The bias against "illegal immigrants" here in Dallas amazes me .
My amazement is magnified when I am in churches where I often hear the most adamant opposition to the presence of immigrants in our community.
I find this amazing for two reasons--one theological and one practical.
First, the Bible clearly embraces the cause and the plight of the immigrant or, to use scriptural language, the "alien."
Consider this reading from the Law of Moses: "Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt." (Exodus 23:9)
The prophet Jeremiah echoes the Law of Moses by establishing the importance of not oppressing or mistreating aliens or foreigners in the land (Jer. 7:6). At one place in his writing Jeremiah lists the oppression of the immigrant alongside the prohibition of murder (Jer. 22:3).
Talk about national values!
The point is so obvious no explanation is called for: the ancient Israelites are enjoined to remember their own status as immigrants in the land of promise. The same injunction could be urged on every American, with the exception of Native Americans who lost their land to the likes of the rest of us who immigrated and ravaged their homes. We are indeed a nation of immigrants.
Second, the practical reality is that Dallas could not funciton without the labor, creativity and vitality of immigrants, many undocumented from south of our border.
Over the last weekend I read an article in The New York Times ("Science vs. Culture in Mexico's Corn Staple," March 27, 2005, A11) describing one of the unintended consequences of the combination of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the increasing use of genetically modified corn seed has been the removal of countless rural Mexicans from their farmland. Without land there is no way to make a living.
Guess where many of these displaced rural Mexicans migrate? If you guessed California, New York or Texas, you guessed correct!
People want to work. People everywhere want better lives for themselves and their families. As a result, people come to America. Nothing new there. My ancestors and yours came here for this very same reason.
Last time I looked there was a lady with a torch standing in the open waters of a rather magnificent harbor just off Manhattan Island inviting the nations of the world to send us anyone who longed to be free. Fairly open-ended invite, wouldn't you say?
Thanks to our strident quota system, folks who come to Texas from Mexico usually come illegally.
What these hard working newcomers bring to our city, especially to our inner city communities feels and looks like anything but something illegal. I can't bring myself to refer to these friends as "illegal." About as far as I can go is "undocumented."
The Bible helps me here. The words of Moses instruct me to recall my own immigrant past.
The spirit of Jesus teaches me to be open-hearted to everyone.
Frankly, obeying these rules is not hard to do with the immigrants I know.
Question: in our recent national values debate, where is the space reserved for a serious discussion of this important issue? Where is the guiding word from the church on this serious national matter?
Sorry, but I just had to ask.
Announcement from Duke Memorial UMC
1 week ago
10 comments:
I find this issue hard to figure out. On the one hand, I am against doing anything that will cheapens the dignity of another human being -- even people in our prison system.
On the other hand, I see no easy solution. Why not just open our borders to anyone who wants to come to America? We could get rid of the green card system altogether and allow everyone who wants to work, work. Seems like it would bring in a lot of tax revenue.
I don't see a satisfactory solution to this problem. I like the guest worker idea better than nothing, but I bet all that will do is bring in more legal aliens and temporarily reduce the number of illegal aliens for a few years.
I wonder if the reason they do the jobs that nobody else will do is because they are the only ones willing to work for sub-standard wages. They are happy to live with other families with 10-12 people living in a 1,200 square foot house. When I was a classroom teacher, one of my students lived in a house where the living room had bunkbeds setup for the kids to sleep in.
If the illegals were not here, the employers would have to pay a living wage to attract legal workers creating more jobs for people willing and wanting to work and reducing the number of jobless and working poor that we have now.
The real enemy is us. We don’t pay 5 bucks a pound for tomatoes or 250,000 for a modest home or 2,000 for a nanny. If we are not willing to do what it really takes to curb the immigration problems by REALLY going after the people that are hiring them, we need to treat them like human beings and provide them the social services, medical, legal, and educational needs that the rest of the working poor should be getting.
Of course, you are right: we are all aliens. We are all here on this Earth as nothing more than visitors; we are away from our eternal home.
We forget that we are here merely as stewards over His earth. We are so quick to forget that we are not the kings, the we do not own the land; we chop it up and call it our own, forgetting that we have a higher landlord simply because he charges no rent.
