Thank God for Immigrants
Dear friends,
Thanksgiving, which most of us will celebrate later this week with turkey, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie and perhaps a parade or a football game, has a few different origin stories.
Some consider the first Thanksgiving feast to have been a 1621 harvest celebration meal shared between Wampanoag Native Americans and Puritans who had crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the Mayflower after fleeing religious persecution in England.
Others would note that Thanksgiving was not officially established as an American holiday until the 19th century: In the fall of 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln “set apart the last Thursday in November… as a day of thanksgiving and praise to Almighty God.”
A commonality between those two origins stories, interestingly, is immigration. President Lincoln’s declaration does not reference pilgrims or harvest — but Lincoln does thank God, specifically, for having “augmented our free population… by immigration.” Lincoln had long opposed the nativist “No-Nothing” movement of his time and signed, as one of his signature pieces of legislation, an “Act to Encourage Immigration” on July 4, 1864. Lincoln also relied upon immigrants, particularly those from Ireland and Germany, who made up roughly one-quarter of the Union Army’s soldiers. He was, appropriately, grateful.
Of course, immigrants are still serving in the U.S. military, as they did in the 19th century. And they still come seeking religious liberty that they have been denied in their homelands, as they did in the 17th century and in every century since.
But such immigrants are, increasingly, officially unwelcome. Last month, a presidential determination on refugee admissions set a historically low refugee admissions ceiling of just 7,500 for the new federal fiscal year, down from ceilings of 140,000 or higher set by presidents like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Troublingly, individuals fleeing religious persecution — a stated priority for resettlement under President Trump’s first administration — seem to have been excluded entirely. With refugee resettlement largely suspended over the past ten months, almost no persecuted Christians or others fleeing religious persecution have been resettled as refugees, a stark decline from 2024, when more than 29,000 Christian refugees were resettled from the fifty countries where Open Doors US finds that Christians face the most severe persecution globally.
Meanwhile, individuals seeking asylum under the terms of U.S. law have increasingly been detained and held for months. My friend Ara Torosian, an evangelical pastor in Los Angeles, has had multiple individuals from his Farsi-speaking congregation detained — even when they had entered the country lawfully and were authorized to work. One of his congregants, thankfully, recently was granted asylum, having proven to an immigration judge that her fear of persecution in Iran because of her Christian faith was well-founded — but then her husband, with the same threat as a convert to Christianity from Iran but a different immigration judge, had his asylum denied — and now fears deportation to Iran.
So, as you gather this Thursday, I’d encourage you to follow President Lincoln’s lead and thank God for immigration.
Thank God for the religious liberty that allows us to freely gather to worship — and pray for brothers and sisters in countries where such gatherings are illegal, putting them at risk of persecution or even death, for the United States to once again open the “golden door” to vetted refugees who have fled such persecution and for asylum seekers and other immigrants languishing on this Thanksgiving in detention centers, fearing deportation to situations of persecution.
Thank God, also, for the food you’ll eat, and for the immigrants who make up two-thirds of all farmworkers according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
And thank God for the privilege we still have to advocate when we believe our country is not living up to its full potential or respecting the dignity of each person — and then take a few minutes to call your Members of Congress, to let them know that you’re thankful for immigrants and want our country to continue to welcome them.
Thankful,
Matthew Soerens
National Coordinator, Evangelical Immigration Table
