We had a week at Chautauqua listening to lectures on immigration, and on Shabbat we looked at all the times the Torah tells us to be nice to “strangers” or aliens.

I came away wondering if the Thanksgiving tale is one of the reasons so many Americans are afraid of immigrants. I didn’t grow up in the United States, but I heard that the Pilgrim Fathers would have starved if the Indians hadn’t invited them to their feast. The Indians welcomed immigrants, and look what happened: a week of lectures at Chautauqua–a few miles from the Seneca Nation–without a single Native American voice. The Pilgrim Fathers learned their own lesson: immigrants will destroy you with liquor, with arms, with disease, betray you with their treaties and confine your shattered remnant to remote reservations. No wonder the descendants of the Pilgrims are wary of immigrants.

We’ve all heard that hospitality is highly valued in the Middle East and other parts of the world, so why would the Torah have to instruct people to be nice to immigrants or strangers or aliens? The Jews were strangers in Egypt; the host people didn’t make out so well. The Jews were immigrants in the land of Israel; the indigenous locals didn’t make out so well, either. Since the Jews might have learned to resist immigration as forcefully as some Americans of today, the Torah’s instruction is: Even though you have good reason to be wary of other peoples, you must still treat them well.