Were the Nephites illegal immigrants?

I mostly mean that facetiously; the very concept of a modern nation-state with clearly defined borders and immigration processes was utterly alien to the ancient milieu in which the Book of Mormon purportedly takes place. Nevertheless, so much of Book of Mormon apologetics over the past few decades–at least since John L. Sorenson’s An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon in 1978, and especially since the advent of the DNA debates in BoM studies in the 21st century–has centered on the fact that the children of Lehi were likely far from the only people in the Americas when they landed in the sixth century BC.

There is obviously the Jaredites who figure prominently into the Book of Mormon record itself; and Leh is also on record as saying the Lord has guided many peoples to the promised land from “time to time;” likewise, Alma mentions the alien nature of the rampeumptom, as though it were an infusion from an outside cultural source; there is also Mormon’s odd boast that he is a “pure descendant of Lehi,” as though such were a rare thing indeed. All these internal textual details have given “limited-geography” partisans so-called (of which no less than Hugh Nibley was a proponent) the ammunition to argue that the Lehites were a very tiny segment of the total population of the Americas; hence, what ancient Israeli DNA that may have been present in their initial settlement could’ve been bred out of them countless generations ago, due to their endless intermixture with all surrounding peoples and civilizations, which would explain why most Native American groups appear to have primarily Asiatic, not Middle-eastern, genetic markers. (Though incidentally, we note in passing that Nibley himself posited that the vast majority of Native Americans were likely of Asiatic origin via the Jaredites–due to their modes of total warfare reminiscent of the Mongols on the Steppes–clear back in 1952, a full year before Watson and Crick first discovered DNA in 1953). At least, thus goes the thinking.

Without touching further the heated DNA debate in Book of Mormon studies (which is far outside our expertise), we wish to emphasize that if we do indeed take this vein of apologetics seriously, then that means when the Lehites first landed in some unspecified part of the Americas, they were, properly speaking, not just religious pilgrims, but immigrants and refugees, arriving in a place that almost certainly had a pre-existing native population (the last time that any region of the habitable earth remained un-explored by human eyes would’ve been sometime around the end of the last Ice Age); and that these prior peoples either needed to make room for, or see their lands ceded to, the initial Lehite colony.

Again, I am wary of drawing any sort of parallels between ancient pilgrims and modern refugees, as there was absolutely no such thing as green cards, visas, or passports anywhere on earth circa 600 BC. But that still means the Book of Mormon, “the keystone of our religion,” is at its heart the record of immigrants and refugees to the Americas. Hence the great need why we must treat immigrants and refugees with the utmost respect and reverence.

These thoughts all drifted through my mind when I finally read Yuri Herrera’s 2015 novella Signs Preceding the End of the World by the Mexican author Yuri Herrera (translated into English by Lisa Dillman). This austere little book follows a young Mexican woman named Makina, dispatched by her family to sneak across the border into the U.S. in order to learn the whereabouts and fate of her older brother, who went up north in search of work to send remittances home before disappearing from all contact.

Makina is forced to have dealings with unsavory elements of Mexican criminal society in order to make the dangerous crossing; and of course, her troubles do not end once she actually makes it across the border, because she must now confront the condescending cruelty and vicious hypocrisy of U.S. immigration enforcement, who are presented as little different from the criminal underworld she had to navigate south of the border—only the U.S. version is more self righteous and more “legal,” which as Elder Packer once noted in Conference has nothing to do with morality.

The prose itself is written in the style of Latin American Magical Realists (e.g. no quotation marks in the dialogue; flat, fairy-tale descriptions of events; etc.), reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez, yet without any of the accompanying magical elements. If the text sometimes feels dreamlike, it is in the nightmarish sense of never being able to control the events around you, like when you impotently swing your first or fire a gun in a dream without being able to damage anyone around you.

The sympathies of the novella are obviously and firmly on the side of the Mexican immigrants, “legal” or otherwise. Yuri Herrera clearly believes the Mexicans have as much a right to be here as anyone, and here’s the thing: per the Book of Mormon, they do. Mexicans are much more intermixed with the indigenous groups than white-settlers state-side, and hence have first claim. They are the ones descended from those whom the Lord hath guided over to the Promised Land, from “time to time.” They are the ones who first made room for us, not the other way around. And our present National viciousness and cruelty towards the same is indeed one of the signs preceding the end of the world.

Christ Himself in Matthew 24:12-13 declared of the Latter-days, “And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.” The implication is clear: the way we endure to the end is by not letting our love for others wax cold. Yet we currently live in an era when the love of many—for the plight of immigrants, of neighbors, of everyone suffering more than us—has waxed cold indeed. Again, the cruel and vicious manner in which we treat Mexican immigrants in the U.S. is indeed a sign preceding the end of the world. The title of this novella, therefore, is accurate: if we are to be saved in these Latter-days, then we must love immigrants and refugees–and not just in a vague, generic, useless way, but per our baptismal covenants, we must mourn with them, and comfort them, and stand as a witness for them at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death, as though we were standing as witnesses for God, because we are, for inasmuch as we do it unto the least of these, we do it unto Him. In this manner, we will not let out love wax cold in these latter days.