Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire

February 17, 2008

“For You Were Once A Stranger”

Rev. Kathy Duhon

            “Our mother was born of Italian descent on October 13, 1913, of parents who emigrated from the Old World in the quest of a better life.”  That’s the first line of Bob Rausch’s Eulogy for his Mom, which he gave a little over a week ago at his mother’s funeral.  Bob’s grandparents were immigrants.  Some of your parents or grandparents were immigrants.  All of you have ancestors who were immigrants, who came from the Old World, or from another world, to a completely new and foreign world.  America is a nation of immigrants.  So doesn’t it seem that we ought to be able to understand and find solutions for our current immigration problems?  For we were once immigrants ourselves, strangers in this strange, new land.

            Some will say, (some have said,) ‘My family may have emigrated here, but they did not break any laws; they were not illegal immigrants.  The illegal aliens who do so now are often criminals, and may be terrorists, and should pay the consequences for breaking the law, so the U.S. should just send them back.’  Much is wrong with this stand.  First, there is no such thing as an illegal immigrant or an illegal alien.  People are not illegal.  No one is an alien.  Very few immigrants are terrorists or criminals.  There are some undocumented immigrants, who live outside of our current conditions for legalized residency, but only about one-quarter of our current immigrants are in this situation, although that does apply to at least 12 million people. 

            Like Bob’s grandparents, immigrants came in “quest of a better life”, often desperate to have an opportunity to provide for their families, to find freedom, to escape oppression.  Sometimes they circumnavigated the law by accident, not design.  Sometimes they were deceived about their status and possibilities by lawyers and con-men, “coyotes”,  who deal in human cargo over the border.  Sometimes they were so poor or endangered or desperate to reunite with family members, or to live the American Dream, that they came, or they stayed, without the proper paperwork. 

            A few years ago the immigration issue began attracting more notice from religious groups across the country.  In one meeting in Chicago between immigrants and church leaders, after horrible conditions had been described, a pastor asked this question, “Why did you choose to come to the United States?”  This was the answer given:  “We come here because of horrible economic conditions at home.  We are not here by choice.  Who in their right mind comes here knowing that they will be insulted and looked at as a threat?  Who risks their lives crossing a militarized border and leaves their family, their culture, their life behind, unless they have to.”

            The legality of immigrant status didn’t used to be a problem.  Bob’s grandparents and my ancestors did not need paperwork – there were no quotas, no visas, no green cards, no way to be “undocumented”, to be considered “illegal”, for a good part of our American history.  Our 20^th century immigration laws shifted and changed, and continue to do so.

            Whatever the legal status, immigrants were always strangers and often treated as inferior, feared and despised.  Italians were not always considered white, which you needed to be for citizenship.  Neither were Jews nor Eastern Europeans.  Even the Irish were not always thought of as white enough.  Asians and Africans were excluded entirely at times.  And why should whiteness be a large part of defining our ability to be here legally?  It was carefully codified into the early immigration laws, and we had a federal law on our books until 1952, in which citizenship was only for free whites.  The first thing to know about our immigration rules and regulations is that they have been, and often are, based upon fear and racism, prejudice and intolerance, and this has been and remains a moving target.

            No one wants to think their motivations for exclusion are about skin color or fear, and they voice other reasons.  People will tell you that we need to limit immigration because this flood of foreign folks will take away our jobs, and because they will unduly use our public services, such as health and education.

            Jobs, employment issues – those cut right to the heart of the matter.  We have increasing unemployment and may already be in a recession, and it would be nice to blame somebody for this, and somebody who seems different is an easy target. 

            Yet we know what the issues of our changing economy are about, don’t we?  Globalization and greed have sent jobs overseas in droves.  We fund a war instead of basic needs, including job training.  Employment laws that have not been enforced or updated concerning minimum wage, health and safety issues, overtime and children’s work protections, as well as various union-breaking policies, have driven down our wages, have depressed our ability to make a living wage, have made our workplaces less safe.  The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) made it possible for us to sell our cheaply subsidized corn to Mexico, badly damaging their economy in this and other ways, which sent Mexicans, our largest immigrant group, over our borders to find the jobs that had dried up at home because of the trade policy.

            And who has it the worst in our economy?  The undocumented ones, who are afraid to complain, who are in some circumstances effectively stripped of the rights that all workers have, at least according to international law – but oh, yes, it was one of the those international agreements that the U.S. did not sign onto, back in 1990.  Yet we do claim to wear the mantle of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which employment rights for all, regardless of residency status, are included.  

