Robert W. Heimburger's 2018 monograph, God and the Illegal Alien: United States Immigration Law and a Theology of Politics, joins a growing literature in the field of Christian ethics that reflects on issues around migration. While scholars of Christian ethics did not wholly neglect the issue of migration previously, it has drawn considerably more attention since the 1990s. The intervening years have seen the passage of laws like the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, Pub. L. No. 104-208, 110 Stat. 3009-546 (1996); the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Pub. L. No. 104-132, 110 Stat. 1214 (1996); and the Secure Fence Act of 2006, Pub. L. No. 109-367, 120 Stat. 2638. They have also witnessed the reemergence of the US-Mexico border as an important site of political theater and the reorganization of the US border enforcement apparatus under the Department of Homeland Security. Throughout these years, American attitudes toward migrants have remained largely ambivalent and Christian ethicists have sought to cast light on the moral stakes that ought to concern American churches and people of faith. To date, the literature includes the works of Ilsup Ahn, Mark Amstutz, Kristin Heyer, Tisha Rajendra, and Dana Wilbanks,Footnote ¹ and probes conceptions of justice, borders, the relationships between migrants and citizens, and the ethical and political responsibilities they produce. Heimburger's contribution is twofold. First, he offers the field a careful historical analysis of one of the legal categories crucial to US thinking about migration, the “illegal alien.” Second, he provides a theology of politics that seeks to articulate the nature and limits of state authority. The result is a clear-eyed study that scrutinizes theologically US immigration law without losing sight of the goods that law endeavors to defend.

Heimburger's book is organized into three parts, each of which oscillates between historical analysis and theological rejoinder. Part one, “The Immigrant as Alien,” looks to the term's earliest legal origins and compares them with theological accounts of human kinship (23–62). Part two, “The Alien as Unlawfully Present,” tracks the rise of the federal government's power to exclude and expel migrants and reframes this power within a theological account of the polis (63–146). Part three, “An Unlawfully Present Alien from a Neighboring Country,” explains how so many aliens from Latin America came to live unlawfully in the United States and examines what it might mean for the United States to become a better neighbor to Mexico (and Latin America more broadly) (147–208). This oscillating structure binds Heimburger's “theology of politics” to the history of US immigration law, making each side accountable to the goods that the other presents. It also imbues the book with a spirit of Christian realism. Heimburger's ethical proposals are not intended for some utopia. They are tailor-made for the present history and the international system of nation-states that populates it.

Heimburger's historical analyses of the “illegal alien” or, rather, “the alien unlawfully present,” are at once descriptive and anticipatory of his normative work. By uncovering the category's origins and development, Heimburger is positioned to determine whether the “alien” is an “eternal type of person” or “something that is up for negotiation” (25). Heimburger's objective is to show, first, that the term is indeed “up for negotiation” and, second, that it is a concept the law has done without in the past and can do without again. He argues that United States law inherited the category from English Common Law. In its original context, one described as “alien-born” hailed from outside England and bore no natural liegiance to the sovereign (31–34). The “alien,” then, developed in contradistinction to the “subject.” Transposed into the context of US law, where the “subject” had been replaced by the “citizen,” the “alien” had effectively to be redefined (26). Initially, under naturalization laws, “aliens” were the stuff of which “citizens” were made (26). However, in the nineteenth century, the United States grew anxious over Chinese laborers, who came to the United States but did not—according to the discourse of the time—assimilate. The Chinese Exclusion Cases recast “aliens” as figures of enmity, whom the federal government had the authority and obligation to exclude and expel (28–29, 72–88). The subsequent history of popular ambivalence toward migrant laborers, and the imposition of national immigration quotas, contributed to the rapid growth of a massive population of aliens dwelling in the United States and deemed unlawfully present. The payoff of this historical work is to show us that the “illegal alien” as we know it today, is not a brute fact, but the consequence of historical production. This class of people emerged in response to some legitimate concerns about public health and national security. However, as Heimburger endeavors to show, it is possible to uphold these goods, while also dispensing with this legal category, which has forced so many individuals and families to live in the shadows.

On Heimburger's analysis, the category of the “illegal alien” falls out of joint with Christianity's theological anthropology. Heimburger develops his theology of politics through a broad survey of relevant texts in the Hebrew Bible and Christian scriptures, informed by “trusted interpreters” (19, 45). Principal among these interpreters are Karl Barth, Martin Luther, and Oliver O'Donovan (19). Heimburger makes use of the Barthian notion that the human being is a Mitmensch, an “I” that is always encountering, relating to, and partnering with a “you” (47). This vision permits alterity between “I” and “you.” However, it subsumes this difference under the common (read: shared) humanity disclosed in the encounter. Thus, Heimburger concludes that no human being is fundamentally “alien” to another. By extension, no people is fundamentally alien to another (59–60). Our various national identities do not bound our moral communities; rather, they express the point from which we proceed outward in encounter. Appealing to the image of the apostolic church in 1 Corinthians 9, Heimburger insists that the Christian church stands in solidarity with migrants, who remind it of its own migrant character (45, 53–58).

