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What Would an “Open Borders” American Church Look Like? Affirmative Action, Munch N Mingles, and Polyglot Patriarchs

I am for open borders (more or less, with some exceptions we needn’t go into here). I was even quoted in a conservative newspaper’s article headlined “Illegal immigrants have a friend in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” based on a Deseret News article I wrote  (although it didn’t exactly help my thesis that a lot of the comments were along the lines of “get out of my country Mexicans”). You could take John Corrill’s and others’ accounts of how we were treated as impoverished never do-well immigrants and they would not look out of place in some of today’s immigration rhetoric.

This isn’t an economics or politics blog, but to briefly summarize: ever since Evan Phillips convinced me in our eighth grade peer persuasive essay exercise I’ve seen more and more evidence that the conventional wisdom of what would happen if we just let the borders open up tends to be wrong. For example, the “worst case scenario,” where a massive wave of poor immigrants hits our shores all at once, actually happened during the Mariel Boatlift in Miami when Castro let whoever wanted to go to America leave Cuba during a small window, and about 125,000 Cubans settled in Florida, largely in Miami, within six months. While the economic literature on it is still somewhat contested, my understanding is that the consensus is that it slightly depressed low-income wages temporarily, but the massive unemployment predicted by the doomsdayers never materialized. Yes, immigrants take jobs…but they also create jobs, and the Mariel Boatlift helped give us the rich Cuban-Floridan culture (and the best shootout scene of all time in Scarface). 

That’s one example, but a well-versed libertarian economist can give many others. (Bryan Caplain even wrote a highly recommended, easy-to-read graphic novel walking readers through the economic and ethical arguments for open borders.) That being said, unlike the mainstream left I don’t think that any policy that isn’t functionally open borders is racist, and I don’t begrudge others not agreeing with me. (And if you don’t think I’m being fair here, name one suggested policy that would have actually led to less immigration that wasn’t slandered as being racist or heartless; heck, even Mitt’s e-verify was given a hard time). 

However, I think we can all agree that open borders right now is a bit of a pipe dream, but still, I thought a thought experiment of what an American Church would look like if anybody who wanted to (more or less) could come into the United States would be fun. I think I have a better sense of this than most, since for the past 15 years I’ve lived in the kinds of wards the Church publishes pictures of to make us look more diverse than we are. (Literally, I’ve seen my ward both in the Church News and the Ensign). 

More centers of strength for missionary work

I’m not super familiar with all the different takes on proselytizing effectiveness, but it seems reasonable to assume that missionary work is more effective when you have a stable ward as a home base. Plus people wanting to assimilate into America might find the idea of attaching themselves to an American church appealing, so again being flooded with immigrants from all over would be great for missionary work. 

Many more ethnic- and language-specific wards and stakes

Whether the Church should have ethnic-specific (and not just language-specific) wards (e.g. the Samoan or Tongan wards we see in Utah) is a whole post or several. I see benefits to both retaining them and merging them, depending on whether you take a melting pot approach or a multicultural approach. But whatever the case, in an America with a billion citizens from around the world a la Matthew Yglesias a stake could have, say, a Thai, Vietnamese, and Arabic branch along with Spanish, West African French, Tagalog, and English wards. My home stake is actually kind of close to this, with two Spanish wards, several English wards, a French branch, and an ASL branch. 

Differentiation within wards

Even if a group doesn’t break off into their own unit, there could be differentiation within wards. We actually saw this in our Philadelphia ward, where there was a Liberian Sunday School taught by a local paragon of the American Liberian community who apparently was a big deal in the Liberian Civil War (I never got the full story) and brought a lot of others into the Church. The optics weren’t great (“why are all the black people in one class and the white people in another?”), but Liberian English is very different from American English, and it was simply easier for them to understand the lesson if it was being taught by a Liberian. These sorts of decisions about how to accommodate, fellowship, and reach out to other cultures would become much more commonplace and relevant, and not just in wards abutting refugee resettlement areas near big cities. Even outside of classrooms, ministering families are often assigned on ethnic and linguistic lines, with more experienced, say, Sierra Leonese paired with a recent convert Sierra Leonese. People might wince at that kind of assortative assignment, but in my experience it’s eminently practical in terms of fellowshipping and plugging people into a ward. 

