I was born in Korea and brought to the United States at 15 months old, receiving a new name and eventually new citizenship. My mother by adoption was second-generation German. My adoptive father’s maternal and paternal names were English.
I married into a name that’s Scottish (though more than two centuries of Swiss, German, English, and other backgrounds have diluted all but the name). When one of my children visited Scotland, a man in a shop showed her a book of family names that included the McFadden clan and then said warmly, “Welcome home.”
So, my national origin is Korean, my race is Asian, my family identity is grafted onto various European branches, and my citizenship is American. But regardless of my passport and family tree, who I am regarded to be is shifting now in a worrisome way. It’s always been true that people make assumptions based on appearance, perhaps confusing me with that other Korean they know or thinking I speak with a foreign accent. But that’s not what I mean.
My sixth-grade teacher spent part of her childhood in one of the incarceration camps that the US government established during World War II. President Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to round up and imprison some 120,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them US citizens.
It’s been 80 years since the internment camps were closed. Decades later, in 1988, President Reagan signed into law an act that apologized and acknowledged that the actions at the time were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
It’s shocking, then, that the Alien Enemies Act is being invoked today to deport people based on their country of origin and perceived ethnicity. In a country where almost everyone traces their ancestry back to immigrants, the United States should have special regard for those who find it necessary to cross borders.
In the 1700s, many Scots migrated to North America to escape poverty and injustice and to seek economic opportunity. The long-ago McFadden who traveled from Scotland (and generations later gave his name to me) arrived in Pennsylvania around the 1790s. Presumably, he was treated well (despite the young nation’s bellicose legislation of 1798).
Regardless of who’s making the laws, both then and now, we who dwell in God’s household hear a higher command: to treat the foreigner not only fairly, but with love.
“If a resident alien lives with you in your land, you are not to mistreat him. You are to treat the resident alien the same way you treat the native born among you—love him like yourself, since you were foreigners in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33-34, ISV).
Wendy McFadden is publisher of Brethren Press and executive director of communications for the Church of the Brethren.