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Does anyone know the origin of the current sentiment of xenophobia prevalent in this day and age? As I have conversations with pastors, church members, and other people, national security is their main issue. Perhaps the aftermath of 9/11 elevated this issue to the forefront. September 11 reminded us of the delicate nature of democracy and the equally delicate peace enjoyed in the United States.[i] I traveled internationally during that time and I remember soldiers standing guard at several airports. However, xenophobia has risen since those days. Nativist sentiments post-9/11 turned against immigrants. I remember being home and receiving angry anonymous phone calls; “Get out of my country!” they shouted, as if I was to blame for the terrorist attacks. The perception was that the terrorists were immigrants, and that all immigrants were suspect. Somehow all immigrants, even those with proper documentation, were less than true Americans and posed a security threat no matter where they came from or how long they had lived in the United States. The issue was that the 9/11 hijackers had visas, entered, and remained legally in the United States. But the anti-immigrant sentiment became so strong that somehow we thought we could be all-powerful and secure the enormous porous borders of the United States – the southern border and then the northern border. Furthermore, everybody had to be screened and they somehow discovered the eleven million undocumented workers present in the Unites States. They were all a threat and had to be removed. I remember the strong anti-immigration proponents on television. And I remember how they pointed out that many Latinos were undocumented. People would come up to me and my Latino friends and ask point blank if we were legally present in the United States. It is like they assume that every Latino they see is undocumented.I am a Pentecostal and I attend church regularly. When these anti-immigrant sentiments peaked, I was deeply immersed in my Pentecostal Latino community of faith. In contrast to the society around us, my community of faith was not scared of the immigrants who happened to attend the church. We did not ask about people’s immigration status. The church regularly reached out to all people, and as far as I can remember no one asked about other people’s immigration status. We also had people who were Caucasian Americans who loved us and wanted to learn Spanish and immerse themselves in our cultures. Our community did not understand the fear and anger at the perception that some in our community may have been undocumented. When I became a pastor in New York, I had some members who confided in me that they entered the United States without documentation many years ago. However, they were given amnesty during Ronald Reagan’s presidency through the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Reagan was arguably the best friend to immigrant Latinos because of this opportunity. Politically, my experience is that there is no such thing as a “Latino vote.” Our communities come from diverse backgrounds: some lean left and others lean right but our values as a whole tend to be on the conservative side even among those who left oppressive countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. When President Trump said he was going to deport many people, the community still decided to vote for him.Immigration is not easy to control. People come to the Unites States on visas, and some choose to overstay their visas. The US typically sees 75 to 77 million visitors per year. In 2024 the grand total was 72,390,321 visitors.[ii] These are the legally permitted visitors with visas. One wonders how the US can control the mass movement of millions of people. Furthermore, visitors can stay for 180 days on a tourist visa and then apply to prolong their stay. The US also resettles refugees. The restrictions on refugee resettlement fluctuate according to the current presidency and its immigration policies. Since 1980, the US has resettled three million refugees.[iii]Undocumented immigration is less easy to control. According to estimates by the CBS network, the cost to deport one person is $19,599.[iv] More conservative costs place it at $14,614 per person. If in the year 2025, the government wishes to deport an estimated 11 million undocumented persons, this means it will spend between $215 to $160 billion US dollars to do so. Perhaps this exorbitant cost is the reason many are being deported without due process. The government is trying to save fiscally. However, it is trampling due process and habeas corpus. People who are in court proceedings over immigration are being arrested at their hearings and deported. But there is something darker at work for the government to use the military, federal law enforcement, and local police departments to enforce deportation, even though it is fiscally unsustainable. It is a matter of human affections and how one perceives and thinks of the “other.” Relating to the immigrant has to do with deep human dispositions. In Pentecostal spirituality we discuss orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy. This last term deals with the dispositions and the orientation of the heart. Many Americans think, “These people broke the law so deport them,” but theology is not merely a rational exercise. It is asking, Why did they transgress the border? Are they fleeing violence, poverty, and/or crime? Are they genuinely scared for their lives? Let us have the courage to understand before we make a judgment. In other words, let’s not be prejudiced or bigoted.  Notes & Bibliography[i] Department of Homeland Security, “September 11 Chronology,” https://www.dhs.gov/september-11-chronology (last accessed June 9, 2025).[ii] International Trade Administration, “International Visitors,” https://www.trade.gov/sites/default/files/2022-03/Annual-Arrivals-2000-to-Present%E2%80%93Country-of-Residence.xlsx (last accessed June 9, 2025). [iii] Migration Policy Institute, “U.S. Annual Refugee Resettlement Ceilings and Number of Refugees Admitted, 1980-Present,” https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/us-refugee-resettlement (Last accessed June 9, 2025).          [iv] Julia Ingram, “Trump’s plan to deport millions of immigrants would cost hundreds of billions, CBS News analysis shows,” October 17, 2024, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-plan-deport-immigrants-cost/ (last accessed June 9, 2025).

