“You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21)
“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Leviticus 19:33-34)
“You shall have the same rule for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 24:22)
“You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother. You shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were a sojourner in his land.” (Deuteronomy 23:7)
Exhortations like these occur repeatedly in the Pentateuch. The idea was clearly important: People from other countries who have come to Israel and Judah should be treated by the same standards as natives. They shouldn’t be oppressed. Christian nationalists think otherwise, though I’ve never heard them explain why.
Perhaps they think this rule expired with Jesus’s coming, like the kosher rules. It’s a standard part of Christian doctrine that the Mosaic Law doesn’t apply to Christians, though these same people insist on posting the Ten Commandments everywhere. Maybe they’d say, “Hey, we never had ancestors living in Egypt!”
You won’t convince any MAGAs by citing these verses that their hatred of immigrants is wrong. Trying to win an argument by accepting your opponent’s premises is usually a bad idea anyway. It’s just interesting to observe the hypocrisy.
They might say, “We don’t hate all immigrants, just those who haven’t managed to negotiate a years-long bureaucratic labyrinth!” But the verses I quoted don’t say anything about welcoming only government-approved sojourners. The travelers in the Biblical lands hadn’t gone through border checkpoints, applied for visas, tried to get green cards, or live in fear that their permissions might be revoked or they might arbitrarily be grabbed off the street. They just came. Today they would be considered illegal aliens.
Even if the nativists consider the Mosaic Law past its use-by date, there are the words attributed to Jesus in Matthew chapter 25. “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” He’s literally telling those who harm strangers to go to Hell.
Religions change, and I get annoyed when outsiders tell followers of a religion, “You’re doing it wrong.” But we can ask why people claim to be devoted to a religion yet selectively ignore some parts of their holy text while insisting on the importance of adjacent verses. It’s almost as if they choose their conclusions first, then go looking for Bible verses to support them.