Administrator Loeffler, you are shutting the door on the stranger who lives among you, pays your taxes, and has done everything your laws require except be born here — a door our country has held open for seventy years. The Small Business Administration you run no longer lends to green‑card holders, lawful permanent residents whom the government itself has deemed entitled to work and build a life. You call them “foreign nationals.” You say taxpayer dollars shouldn’t benefit them. But they pay the same taxes you do, file the same IRS returns, and hire the neighbors who fill your pews and your polling places. With a single rule change, you have told the permanent resident who spent twenty‑eight years in this country, who hired nine workers and opened three storefronts, that she does not belong.
This is not about rooting out fraud. You have tried to anchor the blanket ban in a single six‑figure loan to a business partly owned by a person without legal status — an isolated case that does not justify this exclusion. The SBA’s own rules already barred lending to anyone without lawful permanent status. What you cut was the modest 4 percent of loans that went to businesses owned in part by people who are here lawfully, often after years of vetting and fees and waiting — the very people whose entrepreneurial drive, by every measure, creates jobs for American citizens. Your own agency’s data shows that though immigrants make up only about 15 percent of the population, they own roughly a quarter of businesses — they start companies at nearly twice the native‑born rate. A study released this month found that immigrants and their children founded two‑thirds of the country’s billion‑dollar startups. You are not protecting taxpayers; you are starving the engine of American job creation to feed an ideological program that is already forcing green‑card holders to apply for their status from overseas, dismantling the very workforce you claim to champion.
The Torah commands you more than thirty times to love the stranger, precisely because you were strangers in the land of Egypt. “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” This is not a suggestion from an old manuscript; it is the operating code of a civilization that knows what happens when capital is hoarded by the native‑born and denied to the newly arrived. When the law makes the immigrant a permanent dependent, it breeds the desperation the law claims to fear. The SBA has historically been the first lender willing to take a risk on an entrepreneur. Without it, the green‑card holder is pushed toward the shark tanks of merchant cash advances and predatory storefronts — exactly as the agency’s own critics warned.
I will not pretend this is merely a policy disagreement. The moral tradition I come from calls it what it is: a sin against the stranger, a sin of structural ingratitude. The churches in my town are filled with green‑card holders who tithe to the building fund and volunteer at the food pantry. I have stood beside men and women who hold this status and watched the quiet humiliation of doing everything right — paying the taxes, learning the language, raising American children — only to be told the nation’s financial door is locked because the agency’s head declared those loans are for citizens only. My own communities — the parish, the veterans’ networks, the small‑town economies — have too often been silent when the powerful turn the stranger into a threat, and I do not exempt myself from that accounting. But the accounting does not soften what needs saying: when you cut off a taxpaying permanent resident from the loan that would let her open a glass factory, hire thirty people, and retire a nineteen‑year employee with dignity, you are not being “unapologetic” in defense of some patriotic principle. You are being cruel, and the texts you claim as a Christian — the parable of the Good Samaritan, the judgment scene in Matthew 25 where the king says “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me” — name that cruelty as evil. Pope Francis, standing on Lampedusa in 2013, named the “globalization of indifference” that treats human beings as invisible. Your predecessor would have understood that indifference as a sin against the agency’s own mission. You have chosen to make it policy, wrapping exclusion in the language of fiscal stewardship. But there is no stewardship in pushing small‑business owners toward predatory lenders because the government loan they qualified for last year now treats them as unworthy. There is only the cold arithmetic of a regime that sees the stranger not as a neighbor but as a problem to be expelled.
The door of return is open, and it is wide enough for the agency to walk through it. Reversing this rule requires only a pen stroke and the recognition that the taxpayer is the citizen, whether the passport was issued at birth or earned through decades of fidelity. The ledge is written; the question is no longer whether you can fix this before the next election, but whether you will sweep the dust from that threshold and let the green‑card holder build — and let this ledger, which includes her taxes and her employees and her nineteen‑year retirement, speak louder than the cruelty that tried to close it.