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The term “illegal alien” is a hopelessly prejudicial term with overt racist connotations. First, the term did not exist until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It was created because many people saw Chinese immigrants as too exotic or strange. As such, they reacted against waves of immigration from Asia and barred their entry into the United States for ten years. The terminology “illegal alien” did not exist until the passage of this legislation.Consequently, people throw this terminology around, identifying people who are racially and ethnically different from the majority population as “illegal.” This means that from the beginning, those so labeled are understood to have transgressed the law and, since this is a secular state, to be beyond redemption. The conversation stops there. It cannot even be started because they are “illegal.”The other part of the term, “alien,” evokes something otherworldly—extraterrestrial—something that does not belong here, not only to this country, but to this planet. In popular culture, the term almost always refers to an extraterrestrial creature that is hostile and irreconcilable to humanity.For these reasons, this terminology is deeply unhelpful and divisive, and it reinforces the idea that these people can never be true citizens of the United States. They are rendered hopelessly other and, as such, are seen as people who must be expelled from the country—whether they have families or not, whether their children are citizens or not, whether they are in their house of worship or not, or whether they are at a high school graduation or not. They must be eliminated. This is the disease of hysteria at work. In many ways, it is suspicious and reeks of racism, ethnocentrism, prejudice, bigotry, nationalism, nativism, and isolationism.People labeled as illegal aliens have been granted amnesty in the past, most notably through Ronald Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Undocumented immigrants have also been allowed to work to regularize their status and move toward residency and/or citizenship. Often, these policies are tied to the economy. When workers are needed and the economy is strong, immigrants are welcomed. When the economy struggles, immigrants are rejected.But the heart of the matter is our posture toward those labeled as illegal aliens. To be transparent, in houses of worship I have met individuals who have divulged their irregular status to me. Very few of them say, “I came here because I want to be rich.” For example, I think of a man who told me that he grew up on a coffee farm. At one point, the price of coffee collapsed during the Coffee Crisis of 2000–2004. The cost of production became higher than the global market price. Faced with the choice of providing for his family or allowing them to starve, he immigrated to the United States.I have also met young people who grew up in the poorest parts of their countries. One young man never had shoes. He could not afford to attend school. He worked menial jobs, and when he was threatened with joining a gang or being killed, he made the decision to travel to the United States. The many unaccompanied minors who came to the United States in 2014 faced similar decisions. Their parents were the ones who sent them to family members or friends already living in the United States. It is not an easy decision. When immigrants who are not Mexican cross Mexico, they are often assaulted, harassed, abused, and exploited. Young girls and women prepare themselves because they know that at some point they will likely be sexually violated by thugs and criminals.In fact, many who come to the United States, including those traveling in migrant caravans, do not make it. They are maimed or killed, or they are recruited to work for criminal organizations. It is as though they are passing through a birth canal, through Mexico, toward a new birth on U.S. soil as they cross the border. When they arrive in the United States, with each immigrant who crosses the border, the American Dream is born anew. Many are not criminals, but rather brave individuals who enter the country to forge a better existence—one in which they and their children can be truly free.This is what the United States was created to be: a collection of people fleeing exploitation from around the world and daring to dream. We are a people forged from once-enslaved communities struggling toward a new path forward. In the biblical narrative, we find dreamers—Abraham, Joseph, Daniel, Ruth, Esther, Peter, and Paul. They were people who crossed borders, contributing in exile to the life of their communities, even as empires may have regarded them as aliens.