Jemar Tisby: Jesus Was a Migrant

This week on 20 Minute Takes, Nikki Toyama-Szeto talks with Jemar Tisby. He's a bestselling author, historian, and producer of the recently released documentary: Jesus Was A Migrant, directed by Lauren Vernea. They discuss today's political landscape surrounding immigration, the consequences of politics leading theology instead of the other way around, and the various stands of Christian thought and spirituality which have sought to seek the flourishing of migrant communities.

You can learn more about Jemar's work here.
Follow him on Instagram and Threads.

20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action
Hosted by Nikki Toyama-Szeto 
Produced by David de Leon
Editing and Mixing by Wiloza Media
Music by Andre Henry

Transcript

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20MT (SE08) - Jemar Tisby

[Nikki]
Hello, this is Nikki Toyama-Szeto. I'm the Executive Director of Christians for Social Action and your host for this episode of 20-Minute Takes. Today, I talk with Dr. Jemar Tisby. He's a New York Times bestselling author, a historian, an educator, and he's one of my favorite people to talk to when I have questions about the intersection of race, the Christian faith, and social change. On today's episode, Jamar talks with us about the documentary Jesus Was a Migrant, a project that he helped to produce. Join us for this episode of 20-Minute Takes.

[Nikki]
Dr. Jamar Tisby, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of 20-Minute Takes.

[Jemar]
When you call, I'm there. Good to see you again.

[Nikki]
Good to see you. I was so excited to see this new movie documentary that you have out, Jesus Was a Migrant. I think one of the things that I was curious about, this movie is coming in the midst of a longer history of Christian engagement with refugees and immigration.
Can you tell us just a little bit of the highlights of that history of Christians and their engagement with refugees?

[Jemar]
Basically, Christians took the Bible seriously when it talked about immigrants, the foreigner, the stranger, as the Bible puts it. There's a line in there by Stephen Reeves, who's the executive director of FaithWorks, which does racial justice and immigration work. It's so powerful because he says, when it comes to this topic, the Bible is entirely one-sided.

It is in favor of the immigrant, the refugee, the migrant, the stranger. It tells you to welcome them, to treat them like you're native-born, as it says in Leviticus. What's remarkable to me is that it hasn't always been the case that immigration policy was starkly divided along political partisan lines among Christians.

There was a sense in which this was just a good thing to help people welcome them into the nation, be supportive of them, not universally, but obviously there's always divisions of some sort. Nevertheless, when you get into the second half of the 20th century, that's when we start seeing some of the fractures and some of what we now see as so divisive when it comes to immigration policy. But there have been waves of Christians, even evangelicals, who have created nonprofits, ministries to welcome the stranger.

[Nikki]
Yeah. I appreciate just the connection. For you as a historian, I always feel like I get oriented to what's happening now when I hear you unpack history.

Is it surprising to you as a historian that there is a muddiness where the Christian tradition for such a long time has actually been in one direction? Does it surprise you that at the second half of the century that we're seeing some of these shifts?

[Jemar]
It disappoints me for sure. I think not so much surprising. Because immigration policy has always been racially coded, you go back to 1882 was the first official immigration law on the books, and that was the Chinese Exclusion Act.

[Nikki]
That's right, yeah.

[Jemar]
And if you just look at that one law, it's intersecting with so many things that we're now seeing. So race, ethnicity, nation, right? So it's specifically targeted toward one particular group from one particular country, right?

Ethno-racial coded. But it's also bringing in economics and labor because the excuse on paper was, well, they're taking away jobs from white men. They're coming in and they are crowding out the job market from quote-unquote deserving Americans.

And that language sounds eerily familiar today. That one particular ethnic or immigrant group is targeted, usually non-white, and because they don't want to make a baldly racial claim, they'll say, well, it's because of jobs. It's because they're sending over criminals and undesirables and all of these things that get around the fact that it is specifically pointed toward immigration from certain nations.

And we can hear this in the language and the rhetoric from politicians. We can also see it in policy. For instance, white South Africans were considered acceptable refugees, but not people from majority black or brown nations.

[Nikki]
So some of these words are just used as proxies for kind of racial markers of who we do want more of in our country and maybe who we're not going to be welcoming to. Do you have a sense as to those, I mean, I just feel like there's so much in the air right now that is Christian language that is being used to counter this Christian tradition of welcoming the stranger. Are there common themes that you're noticing that folks are using kind of Christian language to support this opposition, this enforcing the borders, that sort of a thing?

[Jemar]
So, yes, some of it is law and order language, right? So they're crossing illegally. We wouldn't mind if they came, you know, through the legal processes, which that rhetoric completely ignores the fact that they're actually cutting off the legal pathways into the country.

