Urban Nations Update: What Was It You Wanted?

One of the questions I’m occasionally asked—and it’s a question I ask the immigrants learning English from the Bible at Urban Nations—is, Why did you come to America? What was it you wanted?

The top three reasons: Money, moola and cash. Or perhaps I should say, rupees, rubles and shekels. Without a doubt, the major factor motivating people to pull up their roots and transplant their all is economic.

This is not to say money is the only reason. In some cases it was clearly political freedom which was sought. One man we helped had fled his native Sri Lanka where he had been tortured as a political prisoner. He came from a monied family but arrived here with nothing. After six years in America, however, he is the prosperous owner of two businesses employing 35 people (mostly immigrants). Another man came to New York from Libya to get special surgery performed on his three-year-old son. The boy is recovering nicely and the family is still here three years later. Of course, still others have come to join family members already established here.

Yet these do not exhaust the reasons we’ve heard for emigration. A “reason” I’ve heard more than once is: “I don’t know.” That’s right. One such respondent was a Ukrainian girl in her early twenties, Valentina. When I asked her why she came to America, she simply did not know. She had no family here; she left everyone in Odessa. Valentina had a good living situation back home but no prospects here (she now lives alone and works in a Sephardic thrift shop on McDonald Avenue).

Perplexed, I pressed her. “If everything was so great there, why did you come here? Why? What was it you wanted?”

“I don’t know,” she insisted, but then went on. “I won a Green Card [permanent resident alien status granted by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service] in a lottery. So I thought, maybe it is fate that I go to America.”

Mission work such as this ought to make a Calvinist out of any sane soul. It was not fate, but a gracious God who brought this woman unaccompanied from her homeland, brought her to hear the Gospel, a message to which she has rendered rapt attention but to which she has not (yet?) submitted.

In another class, I got into a rather warm discussion with a student who was a physicist in “Leningrad.” Interestingly, every other UN student from that locale refers to the city as St. Petersburg. This is just one of the ways in which Igor’s communist sentiments disclose themselves. Another is his ready and eager defense of welfare for immigrants such as himself. In our last class session, he actually claimed to be entitled to government subsidies. He believes it is in our long-term best interests to pay superior, educated people—such as himself—to be here. He very nearly said we should count it a privilege to have him!

This led to, as I said, a rather warm, and extended, discussion in the class. We talked about immigration policy, the proper role of civil authorities, historical and contemporary examples of people groups now well-established who had come to America with no statist subsidies whatsoever, etc.

I was so emphatic in making the Biblical case in these matters that I suspected I may have offended or put him off. I wondered if we would see him again. Right after the class concluded, however, Igor and another student went directly up to UN staffer David Schildkraut and inquired, “David, will we be having our Bible Study this Friday night?”

They may not always know why they are here, but I do. As far as I’m concerned, every single immigrant who comes to us for assistance has been sent to us by God Almighty to hear the Truth as it is in Jesus. For the important question after all is not what any man wants, but what God our Savior wants. Da? Da.