Immigration and Faith describes immigration as an ongoing historical reality that human beings understand through distinct, powerful narratives. Such narratives help various groups of people frame and see migration through a discerning lens. In nations like the United States, with strong immigrant histories, the collision and interweaving of various migration narratives helps partially to explain the ever-shifting tensions and political struggles over immigration.
Migration stories, however, are not only about immigrants. Internal migration elicits similar cultural, scholarly, and theological narratives—of insiders and outsiders, welcome and fear, loss and success. Whether describing international or domestic migration, these “moving stories” interpret the collective experience both of migrants and others impacted by migration. Receiving communities from dominant cultures have much to say, too, and the stories may be constructed more to speak to their experiences than to those of immigrants. Finally, those who choose to remain in the places from which migrants depart also figure into migration narratives, often subtly and almost invisibly. Any honest account of migration, whether internal or international, must incorporate something of the experience and conditions of all three communities: moving, staying, relocating. Approaching narratives from this trifold perspective reveals migration as the multilateral, systemic reality that it is.
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