The United States is home to about 48 million immigrants today, but media outlets favoring a more restrictive immigration policy report on only a small fraction of them.
Fox News is a good case in point: Night after night, the cable channel headlines a very particular kind of newcomer. “ICE removes ‘foreign fugitive’ wanted in Mexico on rape charge.” “Man allegedly in country illegally accused of murdering elderly partner.” “Jamaican man illegally in US arrested in Florida for sex crimes involving teenager.” “ICE nabs another suspected Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang member.” “Migrant TDA gang member breaks officer’s arm.”
Are all those Fox headlines factual? Probably. In a country of 340 million, it’s easy to bite into a rotten apple. But “just the facts” does not mean “all the facts.” And while it’s hard to know for sure the national immigrant crime rate due to incomplete reporting by 49 states, Texas records for homicide convictions from 2013 to 2022 indicate that “illegal immigrants were 26.2 percent less likely than native-born Americans to be convicted of homicide.”
A federal Department of Justice study during the first Trump term similarly found undocumented immigrants in Texas “had substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses.” US-born citizens were more than twice as likely as undocumented immigrants to be arrested for violent or drug crimes and more than four times as likely to be arrested for property crimes.
My interest here is not just about those facts. It is also about the responsibilities of the journalist and the Christian.
Journalism is not a neutral art. Reporters learn to feature stories with human interest, and much of what they communicate to their audiences depends on which humans they find most interesting and which stories they find most gripping. A crime tale gets more clicks than a story about immigrants going to church, but those quiet stories are much more frequent. Stories about criminals get more attention than those focused on the overwhelming majority of immigrants who work hard and provide for their families.
This is not only a risk for journalists who want restrictive immigration policies. For those of us who want to welcome immigrants to the United States, the mirror temptation is to write only about exemplary immigrants put in difficult spots by corrupt or heartless officials while ignoring more mundane and diffuse negative effects of large-scale immigration: crowded schools and hospitals, perhaps, or rising rents due to increased local demand, or cultural conflict within local churches. These quiet stories, too, deserve to be told.
In some cases, more troubling than anti-immigrant journalism is the theology and anthropology that underlie it. Hebrews 13:2 is clear: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” The verse refers to Genesis 18, where Abraham greeted and fed three strangers, then realized they were angels. The verse parallels many other biblical injunctions to be hospitable.
Some people dislike that word strangers and suggest we should love only our close-in neighbors as ourselves. But Jesus notes in Matthew 5, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?” (vv. 46–47). We don’t have specific instructions about how to apply this on a national scale in a secular country, but the thrust is clear: Work on it!
However we work that out, Christians especially should rise above the strident and misleading anti-immigrant messages we see in some media, even some Christian publications. Flip Hebrews backward, and you get Fox’s implication: Do not show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to devils without knowing it. Those Fox headlines distort both current facts and biblical truth.
Left unchecked, this backward testament can lead even Christians to dehumanize immigrants in rhetoric—wrongful no matter how right the cause of policy reform. In the December issue of American Reformer, for example, Hillsdale College PhD candidate Ben Crenshaw criticizes Christians who “claim that the image of God in man and human dignity requires a compassionate and welcoming policy toward immigrants” and others in need. He says, “American evangelicals and conservative Christians who have been taught that Christian love and Christlikeness require welcoming all immigrants, no matter their legal or illegal status,” are a “major obstacle to effective immigration policy.”
To disabuse us of that notion, Crenshaw writes in his penultimate paragraph that the imago Dei does not mean humans “possess a raw and innate dignity that confers worth upon all they do or become, and that subsequently demands that individuals and governments treat them with respect.” On the contrary, he says, “more often than not, men degrade themselves and choose to become bestial or vegetative. In these cases, they should be treated as such.”
Those statements open the door wide to seeing ourselves as righteous and others as subhuman—and treating them that way “more often than not.” Crenshaw hastens to add in his last paragraph, “This does not mean that all illegal immigrants are beasts or plants that can be discarded without a second thought.” Not all? 75 percent? 50 percent? 25 percent? 10 percent?
We all sin and deserve to be on the discard pile, but Christ died for us. At first thought, we tend to discard people not in our tribes, but Christ instructs us to think again, then show hospitality and love.
Marvin Olasky is executive editor of news and global at Christianity Today.
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