How End Times Theology Shaped U.S. Immigration Policy

The book of Revelation is full of horrifying imagery. In the culminating book of the whole biblical story, John of Patmos narrates an end-times battle royale of monstrous armies and a harvest of human grapes that leads to blood flowing from a winepress. It ends with the sinners being thrown into a lake of fire. This should give any Christian pause before claiming that the New Testament is a book of peace.

But for Yii-Jan Lin, associate professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity and author of Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration, the explicit violence is only part of the problem of Revelation. Even more troubling is the vision of the “New Jerusalem” that will arise: a city for God’s chosen, with the undesirables left outside the gates. It’s this vision of exclusion, Lin argues, that has been the central religious authorization for the United States’ immigration policies. 

The U.S. has always considered itself as this New Jerusalem — a land specially blessed by God — but also one that is only available to those specially chosen. And from the establishment of the United States as a nation, as Lin discusses, this drive to only welcome certain individuals has been heavily focused on questions of race and national origin. The notion that the U.S. is a nation that welcomes immigrants is a myth that contradicts historical record. Instead, our “[i]mmigration and naturalization laws serve ultimately to create the ideal population as conceived by those who set policy and legislate,” Lin writes.

Lin acknowledges the U.S.’s vile treatment of Indigenous populations and enslaved people, and reads these stories alongside the “apocalyptic exclusion of Chinese immigrants.” These immigrants were welcomed in the early 1800s as necessary labor for the completion of the transcontinental railroad. When all the tracks were set, however, they became the object of racist vitriol, including the Naturalization Act of 1870, which did not allow for a process of citizenship for people of Chinese descent. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act officially banned Chinese immigrants, with exceptions for certain categories.

As Lin carefully argues, so much of the rhetoric surrounding immigration debates is steeped in the language of Revelation. As a painful example, Lin shares an editorial cartoon published in Harper’s Weekly in 1898, in which a band of sword-wielding angels look in horror at a “colossal flaming Buddha,” who rides on a dragon of storm clouds. The cartoon was entitled “Yellow Peril.”

Lin draws a straight line between this apocalyptic anti-immigration rhetoric of the 19th century to today’s battles over immigration and the promised mass deportations of the second Trump administration. Once you recognize this rhetoric for what it is, it’s easy to spot everywhere in our immigration discourse, and to recognize that this discourse hasn’t changed for hundreds of years. For Lin, Trump’s promises to build a border wall (paid for by Mexico) are simply the latest vision of the United States as the New Jerusalem, where the “economy of the holy city” is funded by the kings of the earth bringing tribute to it — a promise made in Revelation 17:18. But Instead of kings bringing tribute to the New Jerusalem, the U.S. is attempting to make Mexico fund the New Jerusalem’s border wall and, most recently, pressuring Ukraine to hand over $500 billion in mineral wealth.

Revelation’s vision of a New Jerusalem is hopeful for the chosen — they have abundant wealth and safety — but Lin focuses on the other side of the pearly gates. This New Jerusalem is a massively fortified city, meant to both protect and exclude. Lin notes that colonial Puritan preacher Cotton Mather frequently returned to this imagery, envisioning a “City of Righteousness” that, in Lin’s analysis, takes this phrase from Isaiah 1:26 and “combines it with the details of New Jerusalem of Revelation 21.” Lin argues that this vision can be traced back to Christopher Columbus, who firmly believed that his quest for discovery was an apocalyptic one. According to his “Book of Prophecies,” written between some of his voyages, his quest was for “the recovery of God’s Holy City and Mount Zion,” the re-discovery of which was thought to be one of the necessary events to bring about the apocalypse.

This concept of America as the chosen nation is the backbone of the Civil War-era song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Consider the opening lines: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” The ballad serves as the justification for the nation’s expansion into the Western Territories. For Lin, few American politicians have been as adept at weaving these allusions into a vision for the country as President Ronald Reagan. In his farewell address, Reagan described a “shining city” with strong walls, but also “doors that were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here” (29-30), words that belie the reality of the nation’s exclusionary immigration policies. Lin remarks that the effectiveness of Reagan’s rhetoric is “the result of centuries of apocalyptic American identification with the New Jerusalem.” 

And just as the New Jerusalem of Revelation excludes the “unclean” (Revelation 21:27), the U.S. has a long history of associating immigrants with disease. This is the trope Lin sees as underlying “America’s first exclusionary immigration laws,” and which resurfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic when the fear of disease became the rationale for closing borders. Lin also notes the historical relevance of Revelation’s Book of Life, a book that will include the names of all the saved. But Revelation references another book that records the acts of those who will be condemned, a book Lin names “The Book of Deeds.” For Lin, this book is a chilling analogy to the nation’s immigration laws and rosters, administrative books that hold the power of life and death. The nation’s immigration policies and authorities take ownership over these divine books, granting life and death based on decisions surrounding cleanliness and purity.

Immigration and Apocalypse is a powerful book that demonstrates why biblical scholarship has an important role to play in unpacking contemporary cultural discourses. Lin’s scholarship is thorough, and she possesses an admirable ability to make creative connections between texts and their cultural appropriation. The book is definitely not for those looking for a quick and easy read; the footnotes are sometimes dense enough that it becomes difficult to hold onto the narrative thread. But for readers willing to take on the challenge, Lin provides both an excellent history of the United States’ laws governing immigration, as well as how these laws have warped our national identity, and the individual lives these interpretations effect.