That's what was at the heart of this film, Jesus Was a Migrant, when an executive order canceled the CBP One app, literally an app on your phone where you could schedule a legal appointment to begin the intake process. Well, you cancel that, 270,000 migrants who were trying to enter the nation now have no pathway and now are stuck or some labyrinthine bureaucratic process that is technically legal but is intentionally designed to be so difficult as to weed people out, right? So some of that law and order language is in there, but I think it's really part of a matrix of beliefs that we label white Christian nationalism.

We are hearing echoes of this because what's in that ideology of white Christian nationalism is this idea of who is truly American, who truly belongs, and that is often coded, whether explicitly or implicitly, as European-descended people, who we would call white people in this nation, right? And then all others, well, they have varying degrees of acceptance. It expands, it contracts across different eras, and right now we're in an era of contraction, and it's the idea that what is truly American and also what is truly Christian is Western, is European, is white, is North American, and everything else is somehow strange, alien, as they would say it, even criminal.

[Nikki]
Mm-hmm. This movie, Jesus Was a Migrant, follows your journey to the border. What made you originally say yes to take that trip?

[Jemar]
Martin Luther King Jr. has this powerful quote I find myself coming back to again and again that we are caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality that basically, you know, the Bible says when one part of the body hurts, the whole body hurts, right? And so I have long been interested in interracial, interethnic solidarity. Plus, I grew up in a town where the majority was Latino, and this is in northern Illinois, north of Chicago.

So for decades, it's been like this. So it was part of my own background in history. So I wanted to go with FaithWorks.

We tried to get it going a couple of times. Finally, we're able to make it happen in October 2025. And in addition to this being part of my own background, being part of the sort of theological DNA that I think should be part of the true church, there was also an urgent sociopolitical need to address the immigration crisis.

You know, it's just been, let's just name it, it's been the most public form of, I would call it injustice. The most public form of policy from this administration, and namely from ICE, right? And these abductions off the street, and we saw the murders in Minneapolis on camera, but also at the border, through policy, in these so-called detention centers, concentration camps, really.

So I think that part of the motivation to go was to tell that story, was to keep it at the forefront, and to make sure we do something, not only as people in the United States, but as fellow believers in Christ.

[Nikki]
Yes, I totally agree with you. I think it's one of the policies that I feel has really reached into so many neighborhoods in really particular ways. I can't even tell you how many people I know now carry papers on them, Asian community included.

You see something in the documentary that was cutting to me, that in this moment, we see politics leading theology, when really it ought to be theology leading politics.

[Jemar]
Yes.

[Nikki]
That was convicting. Yeah, say more.

[Jemar]
That gets back to what you were talking about previously, like how did it go from, there could be a theological agreement around welcoming the stranger, and how now, one of the tensions, the contrast we point out in the marketing for the film is that many of the people trying to cross the border into the United States are themselves Christian, and many people celebrating the fact that they are now locked out also call themselves Christian. So how within the household of God do you have people rejecting and stiff-arming those who should be siblings in Christ? I think that is because politics is leading theology rather than theology is leading politics.

So what does that mean? It means that, to put it plainly, this will to power, this we will be in charge no matter what, has caused these compromises of the faith, these betrayals of the faith, which what we're seeing in terms of this political allegiance to a far-right, exclusionary, xenophobic politics is not a stark departure from some true faith that they once had. I would say that this has been baked in, and that there were moments in our nation when it was less acceptable to be overtly racist or xenophobic, but now the pendulum has swung where it's pretty acceptable, maybe even celebrated in certain parts, and certainly it is structurally embedded in these policies.

And that has to do with putting fear of people over fear of God. That has to do with serving mammon as master rather than God. It has to do with a sense of aggrievement that this group has been wronged somehow, even though they still hold most all the levers of power.

So all of that combines, and it's a very earthly, temporal view. It is not what Christ would teach us about the kingdom of God and about the heavenly kingdom and about how to be citizens here on earth and in heaven.

[Nikki]
That is powerful that you're saying this is the natural progression for something that at different points has surfaced, but has been maybe more palatable. So it actually sounds like it's a little bit deceptive to say, oh, well, on this particular branch or stream, that's really against kind of a Christian ethic or a Christian world. But part of what you're saying is the problem is more deeply rooted even further back.

[Jemar]
A hundred percent. I mean, I've got a book coming out next year, and I'm drawing on the work of a new wave of historiography, which is saying what we now call evangelicalism, and I keep bringing that up because as we think about the Christians who are advocating for these really harsh policies, when you look at the polling data, people who identify as evangelicals, specifically white evangelicals, are the ones most in support of these policies.

