Each Sunday, about 70 people — all first-and-second generation Chinese Americans — gather in a small Dallas-Fort Worth-area church sanctuary for worship services.
Their shared culture unites them as much as their shared faith.
The majority of congregants have come from China, where Christians are not unknown to endure persecution by the government, and most were raised without any knowledge of God.
“But they have a new faith here,” their pastor, a man whose English name is Michael, tells me. “And the new faith can help [them] to become good citizens of the country.”
That’s how it’s been for Pastor Michael, who is himself a Chinese American — although the “official” American part of his identity is looking less certain for reasons well beyond his control.
Michael spoke only on condition that I not use his last name or the name of his church while his immigration status is pending, for fear attention to his case will bring interference. He had thought he was well on his way to getting his green card.
He has, after all, been in America for more than a decade and calls this place, and his church in particular, home.
He first came to Texas as a student to study at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He changed his visa status from a student to worker category, which would allow him to collect a salary and apply for permanent residency, when he began serving as pastor to his small, vibrant and growing congregation.
But thanks to an abrupt and highly unusual change in the way the Biden administration processes the visas of religious workers, Michael may not be able to remain in the U.S. much longer.
Earlier this year, the U.S. State Department announced that it will now be moving religious workers — and only religious workers — who are in the EB-4 “special immigration” category (which also includes employees of U.S. foreign-service posts, translators, former U.S. government employees, etc.) to the back of the line.
This will effectively make it nearly impossible for immigrants performing religious work in the U.S. to obtain a green card. Many of them already in process, like Pastor Michael, may have to return to their countries of origin while they wait.
Todd Wagenmaker, an immigration attorney who has worked exclusively on religious worker cases for 25 years, said the change is unprecedented and will hurt hundreds of individuals and scores of ethnic religious communities, such as Pastor Michael’s.
Adding insult to injury, the State Department is also suspending any additional religious worker immigrant approvals for at least four years.
The State Department contends the change was made to correct a “legal error” that resulted in a visa processing backlog for immigrants from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
Presumably, the religious worker visa allotments (up to 5,000 per year) would then be allocated to other “special immigrant” categories from those countries to help remedy the problem.
To Wagenmaker, that explanation doesn’t pass the smell test because no other category of visa-seekers is affected.
“Instead of working legislatively to increase the [visa] numbers for other categories, they are kneecapping religious workers,” he said.
What’s more, the State Department did not process any religious worker visas in 2020 or 2021, leaving up to 5,000 visas available for other categories during each of those years.
“That was a great opportunity for underserved classes to use those visas,” Wagenmaker said.
That being the case, it’s hard to look at the policy change as anything short of religious discrimination.
“The Biden administration has not been particularly sensitive to people with sincerely held religious beliefs,” Wagenmaker continued, making this latest action par for the course.
The irony, of course, is that while the Biden administration is using the law to mask its change to the rules that govern employment-based visas, it has been lax and even ambivalent when it comes to addressing illegal immigration along the Texas border.
This only makes the apparent targeting of immigrants here for religious work all the more stark for people like Pastor Michael, who have been following the rules all along.
To his credit, Pastor Michael would not speculate as to the government’s motives, but being from China, he said the sense of being targeted for his religious beliefs was not unfamiliar.
“It looks like they are persecuting the religious workers,” he said.
“If I go back to China, maybe I [will] spend that time in prison,” he continued thoughtfully. “If it is the will of God, it is good.”
Indeed, his experience may serve a higher purpose, but it needn’t be the case.
If Pastor Michael and his fellow religious workers were in a category of immigrants the Biden administration wanted around, it probably wouldn’t.