Leadership representation becomes more of an issue

Again speaking from experience, when you have a lot of first-generation converts in your ward that are one color and language then you get a situation where everybody on the stand is white and most people sitting in the congregation aren’t. This isn’t optimal obviously, but it’s a trickier issue to deal with than you might think if you haven’t been in that kind of ward, and more often than not the lack of representation is not from lack of trying. Having representative leadership without lapsing into tokenism or asking too much of lower-income people without the resources or time to serve in demanding callings is difficult. Of course sometimes you don’t need leadership affirmative action. One of our Relief Society Presidents was a decades-long convert African American who was a high-ranking State Department official, and she was perfect for the job, but when the racial minorities tend to be recent convert refugees who work insane hours and don’t have cars, you have to be more intentional about representation, it typically doesn’t just happen. And yes, if we had open borders presumably there would be some wealthy immigrants too, but those aren’t the ones that join the Church; they rarely are. D&C 58’s take on the parable of the wedding feast and all that. 

Language becomes more of an issue

Leadership would obviously have to be fluent in English, and (as is the case in our stake) native English speaking return missionaries would be pulled in to serve in leadership positions in wards that were primarily recent converts. Stake patriarchs would benefit from being bilingual (ours is), or you could have a traveling patriarch situation for less spoken languages. (I’m not a big fan of the interpreter option). Finally, what is good for the goose is good for the gander; I had one of those do-it-all stake presidents who I could tell was working on his Spanish and French during his tenure so that he could minister to his wards more effectively. Even if English wards were a plurality but not majority in a stake, English leadership would do well to go the extra mile and at least learn a smattering of the other languages they minister in, and stake conferences would need little mini-General Conference translator booths.   

Better Munch N Mingles

To end on a lighter note, the whole true and living Church thing is great, but as a culture Utah Mormon food is awful. We’re not Mexicans or Thais or even West Africans.  Nobody is going to have a Utah Mormon food truck anytime soon, and our Munch N Mingles could benefit from some immigrant foodways. (I was living in Texas when that politician–I forgot who–quipped that if we didn’t tighten up immigration we’d have “taco trucks on every corner,” and I joked that I was taking that as a campaign promise from the Democrats). 

So again, I’m not holding my breath that we will ever have ten different languages in our stakes and five ethnic enclaves that we pass on our way to work, but some of these issues are scalable and would be relevant on a lesser level if we ever found ourselves in, say, an immigrant-heavy country that wasn’t open borders.


Comments

12 responses to “What Would an “Open Borders” American Church Look Like? Affirmative Action, Munch N Mingles, and Polyglot Patriarchs”

  1. I’m not convinced of open borders, but I do think welcoming a lot more immigrants is the right call. Better for the country and better for the Church, based on recent experience in a big square state.

    But calling a ward potluck a “munch n mingle”? That’s going way too far.

  2. your food allergy

    No. The best shootout scene in cinema is found in “Heat,” and it’s not close.

  3. We’d also have better dances, though to maximize the effect you’d need some joint adult-youth dances to facilitate intergenerational learning.

    Yes, leadership representation would definitely be an issue. (Sounds like my stake is not as diverse as yours, but more than most.) Along with the long hours, not having control over those hours or just a predictable schedule is brutal. If you work for one of those companies than expects you to be available on short notice whenever their algorithm says they need you, it’s hard to be a primary teacher let alone a bishop.

    If you sat people on the left down and said “You’re in charge: make an immigration system and we’ll implement it” I doubt many of them would choose open borders. But I get why it seems that way: some combination of wanting more openness than the current state or anything likely to be on the table, thinking that advocating for more openness will win over the Latino vote (hopefully they know better than that now), and being sincerely appalled by the blatant racism the immigration issue brings out.