So I'm not picking on a group randomly. I'm just saying these are the groups that support these policies most strenuously. And that is actually not surprising when you look at the history, which really a focal point is post-World War II anti-communism.

Well, how on earth does that play into it? Well, because in the effort to make the world safe for democracy, as they put it, they set up this contrast, not only politically between democracy and communism, but also religiously between Christianity and atheism. And so they would call it godless communism, and they would call it Christian democracy.

Now what they meant by Christian democracy was what we would call conservative or even far-right kind of politics, and a movement coalesced around these political ideologies, these political platforms and policies, whether it be law and order, whether it be the war on drugs, the war on crime, all those kinds of things, which then lent themselves to these really harsh surveillance, policing, detention, weaponization policies that we see now Christians being in support of.

[Nikki]
Are there streams of theological reflection and conviction that you feel are reliable foundations for the change that I think a good number of Christians are wanting, when they were sort of exceptionalizing what's happening with immigration? Is there sort of a different Christian heritage or tradition that you feel like, no, actually, that is the one that is the fruit that sort of fights what we see happening on our streets around immigration and refugees, that is the natural extension to these times?

[Jemar]
Yes, it's a great question, and it's one of those ones where when you start looking for answers or responses, it actually can encourage you and give you hope because you start finding all of these movements. So obviously the Latin American liberation theology movement was literally born in ideas of liberation from oppression. Any theologies from oppressed groups are going to provide light and guidance in these issues.

There is the sanctuary movement of Christian churches in the United States that say, we will be a sanctuary for immigrants. Whatever the laws might be, these are human beings first. We're going to make sure they have food, clothing, housing, education, care for their children, health care, those kinds of things, and the church will be a safe place for that.

Those are churches in the United States. In the 1980s, there was a specific movement called the sanctuary movement, but even to this day, there are churches who explicitly identify themselves as sanctuary churches. There are all kinds of nonprofits from FaithWorks to World Relief to many local organizations working on behalf of immigrants that are often faith-based.

I'll tell one quick story, which is part of the policy ramifications of this administration has been cutting the funding of NGOs and nonprofits that were helping immigrant populations. When we went to the border in Ciudad Juarez, there were migrant shelters, and the people in charge were saying, our only support now comes from the church. Everything else has been cut.

The funding's been cut, and so we can now only reliably count on the monthly or annual support we get from churches. Those are places of hope. The last thing I'll say is let's not overlook the Black Christian tradition, even in immigration, because here's the thing.

The surveillance tactics, the policing, the incarceration tactics, those were all rehearsed on Black bodies for decades. Now they're turning it toward immigrant populations without ever taking it away from Black populations. They're innovating.

They're getting better. So they learn those tactics by oppressing Black people in the United States. So what the Black Christian tradition says is how to resist that, how to live in the midst of this surveillance, this being profiled, which the Supreme Court has said is perfectly okay to racially profile people based on language or appearance or where they might be located.

We've lived that for generations, and so we found hope and strength in the church. My latest book, The Spirit of Justice, gets into all that, but we can still learn a lot from the U.S. Black Christian tradition even as we look at issues of immigration and people coming from abroad.

[Jemar]
That's super helpful. As I watched the documentary, one of the ahas for me was when Stephen talks about how he was in a room, and the room was surveyed. People said, how many folks here have been kidnapped?

And the room was mostly women and children, and more than half said, I've been kidnapped. That was pretty shocking to me because I think it drove home what exactly some of the push factors are for this movement of people in a little bit of a different way. For your own experience as a producer, as a person who has been involved in walking alongside this story, was there a particular moment that was an aha moment for you or something that you really hope people will take away from the experience of journeying with migrants through this documentary?

[Jemar]
There are several moments. First, when you watch the documentary, you'll hear from Anira Cano, who works at FaithWorks. She said something in passing in the documentary that I think a lot of people might gloss over, but she says, as a Latino woman, I'm being racially profiled.

When you actually pause and consider what that means, it is chilling. That means that by her name, by her appearance, by her accent, by her bilingualness, she could be a target for detention, incarceration, harassment, just by the way she looks and speaks. And she grew up in El Paso, right on the border, right?

So this is very personal to her. But the idea that the ways that she has to now navigate daily life, it's making sure people know where she's going, where she is, when she should be back so that if she doesn't show up, they know there's a problem. Carrying papers, right?

Just wondering if she goes out to the store to run errands, will she be stopped, harassed, asked for papers, detained? That is chilling in the land of the free, right? Supposedly.

