“How Can I Sing God’s Song in a Foreign Land?”: Immigrant Experience as Exile

Abstract

Most Americans can trace their origins to immigrants. Contemporary migration—internal or international, seasonal or permanent, voluntary or forced, unskilled or professional, legal or illegal—has arisen to an unprecedented scale as to radically change the “face of the earth” (Rosoli & Tomasi, 95–6, 98). Most immigrants tend to be marginalized politically, socially, culturally, linguistically, and demographically. Furthermore, marginalization can cut through inter-generational lines. Parents, sponsored by their children to join them abroad, are bewildered because their children have changed so much and because their grandchildren find them, as grandparents, more of a nuisance than an added source of affection. Marginalization also seems to be hereditary. Second-, third-, even fourth-generation descendants of, especially, non-white immigrants find themselves continually reminded that they do not really “come from here.” Any form of ministry to immigrants needs to take account of all these levels and aspects of marginalization. When does the immigrant experience become a religious or a theological predicament? How does the biblical theology of Exile assist immigrants in finding a theological language for their soul? Can immigrants, from their marginalized stance, become themselves ministering? If the theologians of liberation have found the redemptive potential of the Exodus, might not the immigrant find a similar potential in the Exile?