Well, you've opened a real can of squirmy, wiggly things here. Thanks for inviting me to comment, but I'm pretty sure this is above my pay grade. Nevertheless, as I've rarely let that stop me before, I'll wade in swinging...😜

"If you call yourselves Christians, why not ask what Christ says instead of what Trump says?"

I'm totally with you on this. The Word of God is my touchstone of truth; I'll always believe and act on it before I believe my lying eyes... The struggle is always in "rightly dividing" it and applying it logically and accurately, and I applaud your efforts to engage in that struggle.

"If a stranger lives as a foreigner with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong."

Amen. But this is complicated by so many things, exacerbated by the media coverage, both accurate and inflammatory, and egregiously screwed up by what you referred to here:

"...none of this should be considered an endorsement of the modern welfare state."

Amen to that as well. We have to ask some questions; "Why are we being invaded by millions of foreigners?" and "Why (if reports are to be believed) are the PTSB (Powers That Shouldn't Be)—with a few exceptions—enabling, encouraging, and supporting that invasion?" There are both obvious and subtle perverse incentives at play here.

Some of the more obvious incentives, if you believe the conservative media, are to increase the count of voters at the polls, and/or to destabilize and further polarize opinions, leading to domestic conflict and weakness. But this is also surely the result of battles lost long ago, of destroying human motivation toward responsibility and self-respect by putting everyone and his neighbor on "the dole," handing out money for nothing, discouraging strong nuclear families.

On the more subtle subtle side, the ability of the runaway nation-state sometimes disparagingly called 'Murica, is fueled by its lock on the creation of "Monopoly Money," i.e. the fiat $Dollar that for many decades has been the reserve currency of the world. This has enabled the federal government to extend such largess to the incoming tide of aliens, and to use it as a magnet to draw them here. This will not end until the remaining sleeping mass of humanity wakes up, realizes they have been/are being systematically robbed, day and night, by federal printing presses. It will continue until swelling awareness of this global crime drives the adoption of bitcoin as sound money to replace the state-issued toilet paper.

In quoting Samuel, you skipped a key verse from slightly earlier:

"Yahweh said to Samuel, “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they tell you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me as the king over them."
- 1 Samuel 8:7

That is the core problem underlying the immigration debate; by and large, we crave our kings, presidents, governors, mayors, and etc., and in so doing, we have rejected Jesus The True King.

Your quotes from Jesus are spot on, and should at the very least give us pause to consider how we, as simple "inland dwellers" should relate to and deal with the aliens we personally encounter. Our attitude toward them individually needs to be charitable. And, "laws" be damned, if we encounter individuals seeking honest work, and we have such to offer, let us do so.

The greatest hope I see, overall, is to work toward building up strong local communities with circular economies, using bitcoin to enable peer-to-peer transactions that completely cut out the parasitic "governments" that have insinuated themselves into everything we do. I believe that the monstrosities we've known all our lives as "government" are doing a damn fine job of self-destructing, following the story arc of every nation and empire I've ever known of in history. Its the story of Nebuchadnezzar's dream that God revealed to Daniel: King Jesus is the "stone cut out without hands" that rolls down from the mountain and smashes the rebellious kingdoms into a fine dust that simply blows away on the breeze...

We just need to be about our Father's business, building his Kingdom in all the ways he has gifted and enabled each of us.

Thanks for the shout out, and the invitation to engage.🙏😀

😄😇😉