  4. Stephen C

    @Jonathan: I thought that’s just what they were called…but maybe that’s just a local thing, I don’t know. We have them once a month or so.

    @food allergy: Ah yes, that’s a great one too.

    @RLD: Plus I suspect that international stake dances would also require some intentionality on the parts of the adults so that the ward-specific groups don’t just mill about in their own groups and not interact with each other, as teenagers are want to do.

  5. In light of Stephen’s post, I think this old, old post of mine has held up reasonably well.

  6. Open Borders = Loss of Sovereignty = Loss of Country. I simply cannot believe that someone (supposedly as intelligent as you proport to be) would advocate for such a thing.

    Perhaps your type of “intelligence” is not something to be admired or emulated.

  7. John Mansfield

    My stake (Seneca Maryland) resembles the above. The census bureau puts my county (Montgomery County, Maryland) right at one-third foreign-born currently. (Seriously, last I looked the count was above 30%, but the number given today is 33.4%.) A stake presidency counselor looked up the birthplaces of everyone in the stake and found 80 different countries. The outgoing mission president said people from 100 countries have been baptized in the mission during his time. Stake conference offers interpretation in Spanish, Mandarin, and French. Prayers and talks in languages I don’t understand happen with some frequency. I have several friends (plus a son and daughter-in-law) in the Mandarin-language branch and sometimes attend the very tasty Lunar New Year party.

    I winced at the point it was predicted someone would. Natural group affinities are so easy to lean on, and I fight against it: the notion that all the native Spanish speakers should minister to one another, all the men over 70 should be siloed together, all the lawyers and business owners stick to their corner where they understand each another and any academics or scientists in another. That is what a lot of people want, and for some individuals that is for now how they are best served. Unity, continuity, and the future call for working against that urge.

  8. Stephen C.

    I actually live in PG County next door! I was going to try to one-up you with percent foreign-born, but it looks like we’re only at about a quarter.

    https://data.census.gov/profile/Prince_George's_County,_Maryland?g=050XX00US24033#populations-and-people

    Those Church numbers sound about right, we have a map in the foyer of our building with pins for where all the different members who use that building have either lived and served missions, and it’s more or less covered.

    It’s tricky. It’s easy to say that the ideal is to have everybody mix and assign the Nigerian 20-year old convert to minister to the Peruvian high priest, but sometimes, especially if there is a language barrier, it is nice, especially for recent converts, to reduce the weirdness and strain of having a new network all the sudden by connecting like with like, but I agree that after a certain point there should be as much mixing as is linguistically feasible.

  9. One thing I think about at Church is why doesn’t this Ward look like the people in neighborhood we live in? I get most of the difference is not intentional but know the Restored Gospels message and Community could be so much better if I was better and our Ward culture improved. When we skew White upper class we miss out on something. I understand language and identity wards but would appreciate more mixing of SES and racial background.

  10. Stephen C

    @RL: I’ve been in stakes that have been very intentional about ward boundaries in the spirit of what you describe in order to mix things up. For example, one popular approach in urban areas is the pie slice approach, where a ward will have a slice of the inner city along with the suburbs, instead of a suburb ward and an inner city ward.

  11. Jack of Hearts

    I heartily second Bryan Caplan’s graphic novel about open borders. I was already somewhat open to the idea when I got my hands on it, but reading it converted me completely, and then Matt Yglesias’ One Billion Americans only cemented the change. I hope someone reads one or both of those books because of this post, and I hope someday that open borders can finally become a reality.

  12. Brenda W

    Open borders would be interesting. What would it look like if they received no aid from the government. Would they assimilate? Would they congregate in ethnic hubs for familiarity? Would they be assaulted by the fear of the locals who feel overwhelmed and don’t want their community to change. How quickly would they outnumber and by voting power change the American culture to reflect what they just fled as in institutions laws that reflect the social norms of their culture and religious beliefs.

    Complete open borders might be great and it might be chaos.

    Even when the church grows to quickly in areas, they begin to have trouble keeping the doctrine and principles of the church on the straight and narrow.

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