AU’s “Wall of Separation” blog posts this week have been connecting the dots between immigrant rights and church-state separation. Mariko Hirose, AU’s chief program officer, began the week by asking the big question: “Why do Christian Nationalists hate immigrants?”
Tracing the “beginnings of major immigration controls” in the United States to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Hirose noted that a “white nationalist backlash against increased Chinese immigration” undergirded the act, falsely portraying Chinese immigrants as “parasites” and America as “a country of white men.” This long-running xenophobia endured, its hatred in recent times embodied in the 2017 signing of the Muslim Ban.
Prior to joining Americans United earlier this year, Hirose “led the litigation department of a refugee rights organization that challenged the Muslim Ban and other anti-immigrant policies.” More recently, she pushed back on the false tales about Haitian immigrants eating pets. Now White Christian Nationalists, holding aloft their Bibles but refusing to love their non-white neighbors, “have come for the Muslims, the Asians, the Haitians, for all immigrants,” Hirose lamented of our present day. “They have come for LGBTQ+ people, for women, for Black and Brown people, and for anyone else they consider second class.”
Hirose came to AU because “Christian Nationalism – the billion-dollar, extremist movement that AU has been fighting – lies at the root of the anti-immigrant forces in this country. We need the wall of church-state separation to protect us from those forces,” she concludes.
In similar fashion, Alexandra Zaretsky, litigation counsel at AU, observes that the Muslim Ban – “an outgrowth of Christian Nationalist rhetoric and fear-mongering” – is but one recent example of hatred directed at immigrants. She calls out, for example, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for citing “the Bible to justify a policy of family separation at the border, which led to children as young as five being taken from their parents.” Sessions, writes AU’s Vice President of Communications Andrew L. Seidel in an article published by Think Progress, “likely took his cues [on his child separation policies] from the White House Bible Study (WHBS), a weekly Bible study for members of the president’s cabinet” organized by Capitol Ministries, a Christian Nationalist nonprofit.
Prior to joining AU, Zaretsky worked for as an Equal Justice Works Fellow for a refugee rights organization. There she focused “on reuniting families impacted by the Muslim Ban” that “explicitly targeted families from Muslim-majority countries, including children living in difficult and dangerous conditions.” Capturing the essence of the Christian Nationalist ideology behind the Muslim Ban, Seidel, in his book American Crusade, writes that “Restricting people’s movement because of which god they worship or which holy book they revere is a threat to religious freedom.”
Zaretsky reminds us that the U.S. government in 2017 also shut down a long-standing program through which persecuted immigrants of diverse backgrounds obtained refuge in America. Zaretsky “came to Americans United from the immigrants’ rights world” because she understood “that at its core, the fight for immigrants’ rights and the fight against Christian Nationalism is the same fight.”
An AU staff member, who is an undocumented immigrant, knows only too well the inhumanity of self-declared Christians opposed to immigration. Growing up openly as a devout Catholic while quietly being gay, they, the media relations manager at Americans United, personally and professionally witnessed and experienced religion “weaponized to persecute human beings based on their sexuality and immigration status,” a revelation that led them to leave the church. Prior to coming to AU they worked within the immigrant rights movement, “fighting for the Dream Act, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and immigration reform.”
In time they recognized that Christian Nationalism is “the sole reason there was and continues to be a war to strip both immigrants and LGBTQ+ individuals of their rights and humanity.” To this day they live in a world where “most LGBTQ+ folks expect discrimination and persecution from the church, or, at least, aren’t surprised by it.” Quoting from the Bible to justify their hatred, Christian Nationalists “continue to use their beliefs to persecute people who look and speak like me,” the staff person notes.
“That is why, when I fight for the separation of church and state, I am fighting for immigrant rights, and I will work hard to ensure that the wall which separates church and state is at least one layer of brick higher than when I found it,” they said.
