In recent weeks, distressing images of detained children, renewed
calls for drastic immigration restrictions, and the United States
Supreme Court’s decision upholding a travel ban against Muslim-majority
countries have intensified national discourse on immigration policy.
These developments should strongly resonate with Orthodox Christians.
Though the church’s demographics have certainly changed over the past
century, Orthodoxy flourished in the United States during the early
1900s as a church built by, and for, immigrants. Orthodox Christians
must draw on their histories to speak credibly to the anxieties of
migration, the human toll of detention and deportation, and the negative
implications of immigration restrictions, entry quotas, and normalized
xenophobia.
One argument employed to support stringent immigration policies comes
from those who insist that since their immigrant ancestors “came
legally” and prospered, others should be held to the same standard. The
truth proves a little more complicated. This
is particularly exemplified by the thousands of Orthodox Christians who
migrated here from Imperial Russia before 1917. If you are one of their
descendants, as I am, one or more the following three statements may be
true: Your ancestor broke at least one nation’s immigration laws to
travel to the United States. They required significant assistance to
enter and make their way in America. Finally, they very possibly
traveled as an undocumented person.
Researching in the records of the United States Immigration and
Naturalization Service at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., I
uncovered many files in which Russian Orthodox immigrants vividly
described harrowing journeys from tsarist Russia. In their stories, I
repeatedly found admissions to “stealing the border” (красть границу), a
form of undocumented migration. Subject to imperial demographic
policies that severely curtailed international migration for most
Orthodox Christians, and often lacking the money to pay for an
international passport, many migrants simply sidestepped the state. They
instead traveled without authorization, hiring shadowy immigration
brokers whose hefty fees bought passage across the Russian border,
evasion of police and border agents, and food and lodging during the
clandestine journey to a seaport. Mostly adult men traveling alone,
these migrants risked danger and arrest for the potential of returning
home to their families in Russia with pockets stuffed with dollars.
In New York, the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of
North America were aware of migrants stealing the border, and took
measures to both discourage the custom and mitigate its lasting personal
impact. A church-produced newspaper circulated in both the United
States and Russia strongly advised potential travelers against the
practice, as “…in fact it turns out to be far more expensive, for the
agent robs the peasant blind.” Still, such migrants came in droves. As
one immigrant later recalled, thousands upon thousands arrived
“destitute, humiliated, sick, without documents, helpless, in a new
country knowing no one and nothing!”
In 1908, archdiocesan leaders founded the Russian Immigrant Society, a
social service agency established to help these vulnerable Orthodox
migrants enter, settle, and find work in the United States. The society
assisted over 3700 immigrants in its first year, and over 50,000 across
its history. On Ellis Island, a society representative kept an eye out
for Orthodox Christians barred from entry. By 1913, this representative
was assisting upwards of 3000 migrants per year, averaging over nine new
cases per day. He arranged and paid for migrants’ appeals, then
attended immigration court hearings to vouch for their wellbeing. So
many were detained at Ellis Island that in 1911, a society priest
offered Christmas prayers in its detention center for several hundred
Russian, Greek, Syrian, and other Orthodox Christians. Upon entry, the
society referred migrants to the Russian Immigrant Home on Manhattan’s
Lower East Side, where they received meals, housing, and job contacts,
and prayed in its chapel for success in America.
While the church provided spiritual grounding and material support,
the workplace shaped migrants’ lives in America. In the shadows of
Pennsylvania’s foundries, Colorado’s mines, and Detroit’s assembly
lines, Russians packed into boarding houses where they shared beds in
shifts, and took their meals in dingy saloons. Toiling in jobs few
others would accept, many languished at work due to language barriers
and xenophobic foremen. “This Babylon hid many away in its workshops, in
stifling places, seated behind looms, behind tailors’ benches, behind
sewing machines,” St. Alexander Hotovitzky decried in a 1912 essay on
the plight of Russian workers, “strewn on the docks, thrown about along
tunnels, along the mills.” American life broke these workers’ bodies and
tried their spirits, but they were not neglected. Immigrant Society
members like St. Alexander visited these workers in labor camps,
immigrant neighborhoods, and even jails to provide spiritual care and a
touch of home. Though not every Orthodox migrant turned to the Russian
Immigrant Society, its ministries touched thousands of Orthodox lives,
no matter how crooked the path leading them to the Immigrant Home, nor
arduous the trials after they settled.
The Russian experience reflects but one strain in the multinational
history of Orthodox migration to the United States. Yet it stands as a
provocative invitation to think critically about the terrors,
insecurities, and legal ambiguities within every immigrant story.
Orthodox Christians of all ethnicities have not been spared the fear of
the border agent and the indignities of detention, nor been unaffected
by immigration restrictions and nativist paranoia. The Orthodox were not
the first, and certainly not the last to come to the United States to
bolster a national economy built on the backs of unskilled laborers who
toil “in stifling places” for the promise of dollars. And they surely
did not go it alone, relying on their church as a bulwark against an
America that saw them as dispensable and invisible.
Orthodox Christians should have much to contribute to today’s
discourse. “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the
citizen among you” we read in Leviticus, and “you shall love the alien
as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Lev. 19:34).
Recalling how newly-arrived Orthodox Christians were clothed, fed, and
supported in their past hours of need, how can today’s faithful hesitate
to express solidarity with the thousands of migrant families
experiencing similar traumas in America today?
Aram G. Sarkisian is a doctoral candidate in history at Northwestern University, and the 2017-18 NEH Dissertation Completion Fellow of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University. He researches Orthodox Christianity in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States with emphases on immigration, labor, political radicalism, and lived religious experience.
Public Orthodoxy seeks to promote conversation by providing a forum for diverse perspectives on contemporary issues related to Orthodox Christianity. The positions expressed in this essay are solely the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Orthodox Christian Studies Center.