Last Sunday I was on an airplane to Chicago for a quick visit with my son and his family, which by pure happenstance coincided with the Cubs’ home opener. At the gate, waiting to board, I ran into an old acquaintance with a handful of boarding passes, and a gaggle of teenagers (or tweeners). Softball team, I asked my friend? No, she said, they’re going to be “reunited.” I obviously didn’t get it, so she said it again. Reunited.

Then it hit me. These were kids that have been sleeping on cots, in chain link enclosures, for months, while their parents were shipped somewhere across the country. So here I am flying across the country for a 36-hour visit and a single baseball game, while these kids are flying across the country to, they hope, see their families for the first time in months. I was seated in first class, because that was the only seat available—my scheduled flight had been cancelled—and turned down the roast beef sandwich / Asian salad lunch combo, because I had eaten in the airport café. These kids had a Ziplock bag with a bottle of water and a package of peanut butter crackers. I didn’t know whether to laugh, or cry, or be ashamed. I do know that God is way more merciful to me than I deserve.

It was with that background that I read this week about the plans of the president who shall not be named and his adviser Stephen Miller to send undocumented immigrants to “sanctuary” cities. “Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only,” he tweeted, “The Radical Left always seems to have an Open Borders, Open Arms policy — so this should make them very happy!”

Indeed it should. In a previous post I expressed my opinion about the way we should welcome the Central American refugees. Nothing on this flight changed my mind. There may have been people on that flight that concerned me. (The fellow next to me who was annoyed because the flight attendant wasn’t able to get him a second gin and tonic—on top of the beer he carried on the plane—before takeoff would be a more likely candidate.) These kids were not among the worrying ones. If the emergency exit had to be opened I know whom I would pick. If shipping these kids to my city is the President’s idea of punishment, all I can say is “hit me with your best shot.”

A few people seem to get this. The Washington Post reports that Joseph A. Curtatone, the mayor of Somerville, Mass., says that Somerville would welcome all the immigrants the government wants to send. And studies show time and again the economic benefits that communities enjoy from having an influx of immigrant workers. But it certainly doesn’t appear that the president intends to confer a benefit on these “sanctuary” cities, and Mayor Curtatone seems in the minority in interpreting it as such. More importantly, the majority way of thinking once again conceives of immigrants as part of a grand utilitarian calculation of costs and benefits, and as chess pieces in a political game.

So how did we get to this sorry state? Part of it, I believe, is amnesia about the nature of our legal relations with other countries and their citizens. The concept of international law (or more properly the law of nations) is a fundamentally Christian one. The Greeks looked as other countries as enemies, although they did have the early makings of diplomacy among Greek states. The Romans took international relations  a bit farther, although, being by nature conquerors, they were primarily concerned with the dignity of treaties settling wars. It was the church that truly developed the idea of the law of nations, which came from a profoundly theological concept of human existence. While individual states had jurisdiction over its citizens regarding temporal matters, the church had jurisdiction over spiritual matters, including moral relations among peoples. For centuries, the church had a parallel legal system, with courts to decide disputes and issue orders in such matters. (Indeed, the church can be fairly said to have created the first true legal “system” in western culture, and secular legal systems, especially in Western Europe, borrowed heavily from canon law.) In other words, we were all subject to dual sovereigns: the state and the Church. Some of the most important works of Christian theology, including Augustine’s City of God and Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms (discussed by him a number of times) deal with this concept.

The church’s  jurisdiction over persons came from their status as members of the brotherhood of humanity. We are, literally, both citizens of our own nations, and citizens of the world. There are no aliens, no undocumented refugees in this kingdom. Each of us has certain rights that no local law can vacate. Now, however, we seem to have returned to the Roman idea, that our responsibilities to non-citizens are contractual only. (While we’re on the topic, I would suggest reading the Holy Week narratives next week thinking “us” whenever the Romans pop up. It’s rather enlightening.) Even if we believe that human rights are universal, we seem to believe it because it is in our best interests to honor them. We deem them universal, out of political prudence. This seems to be the current argument against torture; if we torture other soldiers, they’ll torture ours. While that may be practically true, it’s not particularly ennobling.

Of course, if human rights truly are universal, it doesn’t take a politician to recognize them. If we recognize that we in fact share a common humanity, that we are in a real sense fellow citizens, then we have a better basis for universal human rights than our own self-interest. Otherwise, human rights turn into contract rights, that may be negotiated. (I’ll trade you three degrees of religious freedom for five degrees of a fair trial, and a privacy right to be named later.) While that may seem preposterous to us, that seems to be exactly how our leaders sometimes look at it, except, of course, that they are the ones doing the deals. Harold Berman, the great historian of the relations between law and religion, said that our legal systems are in crisis, for precisely this reason: we have forgotten the origins of ideas we now take for granted.

Yes, I realize that it’s generally thought today that our society is formed on a “social contract” theory. You and I agree not to harm each other, and are free to do whatever we want subject to that agreement. However, we forget that John Locke, as much as anyone the “father” of social contract theory, was a Christian. We also skim over the words of the Declaration of Independence (which, although authored by Jefferson, borrowed heavily from Locke): “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The references to a Creator and humans being created are no accident. Humans are equal because they are created by God as such, and the basic rights we enjoy as humans cannot be bargained away. Nor do they depend on a green card.

For more on the law of nations, see here. For more about Harold Berman, his Amazon author page is here.