Migrant Caravan Reaction

To be honest I don’t know what to think about a caravan of thousands of people from Honduras and Guatemala. I’m wondering how something like that gets started, how they are getting resources to travel and how so many people are drawn together. When I think about 1909-1916 when my family came over to Ellis Island there was economic depression and the spread of communism and people heard that America was looking for immigrants to work in factories. Many sold everything to buy passage on ships and came over and I remember seeing pictures of poorly hand made American Flags because they were excited about becoming an American. Many others were turned away by the shipping companies due to sickness.  There was little to no government assistance so my great grandparents went to the church who housed them and helped them find employment.  My grandparents had to take immigration and naturalization classes and take an oath casting off all other allegiances. Leviticus 19:34 definitely calls us to treat sojourns as one of our own and Mal 3:5 says that God is against those that refuse to help immigrants. But the bible also says in Num 15:16 that there will be one law for everyone indicating that naturalization is also expected.

With this in mind there are things that bother me with the current state of immigration in the US. For example my parents live on the South Side of Chicago and many undocumented immigrants live by them. They are friendly people but my parents are bothered by the fact that many of them do not up keep their property and its actually causing damage to my parents property. Its not that they don’t have resources but many send their money over to Central America to maintain homes they own there or buy/maintain homes for their relatives. Further when my mother went to vote back in 2012 an undocumented immigrant came in to vote just yelling a candidates name and they rushed her over to a booth and helped her vote in Spanish without asking for any ID.  My niece saw the same thing in the November 2018 elections at her polling facility. 

My cousin is a Chicago police officer and he says several times a week he gets called in where an undocumented immigrant has wrecked cars and property while drunk, or gotten into drunken brawls and assaulted someone and what bothers him is that because Chicago is a sanctuary city they just let the guy right out the back of the police department and he is told to keep his mouth shut… They say that there is low crime rates related to immigrants but its hard to tell how true this is when so many sanctuary states aren’t filling out police reports and are just letting them go. When I saw pictures of the caravan I saw many flags from these other countries which seems to be in contrast to the Ellis Island pictures of people with hand made American Flags. They say it takes long to go about immigration legally, I’m not sure how true that is as I work with a guy from Mexico who just got his citizenship which took him 3 years after working here on a visa, I suppose it might be related to coming over with some kind of working skill set versus not.  But it would seem that there should be some expectations for immigrants to meet some requirements and make a shift in their allegiance.  It seems to me that one side is painting this as all rainbows and butterflys while the other-side seems to paint it as a march of terrorists and plague carriers; the truth is probably somewhere in between.