However, Heimburger does not imagine this encounter between individuals and peoples taking place in a world without states. Citing the story of Cain and the establishment of the first city, he proposes that some guarded community appears necessary amid a violent and fallen humanity (98–101). Citing Revelation, he notes the Christian aspiration to an “open city,” but suggests that this reality is strictly eschatological (102–04). Drawing on Martin Luther's “two governance” theory, Heimburger suggests that nation-states attain legitimacy as they act to defend the common good of those who dwell in their territory. However, he cautions, their sovereignty is checked by God's own and, as such, their rulings are subject to divine justice. The task that stands before nation-states is to act as “humble guards” (chapter 4). Peoples and nations are “due a request when nonmembers want to cross their lands,” but they must judge the request rightly (123). Moreover, the “hallmark of God's just judgment,” Heimburger concludes, “is justice for the one from far away and love for the migrant” (123). By implication, governments retain jurisdiction over their borders, but they ought not, properly speaking, to retain plenary power in matters of immigration. The claims of certain migrants may force their hands.

More than guards, Heimburger considers that it may fall to nations to become good “neighbors.” Reading the parable of the Good Samaritan alongside Oliver O'Donovan, Heimburger calls for an account of justice that goes beyond the in-group to lavish mercy upon those with whom we draw near (194–95). Becoming a neighbor, in the sense that the parable describes, implies far more than the “equality and fraternity,” that Franklin Delano Roosevelt put at the center of his “Good Neighbor” policy toward Latin America (200). Heimburger grants that the “neighborliness” of a nation-state must be something distinct from that of the individual (204). Nevertheless, he proposes that it might involve reconceiving the border as a “horizon” rather than a boundary, as the “face” a nation presents to the world's gaze—as a site of encounter (202–04). Practically, what might this mean? First, the United States would be forced to reckon with the insufficiency of laws that obstruct the historic migratory routes of neighboring peoples and render millions illegal. Second, it would entail recognizing those it has already rendered illegal, creating remedies for undocumented individuals who have lived in the United States peacefully, and cooperating with Mexico to establish reformed immigration laws that better reflect the flows of migration that have characterized the two nations’ historical relationship (205–07).

Heimburger's book was published on the heels of two other studies on the Christian ethics of migration: Mark R. Amstutz's Just Immigration and Tisha Rajendra's Migrants and Citizens (see note 1 above). By brief reference to these works, we may better appreciate the value of Heimburger's contribution. Amstutz, like Heimburger, notes prior works’ failures to address the details of the laws and policies that structure immigration in the United States. He also notes the absence of a robust political theology capable of addressing the international system of nation-states. Supposing Christian ethics incompetent for attending to these realities, Amstutz concludes instead that Christian churches ought to refrain from political advocacy and should limit themselves to “moral teaching.”Footnote ² Heimburger's book demonstrates that Christian ethics yet retains the competency for careful engagement with case law and policy history. Moreover, Heimburger's theology of politics provides a plausible account for the role that the international system of nation-states might play in salvation history.

Moreover, the account of “neighborliness” that Heimburger develops in God and the Illegal Alien provides an intriguing response to the conclusion of Rajendra's Migrants and Citizens. Rajendra expresses ambivalence that the Parable of the Good Samaritan has become a locus classicus in the Christian Ethics of migration. She argues that the chance encounter between the Samaritan and the beaten man misrepresents the thick historical relationships that persist between the United States and its southern neighbors.Footnote ³ In the beaten man, the Samaritan meets a stranger. In the migrant, the United States meets a neighbor to which it has already bound itself in a history of economic and militant interventionism. For Rajendra, an adequate reading of the parable must reconcile the inequities between long-standing antagonists.Footnote ⁴ Heimburger's call for a form of neighborliness that reckons with the historical relationships between the United States and Mexico provides, at the very least, a promising first step in this direction.

Even as it advances the literature, God and the Illegal Alien is not comprehensive in its treatment of US immigration law. The Immigration and Nationality Act applies to more than aliens deemed “immigrants.” Another major point of controversy is its treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. In order to limit the scope of his study, Heimburger leaves aside the question of asylum. Nevertheless, the reader may wonder how his account of the “humble guard” or divine sovereignty might recast nation-states’ dispositions toward these acutely vulnerable migrants. Presently, domestic and international law recognize an individual's right to emigrate and to seek asylum in another country. However, the law leaves unspecified any obligation, on the side of states, to fulfill this right. The provision of asylum, it appears, is the result of a state's largesse, not the expression of its duty. If the state's authority to protect its border is humbled by the divine mandate to care for the vulnerable migrant, are they obliged to accept asylum seekers? On what grounds, if any, may states turn asylum seekers away? Alternately, might the “humble guard” find these specific legal categories unnecessary, extending to other classes of migrants privileges typically reserved for refugees and asylum seekers?

All the same, Heimburger cannot be faulted for setting this confounding issue aside. He presents us with a valuable contribution that bridges the all too common divide between Christian ethics and legal scholarship. Likely, what appears most novel in Heimburger's analysis will depend on the reader's field. Legal scholars may take particular interest in the jurisprudential implications of his “theology of politics.” Students of Christian ethics, like the present reviewer, may find especially illuminating his clear exposition of US immigration law's complex history. The virtue of God and the Illegal Alien is its possession of analyses capable of commending it to scholars of either field.