The other part that really got me is you'll see in the documentary a father talking about his family being detained. So there's another family in there fleeing cartel persecution. They murdered her husband.

They threatened to kill her daughter, so she ran away. But they were not detained. They got to the border, and they were turned away.

This other family was actually detained. In the detention center, it's almost worse than what we see on the streets because we don't see it. It's hidden.

There's no accountability. So what happened in there is they have a child who's under 10 years old. He's severely autistic.

He's nonverbal, and he has a thing with texture. So he can't chew solid food. He can only take it softened, blended up.

So they're in this detention center. They're trying to explain this to the guards. Like, our son can't eat this slop that you're giving us.

Can we have access to a blender, to oatmeal, to other kinds of food he will eat? No one would even listen to them, much less accommodate them. And so their son, again, less than 10 years old, went for days without eating, and this almost completely nonverbal child could only say these words, “Mama sopa.”

“Mom, soup.” Can I have soup? And it was so devastating to me because you have a neurodivergent child.

They're being detained. They're not being cared for, and it's a child.

[Nikki]
Yeah.

[Jemar]
It's a human being, and what parent, what adult wouldn't want to care and see to the needs of this child? And yet in these detention centers, these incarceration centers, the humanity was completely lost.

[Nikki]
Wow. It feels so resonant with that Matthew 25 scripture where Jesus is saying, you know, when you went to go visit the imprisoned, when you closed the naked, when you fed the hungry, you know, they were like, when did we do that to you, Jesus? And Jesus says, when you did it unto those, you did that unto me.

And that just feels so powerful and visceral, as you've just described that, that those guards had an opportunity to respond to the image of God in that child, and their response is pretty heartbreaking. And at the same time, we're also having that opportunity to respond to the image of God in our family members, these migrants, refugees, these folks who are so vulnerable. And I feel kind of convicted of what is the response that we as a community but also individually, how are we responding as if unto Jesus?

It is a courageous piece of filmmaking that you all did. So thank you so much for making those stories much nearer to us.

[Jemar]
This Was a Migrant is the first official production of Tisby Studios. And what we do is tell transformative faith stories. It's primarily nonfiction because I'm a historian, but it's not solely.

So we will branch into narrative and scripted projects as well. This was a first foray. And what we're eager to do is to – we're not trying to sort of reach across the aisle to people who are completely immersed and embracing this white Christian nationalism.

What we want to do is speak to a coalition of the willing, to people who already get it but maybe aren't engaged. Maybe they're empathetic, but they're not activated yet. And there is a power to not just storytelling broadly but film.

There is an accessibility there. So just a quick story. We did our first house party screening.

It was so cool. It was here in Louisville where I'm based. And just somebody who's followed my work said, we would like to do a screening at our home.

We'll invite some folks. And would you come? I said, for sure.

This is like what we did it for. And what was so cool was we got in that room, and it was catalytic. It was people who were coming from a broad array of Christian backgrounds, some very progressive, some kind of straightforwardly evangelical, who would never be in the same space, now in the same space, some who were actively engaged in immigration work, some who only saw what they saw on the news.

And then to see everyone's faces just looking at the screen and the film being able to meet everyone where they were, somehow, some way. Some saying, those are stories I've heard before. I can say that's 100% true.

And now finally somebody has a megaphone and is saying it to more people. To others saying, I've never knew this. I can't believe this is happening.

What do we do? So that's what we're going for. And we've pursued this sort of innovative distribution model where we're not just putting it up on YouTube.

We're saying host a screening, gather a group, because we believe wherever two or three are gathered, the Holy Spirit's there and something's going to happen. So we've got a slate of projects that are early in production, so I can't be too specific about it, but this is a moving train. And we are excited to partner with other people and organizations and tell stories that really matter.

[Nikki]
I think that's great. I appreciate that it's playing a catalytic role in the context of a community. And I do feel like that that is, it's really powerful.

I think it's also, it's not very long. And so in the same ways, it's both very deep, but it's also an excellent primer that it just pulls from different things that folks might find a little familiar or not actually realize they're related. So in that sense, it really like, it helps clarify and make sense of different disparate pieces.

So that I thought was fantastic. So thank you so much, Jamar. We appreciate you taking time to join us.

[Jemar]
Appreciate you. Thank you.

[Nikki]
20-Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action. Our music was created by Andre Henry, and this episode was mixed and engineered by Wiloza Media. If you liked this episode, spread the word by subscribing, reviewing, or sharing.

I'm your host, Nikki Toyama-Szeto. If you want to find out more about our work, visit the website at ChristiansForSocialAction.org.