Tony Messenger | Post-Dispatch

Metro columnist

Three churches tell a story about immigration in America.

The First Mennonite Church in Mountain Lake, Minnesota, was organized in 1878. My mother’s ancestors were baptized, married and laid to rest there. They took a long journey before their time in America, starting in the Netherlands, heading across Europe through Germany and settling in an area of what is now Ukraine.

They were simple people — farmers and pacifists — who sought the freedom to live their faith. As a sixth- or seventh-generation white and middle-class American of mixed lineage, I never thought much about their journey and the difficult decisions they made — until I started writing regularly about this country’s ongoing immigration crisis.

The crisis began in earnest in

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