Every year at Christmas time there are attempts to equate Joseph, Mary, and Jesus’ flight from Bethlehem to Egypt to the plight of illegal immigrants—claiming that they too would have been “undocumented” and therefore turned away at the border.
While it is true that Joseph, Mary, and Jesus were forced to leave their home due to a form of political persecution, the equivalency doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
First, Jesus was the only target, there weren’t specifically any others. Yes, Herod’s assassins would have murdered roughly 10–20 male children, two-years old and younger in and around Bethlehem, but that is just straight cruelty and collateral damage, not political persecution.
Herod’s “persecution” of Jesus was as much personal as it was political. No one else had to flee Herod’s wrath. Yes, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were a kind of refugee, but no one else was. Therefore, the attempt to equate the brutal attempt to murder one child with the broadscale economic hardship that drives most modern illegal immigration is a stretch.
Second, Joseph, Mary, and Jesus crossing the border into Egypt would not have been illegal, and they would not have need anyone’s permission to do it. The likelihood that they were “stopped at the border” is near zero.
Travel, and “crossing the border” between the Roman client kingdom of Judaea and the Roman province of Aegyptus would have been at most, a formality. Trade between (Roman) Judaea, (Roman) Aegyptus, and Rome proper, let alone Roman Syria (Antioch and Damascus) and the whole of the Mediterranean, would have benefitted all parties. Rome wanted goods and services to flow as freely as possible, only controlled to the degree they could profit from them. Rome simply didn’t guard its borders, especially internal borders, which is the case here, the way progressive interpreters of the circumstances might hope.
Then there was the Jerusalem-Alexandria connection. By the time of Christ’s birth, there had been a thriving (albeit often persecuted by Alexandrian Greeks) Jewish community in Egypt in general, and Alexandria in particular for almost 300 years. Jews traveling between Judaea and Egypt was not unusual.
During Herod’s reign, several prominent Greek-speaking Jewish families from Alexandria, Egypt lived in Jerusalem. Within a few weeks of the Magi’s visit, Herod appointed Joazar ben Boethus, a member of one of these prominent Alexandrian-Jewish families, High Priest.
Finally, there is the notion that the angel of the Lord directed Joseph to take his family into Egypt. It is far more likely that God the Father was providing a strategically sound method of escape for his only begotten son than one fraught with unnecessary physical and legal obstacles.