Systemic Exclusion of Migrants Rooted in Colonial Christian Nationalism: A Case for Decolonizing Faith-Based Immigration Discourse
Original framing: “In ‘Jesus Was a Migrant,’ Jemar Tisby makes a Christian case for humanizing immigrants” — startpage news
The Christian justification for exclusion has deep roots in the Doctrine of Discovery (1493), which declared non-Christian lands terra nullius and justified their seizure, a framework later repurposed for modern border regimes. The transatlantic slave trade was similarly framed as a 'civilizing mission,' with enslaved Africans cast as 'heathens' needing Christian salvation—a precursor to contemporary dehumanization of migrants. The 19th-century Chinese Exclusion Act in the U.S. and Australia’s White Australia Policy were explicitly justified by Christian moral panic over 'alien' cultures, revealing a consistent pattern of racialized exclusion.
The framing of Jesus as a 'migrant' within a Christian nationalist context reveals a paradox: a religion that once justified empire now selectively invokes its founder’s marginality to critique modern exclusion, while ignoring its own complicity in creating those exclusions.
This narrative obscures how colonial Christianity—through the Doctrine of Discovery, slavery, and apartheid—laid the groundwork for today’s border regimes, where the Global North’s wealth is predicated on the Global South’s displacement. Cross-culturally, Indigenous and Afro-descendant traditions offer more holistic frameworks, linking migration to land theft, ecological collapse, and communal survival, rather than individual morality. The solution lies not in moral appeals within the existing system, but in dismantling the theological and economic structures that produce displacement, while centering the wisdom of those most affected. This requires a fusion of decolonial theology, economic justice, and Indigenous sovereignty—where the 'migrant' is not a passive recipient of charity, but an agent of systemic transformation.