Jonah 3:10-4:11
The book of Jonah offers a reminder of the love of God always turned toward the Other, the outsider, the so-called enemy.
Jonah, at the end of the book, is angry that God has spared Nineveh, a city of enemy foreigners. God uses the tree, which gives Jonah shade, to remind Jonah that God's care extends to everyone simply because of their very existence. "You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night," God says to Jonah, "And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also many animals?"
God's concern for Nineveh is not because of what they have done or what they can do, not because of their productivity or economic value or ability to assimilate into the proper culture or good values, but simply because there are many people and animals there. God's creation has value in itself.
Such a simple reminder of base human dignity is the basis of Migration With Dignity. Too often immigration policy becomes a place for adjudicating worth on the basis of nation of origin, ethnicity, education level, economic impact, criminal history or lack thereof, and many other qualities. But ultimately, every person deserves the protections of Migration With Dignity – basic human rights – simply because they exist.
Hannah Bowman is a member of the Episcopal Migration Caucus who lives in Los Angeles, the founder of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons, and the author of Abolition Ecclesiology: A Spatial Theology for a Church Against Prisons (forthcoming from Fortress Press in November 2026)