On a typically hectic morning, as I prepared to leave home for an early appointment at the office, I was vaguely aware of the radio rumbling in the background. Then something caught my ear. A commentator was offering opinions on the history of immigration. Either that, or he was offering opinions on the history of integration. The confusion was my fault. I had only partially been paying attention.
     Which was it?
     My confusion proved to be a revelation. The current consternation in the United States about issues regarding our borders cannot be understood apart from ethnic and racial perspectives about the people who cross them. It is a subtle, but not insignificant, fact that to the casual ear the word "immigration" generates echoes of the word "integration." And it taps into the same kinds of fears about ethnic identity that have been a dominant force in the United States for most of our history.
     One need only consider the differences between our northern and southern boundaries to appreciate the issue. While National Guard troops are being amassed in those states that border Mexico, no such action is being taken along the far longer and more porous border with Canada. Of course, it may be true that few Canadians are eager to enter the United States, legally or illegally—their health care delivery system may be superior to ours and their pharmaceuticals are notoriously less expensive. But there were no Canadian Mounties at the border in the 1960s when young Americans, seeking to escape the draft, illegally crossed into Saskatchewan. And there are no reports today that American troops are being pressed into stopping Manitobans from getting jobs as hotel maids in Minnesota.
     Occasionally, one hears the argument that the southern border of the United States has to be protected against terrorists who might use Latin America as a staging area. But Canada's is a remarkably open and tolerant society, and anyone bent on wreaking havoc in New York or Chicago could cross our northern border as easily as our southern one.
     The real issue is that American attitudes on almost every issue cannot be separated from American attitudes on race and ethnicity. White folks who speak only English tend to have more trouble feeling comfortable with dark-skinned Spanish speakers than with light-skinned French speakers. And that makes the matter of immigration—or integration—not a legal issue or a military issue or even a language issue, but a spiritual issue.
     At least for Christians that is the case. Do we truly believe that all human beings are created in the image of God? Do we truly believe that Pentecost was a richly diverse gathering of people from different lands and ethnic backgrounds, as portrayed in the Acts of the Apostles?
     Do we truly believe that the state of our souls is more important than the state in which we hold citizenship? When Paul was writing his letters, being a citizen of the Roman Empire meant—as it did personally for him—having access to the protections of a legal system not available to noncitizens. Yet Paul wrote to the Philippians that one's earthly citizenship was irrelevant, "for our citizenship is in heaven."
     Our current divisions over matters of immigration must be placed in the larger context of our American history. People have crossed the borders by sea and by land from the 16th century to the 21st for all sorts of reasons. Some came not out of hope for what they might find here so much as out of despair with what they were trying to escape—the horrors of hunger, the persecutions of piety, the pain of prejudice. Some came not out of choice but because they were in chains, on their way to markets to be sold as slaves. Some came as economic opportunists, imagining that they could ply their schemes in an untested land. And some came because they wanted simply to live—to work, to raise families, to practice their faith.
     Thinking about the many reasons why immigrants have made the journey is enough to make a grown man cry. Even a Marine. When the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, was testifying before a Senate committee recently, he spoke very personally about immigration issues and about his father who came to the United States from Italy. Gen. Pace demonstrated that it is possible both to be one of "the proud" and one reduced to tears. Some of those tears must have been generated by the deeply felt emotions borne of the bigotry that an Italian had to face in coming to America less than a century ago.
     Others who came from Ireland and Poland and Lithuania faced it, too. The bigotry is even more burdensome today for those dark-skinned immigrants from Mexico and Honduras and El Salvador.
     President Bush has laid out a vision for inviting immigrants who wish to come, for welcoming the workers who are here, and for respecting both the hopes and the fears that draw them to our borders. Some national leaders, including more than a few members of the president's own party, prefer the politics of prejudice to the promise of peace. They have tried to block the way to implementing the president's vision.
     In America's past, there have been others who tried that. George Wallace tried to block a university doorway. Strom Thurmond tried to block a voter registration booth. William Jennings Bryan may have blocked his own entrance to the White House by failing to let immigrants feel integrated into his party's political process.
     Barricaded boundaries to immigration and integration are worse than political mistakes. They are signs of spiritual failure. Christians should confess that and, as an act of penance, take the barricades down.

William B. Lawrence is dean of the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. From 1998 to 2001, he was senior minister at Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C., the national church of United Methodism. This column originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News. It is reprinted here with permission.