Watching news of ICE arrests and protests in Los Angeles, I cannot help but think how we have got here. The perception of many people who voted for President Trump is that there are too many “illegals” in this country. The reason for this impression, perhaps, is that the Latino presence in some states has increased exponentially in the last few decades. Towns with minimal or no Latino presence now have significant immigrants. The image below demonstrates this change in non-traditional Latino states, where the unprecedented growth has taken place.[i] According to the U.S. census bureau, between 2022 and 2023, the Hispanic population accounted for just under 71% of the overall growth of the United States population.[ii] Hispanics of any race grew to just over 65 million, an increase of 1.16 million (1.8%) from the prior year.[iii] This growth significantly contributed to the nation's total population gain of 1.64 million in 2023.[iv]I live in the small town of Cleveland, TN. I remember first arriving in Cleveland when I was in the first grade. I have been in and out of Cleveland since I was six years old. Back in those days—and aside from my sister—I was the only “Hispanic” kid in the school. No one knew much about me except that I spoke Spanish and that I was learning English. I may not have been fluent in English, but I was good at learning things and came to the classroom with strong abilities. Though I did not have the language skills to keep up with my peers at the beginning, a particular instance let me know that I could do what my peers could do. I remember the teacher gave out a math worksheet on my first day of class that I finished before all my peers. I also got all my answers correct. Later, I steadily learned English and spoke it fluently within a year. In fact, I spoke English with a southern accent. One time, my parents recorded a greeting to send to my grandmother on a cassette tape. When I visited my native Honduras in the late 1990s, my sister and I found the exact cassette tape with the recording on it. When we listened to it after all those years, we laughed because we had a thick southern accent.            I am now in my 40s, and the school system has changed. There are many more children of Latin American descent, as well as other heritages. My son’s middle school has a lot of Hispanic students. He played soccer on his team with children whose parents were 1st generation immigrants of Argentine, Chilean, Dominican, Honduran, Guatemalan, and Mexican heritage (among many non-Latin American backgrounds, of course). He would sometimes come up to me and ask me questions about what certain Spanish words meant. Here I am, nearly forty years after I first arrived in Cleveland and things have changed in this small town. But even though all the children I have met here have arrived through the proper channels or are born U.S.-citizens, there is a strong anti-immigrant sentiment in my community.            This is xenophobia: the dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries. Just because a person is brown, it does not mean that they were or have been “illegal.” Seeing ICE arrest U.S. citizens even after providing proper ID is a clear sign of racial profiling by those who are supposed to keep us safe. Seeing the military deployed at protests is a politicization of the military. The way that these politics are working out makes me wonder if brown people will ever be perceived as true U.S. citizens and equal. The Latino community has increased exponentially. It is nothing to fear. And even if one day they were to become a majority in the U.S., like the case of Blacks in South Africa, it appears they would still be a minority in terms of economics and/or power. I am a Christian and there are two important elements of faith that are important for us. The first is hospitality as a qualifier for leadership in the local church (1 Peter 4:9; 1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:8). I would also argue that it is a mark of a true Christian and a Spirit-filled life (Hebrews 13:2). The other element is compassion. If we remember the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10), good will and compassion extend beyond cultural, ethnic, racial, socio-economic, and nationalistic barriers. The radical nature of the Samaritan’s aid to the Hebrew man cannot be understated. The immigrant—whether legal or “illegal,” documented or undocumented—is our neighbor. We must now consider what it means for them to be our neighbor and what hospitality requires of us. Notes & Bibliography[i] US Census Bureau, “Percentage Change in the Hispanic or Latino Population by Country: July 1, 2022 to July 1, 2023,” https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/hispanic-population-change.html, last accessed June 19, 2023.[ii] US Census Bureau, “New Estimates Highlight Differences in Growth Between the U.S. Hispanic and Non-Hispanic Populations,“ June 27, 2024, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/population-estimates-characteristics.html (last accessed June 5, 2025).[iii] Ibid.[iv] Ibid.