Who are we to set up walls? Do they keep others out, or merely lock us in to this world, and out of heaven?
I am not sure what the solution is. But I am fairly certain that isolationism is not it.
I agree with everything you said, especially the lady with the torch inviting anyone who wants to be free. I hate to bring up the negative but here goes, the language, when your ancestors and mine came from other countries the first thing they did beside get a job was learn the language and did not expect America to speak their language. When I hear people complain about the people moving here from the South I never hear any complaints about the people except the language fact. I think Gods tells us to get along in more ways then one but to punish the workers at Babylon he had them all speaking different languages? Did I miss the point of that story Larry and what about the language expectations from our new neighbors?
Sure, there are church people who resent undocumented aliens, and, yes, they are out of step with Scripture. The real story, however, is the one hinted at by your reference to the NYTimes article: the colloboration of the U.S. and Mexican governments and corporate elites to make a nation of producers (Mexico) into a land of enslaved consumers like the U.S. They don't give a damn where these consumers work as long they're working cheap and pumping their wages back into consumption. Lacking a biblical foundation, we might still have compassion for these undocumented aliens - they're caught up in the same game the rest of us are, disinherited from the land, working for less and less, and paying 2 bucks a gallon for gasoline.
Here I go again, being disagreeable.
I can't go into Canada (which I do as part of my job) and work without clearing Immigration Canada. As Christians, we are bound to obey the laws set up by men (save where they do conflict with the laws set up by God). I fail to see where putting restrictions on immigration violates this.
Even in the Law of Moses, many of the statutes were binding on the alien, the sojourner, the stranger, and the foreigner, just as they were binding on the Israelites. Apparently, God wants us to obey the laws of the place we are located.
Do we treat illegal immigrants (immigrants who violated the law, thereby rendering them illegal) with contempt? No! But is it contempt to encourage them to make themselves known and legal?
We are lucky to live in a country where, if there is enough outrage, laws can be changed. A recent example is the allowance of Federal jurisdiction in the Terri Schaivo case. Work on changing the law to bring about justice. I too think the guest worker program is a great idea.
LKM mentioned the language barrier. Another difference between those immigrants who came over and became (most of) our ancestors is that the first stop they made was at a place like Ellis Island and going through the equivalent of today's ICE, not sneaking in by the dead of night.
There are organizations that have their members or representatives obtain legal entry into countries like China or Vietnam, smuggling Bibles in where the law forbids them. Do those members expect to get off scot-free when caught?
As Christians, we are told to obey the law, and if we do break it, we dare not do it lightly. Change the quotas, change the process, make new types of visas, but don't insist that someone who has broken the law be treated as someone who hasn't.
Of course, the immigrants who come here in an attempt to feed their families are not the only or main culprits in violating law--law that our government at every level officially and unofficially turns a blind eye toward(I have many examples from here in Dallas). Those who employ the cheap labor violate the law and exploit the workers. Double whammy, huh? I think most of us have no conception about the reality of poverty.
Oh, yes, and one other thing. Immigrants today are learning English, I would suggest, at an even faster pace than the typical 18-19th century folks from Europe. The second generation of any immigrant group achieves a better grasp of English than the first wave. New immigrants from Mexico and Latin America, for example, are struggling with the language, but many, many are attempting to learn English and their children are as well. In many cases these latest immigrants are rural and uneducated in their homeland. So, many are illiterate in Spanish which makes their ability to master English even more challenging. Of course, our nation resists adequate ESL funding, even for school children. In the case of Spanish, it seems to me that we miss a real opportunity to teach English speaking kids Spanish in a cooperative venture with those children of immigrants who need the English. Mexican families who have been here for more than a generation master the language. Put yourself in the other's shoes for a moment. How about we move you to China--that's where all the jobs are headed! Now, you learn the language in your spare time after working long, long hours due to the substandard pay. And while you are at it, jettison your English culture--don't be concerned to preserve a bit of it. How does that feel?
Maybe the question that we need to be asking is how can make other countries more attractive so that people don't have to risk limb and life. leave family and homeland, to work at a crappy job for low wages. Any suggestions?
ah, spot, a question I think I can answer.
Let's just export good-paying American jobs to other countries . . . oops, we tried that already.
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