            Labor abuse of undocumented immigrants includes overworking, underpaying, and exploiting in unsafe working conditions.  Especially since September 11^th, unethical employers have used fear to intimidate undocumented workers further.  Discrimination against even legally documented immigrants abounds because it has become okay to turn away someone who sounds or looks different, in the wake of our focus on terror.  Yes, we need to enforce and expand the labor laws we have, for the health and well-being of all laborers, and we need to not have an underclass of laborers who are taken advantage of by employers.  For example, guest worker programs have been used for years in this country to obtain a working population who is temporary and not eligible for benefits and given lower wages and poorer working conditions.  In our current situation, there are jobs that are offered only to undocumented immigrants, and that is because they include illegal and abusive labor practices by the employer.  This is not in anyone’s interest.

            We heard in Maria’s story her answer about their family not taking advantage of services, using the system more than they deserve, a complaint that is often waged against undocumented immigrants.  Actually, in studies that have been done, evidence is clear that undocumented immigrants pay more taxes than they receive in services, which they often avoid out of fear, and are sometimes ineligible to receive.  In a recent eight year period, undocumented workers paid about $50 billion in federal taxes, but were not allowed to use Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid and Food Stamps.

            Around the time of the Katrina disaster, we realized that FEMA, our emergency program, had been under-funded and placed with incompetent leadership under the overlay of the new Department of Homeland Security.  We know how well that worked – not well at all.  The immigration part of our federal government was also moved to Homeland Security and re-named, and the results have been telling.  This past week the news talked about the huge backlog in the naturalization process for citizenship which is illegal, and a judge has ordered the government to eliminate their lengthy delays.  A Moslem Imam had this to say about the new system, about a year ago, “The [Moslem] community has been impacted by the relocation of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency into … the Department of Homeland Security.  This super structure is predisposed to criminalize the administrative processes attached to immigration.  These dynamics have resulted in increased deportations of Muslims, Arabs and South Asians under the guise of fighting terrorism.”

            Recently, our immigration services have begun cracking down in high profile raids, and deporting immigrants.  Sometimes they have even detained and imprisoned legally documented immigrants in the process.  This new wave of law enforcement is threatening families by separation of children and parents, bread winners and their dependents, and has suspiciously happened in at least one case during a union organizing campaign at a factory.  And it is reported that employers have been known to call the immigration agents, themselves, in order not to have to pay their workers.  In the wake of these disastrous raids, congregations have become very involved in immigration work, developing the New Sanctuary Movement, a little different from the one in the 1980’s, but in solidarity and support of the immigrants and their families who are suffering under our government’s heavy hand.

            States and towns have joined the fray, on both sides.  Some have tried to make it illegal to provide medical services to undocumented immigrants, or threatened landlords with jail.  Some nasty bills have been defeated and some laws that were enacted have been declared unconstitutional, such as the Hazleton, Pennsylvania extreme anti-immigrant ordinances.  Some rogue groups of border patrollers, like the Minuteman Project, jeopardize our ability to live within the rule of law.  Other places have made the opposite type of move.  Several U.S. cities have declared themselves to be sanctuaries, to uphold the international law when it comes to the rights of all people.  Many municipalities have declined to make their police become enforcement officers for the federal government’s immigration branch.

            We are a justice-seeking people.  We are a compassionate and welcoming people.  We are also a country of bigots and fear-mongers.  Which way will prevail?  Archbishop Chaput of South Dakota spoke out on the immigration issue about a year ago.  He said, “We become what we do, for good or for evil.  If we act and speak like bigots, that’s what we become.  If we act with justice, intelligence, common sense and mercy, then we become something quite different.  We become the people and the nation God intended us to be.  Our country’s immigration crisis is a test of our humanity.  Whether we pass it is entirely up to us.”

            This past week I wondered if we weren’t really failing this test of our humanity.  On the news they profiled the horseback-riding border patrol, tracking recent immigrants through our Southwest deserts.  It really looked and sounded like they were hunting for animals.

            We are all immigrants, not just because we all come from somewhere else, sometime in our family’s past.  We are all travelers in the journey of the stranger around this world.  When did you feel it?  Maybe you moved to a new town or a new neighborhood.  Maybe you feel that you are different from the majority of those around you for whatever reason – there are so many.  Everyone feels they are “the only one” about some aspect of their lives.  The stranger inside us is part of our very makeup.

            When do we strangers feel welcomed?  When do we come to an experience of beloved belonging?  Sometimes in local communities, often in our families, and hopefully always in our faith communities.  Here we are home to each other and here we welcome the stranger among us.  So may it be.  Amen.