“Write your name, for me, please,” she asked, a sturdy index finger tapping on a piece of paper, on the table at my aunt’s house. She was my paternal grandmother, Johanna, or Teacher Kate, as many people called her, and she was visiting her family in Toronto from Guyana. She would have been in her sixties then, a compact Black woman with flawless skin, a kind, steady gaze, and a resonant alto speaking voice. You could hear the mixture of crisp and precise British-influenced English that would have been expected of schoolteachers of Teacher Kate’s generation, born before World War I, in a corner of Amazonia and at the edge of the British Empire. You could also hear the rhythms of Caribbean creole speech, reflecting Guyana’s cultural legacy of majority populations descended from enslaved Africans and indentured folk from the Indian subcontinent and China, among others. Teacher Kate’s work in classrooms with children began before 1930 as a pupil-teacher, a form of teaching apprenticeship of young teenagers that was regularly practiced in the English-speaking Caribbean, in the early decades of the twentieth century. “Write your name, for me, please.” It was a directive, an invitation, and a question all rolled into one as we gathered around my aunt’s dining table. This was the late 1970s, pre-Internet, and I was in my early teens and already in high school. At that point, I had attended school for almost a decade split between Antigua and Canada, having spent my infancy in England, the country of my birth, as a child of the Windrush migration. The late 1970s was a magical transitional time in Black musical cultures as it was the era of the earliest commercial hip hop recordings, disco, funk, and R n’ B. We also listened to reggae, dancehall, calypso, and soca, Caribbean popular musical genres as well, new wave, punk and pop and rock n’ roll on AM and FM radio—our musical choices reflecting our transnational existence between recent Caribbean memories, the larger social context of a rapidly changing Canadian cultural landscape, contemporary Black Toronto realities in the Caribbean diaspora with close sonic and familial ties to major urban centres in the US and England to which Caribbean people had migrated. My friends and I emulated the look of the Pointer Sisters, The Emotions, or women lead vocalists in Chic. In our stylistic ambitions, we existed on a continuum of retro 1940s, church, and our imagined Studio 54. Our looks were achieved through making our own clothes with Simplicity and Butterick patterns, and reworking and mending heavily discounted seconds (discarded mass-produced clothing with what we considered minor and correctible mistakes like crooked seams and missing buttons) purchased cheaply in the garment district in downtown Toronto. That day I wore a belted, light beige, cap-sleeved dress in a shimmery fabric. My hair was still natural, a few years away from its 1980s curly perm, and picked out into a ‘fro. This was the late 1970s and in Black diasporic girl stylistic cultures in my corner of Toronto afros, cornrows, and other natural styles still reigned supreme with the occasional hot comb pressed straight styles for special occasions. I wondered why Teacher Kate would want me to write my name as an introduction to who I was as a student and her granddaughter. Why not ask me to read out loud or to recite memorized passages of poetry, bible verses, or dramatic plays? I had already had lots of practice in public speaking at school and in church, in Canada, where my first recitation was Langston Hughes’ poem “Freedom.” I remembered the church assembly in the Jamaican Pentecostal congregation that met in the basement of a mainstream Protestant church in our Toronto neighbourhood, now called Little Jamaica. We were Anglicans but my mother insisted that we go to the church down the road and around the corner from our house that we could reach without crossing a major intersection, and where our friends from school, recently arrived kids from the Caribbean, also went to church. “Write your name for me, please.” So, I picked up the pen and I wrote my first name in cursive and print. “Write your whole name.” I wrote my first and last name. My grandmother inspected my writing and complimented it while also giving some pointers to improve the cursive. “Write it larger,” she said. I wrote my name several times and each time I did so with more confidence than earlier versions. Now, I wrote my name every day in school on assignments and had done so for years. My friends and I even practiced our autographs. I had written my name years ago in my British passport as an elementary school student. This occasion, however, felt different. In the analog world of the late 1970s, just a few years before the launch of the digital age, my grandmother was inviting me to come to the table of knowledge, to take up space, and to write myself into the narrative in my own hand, boldly and confidently and with style. Words mattered. I got it. I created my signature in that moment with its large cursive letters. Teacher Kate lived for over three decades after that night, in total just over a hundred years. By the late 1970s she had already taught several generations doing the hard work in the post-slavery and British colonial era of the first half of the twentieth century of teaching literacy. Many had entered Guyana and other Caribbean territories as transports of empire through the forced migrations of the slave trade and indentureship, without signature—perhaps an “x,” or even a thumbprint for the latter. I was only Teacher Kate’s student for that one evening but I learned a crucial lesson of accepting the invitation to take my place and to write my name and write myself into being. Photo by Kat Stokes on Unsplash