Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been an explosion of scholarly works on migration studies written by researchers in both legal studies and religious studies. Despite the welcome scholarly engagement and outcomes, there has been seldom interdisciplinary work between legal scholars and religious thinkers on this important issue in our world. Edited by Silas W. Allard, Kristin E. Heyer, and Raj Nadella, Christianity and the Law of Migration now fills the gap. Contributions from fourteen law and religion scholars cover such legal topics as exclusion, deportation, chain migration, refugees, asylees, borders, integration, and citizenship, along with key theological concepts such as hospitality, theoxenia, sanctuary, theopolitics, and social responsibility.

Allard, Heyer, and Nadella organized the book into three parts. In the first, legal scholars engage the contours of both domestic and international migration and migration policy, investigating key themes in the law and migration. In the first chapter, Daniel Kanstroom points out the conceptual and practical limitations of the traditional categories of migration control—exclusion, admission, and deportation—by arguing that they have become “both descriptively inaccurate and normatively inadequate” (11). According to Kanstroom, the highly problematic structural components of the global migration system have intrinsically to do with these traditional categories in that the stories of exclusion, admission, and deportation involve “harsh, punitive, arbitrary, anomalous, discriminatory, and disproportionate” practices (20).

Enid Trucios-Haynes focuses on how migration workers are exposed to “discrimination on multiple grounds, such as race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality” (29). Laying out multiple visas categories (including both temporary and long-term work visas), Trucios-Haynes highlights how “lower-skilled workers” face numerous, often insurmountable, roadblocks in seeking employment-based permanent residence (34). It is refreshing and encouraging to see that a legal scholar discovers the ideological source to protect immigrant workers’ human rights in Christian ethical values.

In a legal argument against former president Trump’s 2019 immigration reform plan, which attempted to upend the so-called chain migration immigration system, Bill Ong Hing argues that “family reunification is certainly at the heart of the U.S. immigration system today” (51). On this ground, Hing counterattacks the Trump administration’s anti-immigration administrative policies. He specifically highlights that the Trump administration’s attack on family-based immigration is based on xenophobia. As Hing also implies, if the economic contributions made by migration families to the US economy are taken into consideration, the Trump administration’s move cannot be justified.

Michele R. Pistone thematizes the anti-immigration legal trend that targets perhaps the most vulnerable group of people in the world of migration—refugees, asylees, and stateless persons (who, as Kanstroom notes in his chapter, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben would call homo sacer [27]). Although it is true that various international agreements and domestic laws have saved the lives and preserved the human dignity of millions of people, wealthy countries have also attempted to deter refugees and asylum seekers from securing their rights (76). Without a doubt, the rise of a global trend against immigration denotes the problematic moral status of the world. As Pistone correctly perceives, government officials and large swathes of the public do not act from a purely humanitarian perspective (84). Against this global legal trend, Pistone especially calls for a more community-based solidarity work of nongovernmental institutions of society.

Allard deconstructs the generally accepted notion of borders “as a site of both exclusion and engagement” by introducing a more flexible and thus unsettled perspective that “a border is neither a fixed condition nor a hermetic barrier” (88). Allard traces the idea of the border as a site of exclusion back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which marked an important moment in the development of the modern, territorial, sovereign state (89). His analysis complicates this old, rigid concept of the border by critically appropriating the three insights of “critical border studies”: heterogeneity, performativity, and ambivalence. These tripartite insights help readers see more clearly that the border is not only or necessarily a site of exclusion, but also a site of engagement (103).

Donald M. Kerwin takes up a difficult question: In an age of rising nationalism, nativism, and disintegration, how could a society create conditions that facilitate social integration, especially between citizens and immigrants? Kerwin’s fundamental approach is epitomized by his remark, “Integration occurs, in part, through institutions that nurture, educate, employ, train, and empower immigrants” (121). The integrative role of such “integration pillars” as “family, the workplace, labor unions, political parties, schools, faith communities, the armed forces, and civic associations” are thus critical to achieve and keep social integration (121).

In the final chapter of the book’s first part, Rose Cuison-Villazor examines the last step of the naturalization process—the oaths of renunciation and allegiance, which she calls “the loyalty oath” (127). She tries to answer the thorny question of “whether the loyalty oath should still be part of the naturalization process” (127). What she is trying to do in this chapter is to show inconsistency between the requirement of the loyalty oath and the hospitality tradition. This issue is rarely discussed in the field of migration studies, and Cuison-Villazor’s voice is not only refreshing and inspirational but also bold and even daring given that many—both citizens and immigrants—take it for granted to take an oath as a necessary step to prove themselves. Cuison-Villazor offers a critical perspective about what it means to become a citizen in a new world (141).

