Synchronicity is not a word I often associate with the random glut of prime-time television. But when a glancing look at the Tuesday night schedule last week revealed a Frontline special on immigration at the same hour as a History Channel segment on Noah’s Flood, I could sense a coincidence too good to pass up.

O the vindication of Heisenberg if I could watch, rather than just record, two programs at once! (For all I know, slowpoke that I am on the technological uptake, one can already do this; but if and when there’s an implant to process competing streams of information, I don’t want it.)

Timed instead to coincide with a front-page article in The New York Times about the rising incidence of corruption in the ranks of Border Patrol, as more and more agents are lured with cash and sex to aid their counterparts in the human smuggling rings, the Frontline special left no illusions about the porous system that governs the San Ysidro port of entry between Tijuana and San Diego, the busiest of its kind in the world.

According to Wayne Cornelius, a professor at UC San Diego who specializes in matters of immigration, research shows that fully 97% of those who try illegally to cross the U.S./Mexico border are successful in the end with one or more attempts. Not exactly the kind of data that’s about to stop the drumbeats of a Lou Dobbs or Tom Tancredo, who like to paint the problem as, well, a flood of biblical proportions. An altogether manmade one at that, but a deluge nevertheless.

But change the channel at a commercial break and the flood in question pertains to Noah, the quintessential refugee who didn’t leave his homeland as much as it left him, who saw the ground disappear beneath his feet. And when considered in the context of the Frontline special alongside it, the Flood hardly lends itself to metaphors for immigration. To be sure, if there is anything to foil the alliance in certain quarters between close-the-border politics and save-the-country religion, you can be sure it’s nothing less than the Bible itself.

For whatever else the Bible is, from beginning to end, from expulsion at the Garden to arrival in the New Jerusalem, it is a story of immigration in one form or another. While this might seem more readily evident in the Old Testament than the New, I can hardly imagine a more ultimate form of immigration than the Incarnation.

Perhaps you missed, as I nearly did, a photo last year of the infamous Mexican immigrant, Elvira Arellano, who was arrested at a press conference in Los Angeles after leaving the church in Chicago where she and her son had spent a year holed up in sanctuary. The mainstream media published plenty of stock images to feed the polar forces that fueled debates about her case, but only in Sojourners did I see her standing before the camera with arms akimbo in a t-shirt that asks in bold print: “Who Would Jesus Deport?”

Who Jesus would deport is a good question indeed, especially in an election year when Democrats attempt to claim their place in the pulpit and Republicans struggle to maintain their hold on the traditionally conservative voting bloc that an immigrant population as broad as the Hispanic one affords. What all sides in the matter agree upon is that the present system is broken. What to do about it, of course, is another thing, rife with complexities that often seem to exceed my capacity to resolve them.

But when I hear the sabers rattle in those camps which otherwise never shy from wielding the Bible in politics, I assume they must have missed or ignored Leviticus 19:34:

“The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”