mine who is an out-of-town reporter, as well as two local pastors, one of whom helps runs the shelter we visited.
related
From the shelter, I could see across the river to El Paso, a block and a world away. Sitting in a circle inside the shelter were about 30 migrants, mostly Venezuelan, who shared stories about their multimonth journeys through Central America. Many had been kidnapped by drug cartels and held for ransom. Now they worry that if they are captured by again, they will be killed because their families have nothing left to pay.
We asked if any of the women had experienced or knew someone who had experienced sexual assault on the journey north. Every single one raised a hand.
We asked them if they thought all immigrants should be allowed entry to the US (No! Of course not. No country could handle that) and who should be kept out (gang members and criminals, to start).
We talked about their frustrations (So many people in America think we are all criminals, but we aren’t) and how they all still hope against hope to enter the United States in the coming weeks.
Considering how impossible their circumstances now seem, we asked why they still wanted to cross the border. Work. “What kind of work do you want?” we asked. Anything, they said. We’ll do anything. The gravity of this weighs heavily on my heart: People this desperate are far too easy to exploit.
As I’ve pondered all this, I’ve been convicted to look for greed and gluttony in my own life. I like cheap strawberries and cheap meat, and I don’t want to pay higher prices to cover higher wages for the people who pick my berries and work the slaughterhouses. But maybe I need less meat and fewer strawberries?
I’m tempted to click “Buy It Now” on anything that strikes my fancy on Amazon. But I’ve started to notice the immigrant driver who drops the package at my door. What kind of wages is he making, and what is Amazon’s use of his labor doing to the mom-and-pop businesses right down the street?
I know I can’t single-handedly solve the immigration crisis, enact comprehensive immigration reform, or change these economic systems. My grocery store won’t notice if I’m buying fewer strawberries. I can’t affect Amazon’s bottom line. I’m not a member of Congress.
But I can tell the truth that a more orderly and humane immigration system would be good for US communities—tense and straining under the weight of new arrivals—and good for those who so desperately want to come here. I can notice that as we dehumanize immigrants and use them for our own ends, we chisel out a deeper trough between God and ourselves—and I can try to help others notice it too.
And I can get honest about the ravenous desires of my own heart and the people I use to fill them. I can recognize my temptation to greed and gluttony and admit these are not isolated, internal sins that affect only me. I can admit they often come at the expense of those who have less.
Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.