The six chapters of the book’s second part offer different theological perspectives on the phenomenon of the migration of people. Analyzing the Hebrew Bible’s varied terminology for foreigner, Safwat Marzouk analyzes how Hebrew terms such as ger, toshav, nokhri, and zar were employed to address the phenomenon of human migration in ancient Israel (148). The purpose of this in-depth hermeneutical investigation of these Hebrew terms is to offer a critical-biblical perspective on discerning different cases of human migration. Marzouk summarizes his main goal as follows: “The critical question that faces any community with regard to migration has to do with discernment: how to show solidarity to migrant, the asylum seeker, and the refugee who are in need, and how to recognize the alien who might pose harm to the host community without falling into xenophobia” (159).

Nadella’s chapter provides a New Testament account of migration, with a distinctive focus on philoxenia—the love of the strangers. According to Nadella, unlike the Greek idea of hospitality, which emphasizes the mutual obligations of the hosts and the guests, the New Testament “puts much greater emphasis on hospitality to strangers” (166). Nadella offers a refreshing interpretation of the Matthaean Gospel, incorporating a contextual-hermeneutical approach and addressing the possibility that Syria was the location of the community for whom Matthew wrote (169).

In their chapters on a theology of migration and on theological responses to unwanted migration, respectively, Christian theologians Luis N. Rivera-Pagán and Gemma Tulud Cruz point out what it means to have a theological perspective on the phenomenon of human migration. For Rivera-Pagán, the core of migration theology lies in the transformation of the culture of “xenophobia” to that of “xenophilia,” contra the “clash of civilizations” theories offered by scholars like Samuel Huntington (182). Cruz develops her migration theology through the “question of unwanted migration.” In so doing, she seeks a type of practical theology. Cruz discovers the key theological framework in formulating her practical theology of migration by emphasizing the “oneness” of the eucharistic motif: “one bred, one body, and one people” (201).

In related chapters on the theopolitics of the migrant and on social responsibility and moral imagination in a Christian ethics of migration, Ulrich Schmiedel and Heyer, respectively, take different approaches to constructing different migration theologies. While Schmiedel establishes his migration theology from a theopolitical stance, Heyer does so from a Christian ethical perspective. For Schmiedel, the most formidable challenge is Carl Schmitt’s decisionist model of dividing people between the friend and the foe. Against this theopolitical model, Schmiedel introduces a “new political theology” (222) of migration by drawing on Jürgen Moltmann, Johann Baptist Metz, and, especially, Dorothee Sölle. As he says, “vulnerability is at the core” of his new theopolitics (227). From a Christian ethical perspective, Heyer calls us to renewed attention to social dimensions of Christian ethics, which helps make apparent the global contexts and macrostructural factors that compel migration beyond the aspect of migrants’ dignity. Such concepts as “social anthropology,” “social sin,” and “tempering of sovereignty rights” become important in her Christian social ethics of migration (238). She summarizes her approach thus: “a Christian social ethic calls for not only defending human rights or providing hospitality to strangers but also unmasking the complex structures and ideologies that abet personal complicity, preventing justice for migrants” (242).

The third section of the book contains chapters co-authored by a legal scholar and a theologian. The construction of this interdisciplinary dialogue, in my view, is the most significant and recommendable contribution this volume brings to the larger scholarly discourse on the phenomenon of human migration. As far as I know, this kind of in-depth interdisciplinary work between legal scholars and theologians is unique. For that matter, this book is worth reading for further interdisciplinary dialogue in both academic and public contexts.

In these final chapters, Cuison-Villazor and Schmiedel explore the themes of citizens, strangers, and migrants by investigating the legal and theological implications of the humanitarian organization No More Death/No Más Muertes, which supports migrants near the US-Mexico border. Kerwin and Marzouk engage the themes of hospitality, integration, and assimilation, emphasizing the importance of an attitude toward hospitality. Cruz and Trucios-Haynes critically reflect on the role of inequality in the structures of international labor migration. Hing and Nadella team up to provide historical and moral reasons why the United States should accept refugees from regions such as Central America. Finally, Heyer and Kanstroom explicate the uncertain future of migration by examining three cases of the tensions between empathy and legitimacy.

This volume helps the reader see more clearly why religion and theology matter when it comes to the phenomenon of human migration, especially in an age of global migration. The Christian religion, despite its limitations and infirmities, can help modern society transcend territorial social imaginations and myopic political ideologies that serve only to uphold the culture of xenophobia and indifference and the system of exploitation and oppression.