It seems to me that we have a conflict of
compassionate perspectives when it comes to immigration. Sometimes we hear stories of undocumented
immigrants who are caught by the reality that though they live in the U.S.,
possibly came here legally but overstayed their visa, or were brought here by
their parents but now because of the law may be sent back to a home they no longer
acknowledge, nor do they wish to return.
I have been asked by pastors what to do with
someone their church has come to love and to whom they have shown mercy, but
the only way they can survive is in a hidden economy, and surviving with the constant
dread and anxiety of being caught and deported.
How can a local church help them, past consulting with lawyers,
providing emergency food and transportation to church, maybe even housing? What the person need's is a legal job, but that is
one thing the church can’t provide without actively breaking the law. However, no matter how desperate things seem
to get the person will not willingly return to their country of origin. They wait to find someone to marry, or for the
law to change in the hopes that they can stay. Most
churches come to the end of what they can legally do and continue to assist in
some frustrated manner as they wait to see, with the individual, how the story
will play out.
Whether individuals or churches become
advocates for changes in the immigration law or not it is the immediate response
to human need and the limitations of only being able to do so much that usually frustrates them. Advocacy is the long
fight while mercy is the near fight right in front of them. On top of this are the moral and ethical dilemmas
of seeing some wonderful people live in a shadow world where they choose to
break laws to make a living, such as false or stolen identity, driving without
a license, fake social security numbers, or living off of a cash economy and
not paying taxes.
While
it is understandable for people to want a better life, I admit some Americans
find it difficult to feel a lot of compassion for people who have lived a lie
only because they want to make more money, or live better materially, but face neither real
poverty nor political or religious persecution back home. Some of these folks knowingly took advantage
of the visa program and stayed when they should have gone home, and now realize
that if they do go home voluntarily they will have to wait years before they
can ever ask to come back to a country they have come to love.
Americans can be in favor of a generous immigration
policy while wanting people to obey the laws we have created to make
immigration somewhat of an orderly process.
No matter the many stories that seem to show America, and Americans,
resistant to a flood of undocumented aliens the truth is that we allow many
thousands of refugees to enter and live in our country every year, besides
those who apply to legally emigrate from their own country through embassies.
There is another perspective about
compassion beside the immediate concern of a desperate individual or family and
their fear of being sent back to their country of origin. This is a larger concern about the incentive for migration that
inadequate and inept policies, laws, and enforcement have created so that
people foolishly risk their lives. Most of us have heard horrible stories of “coyotes”
and smugglers exploiting people, of sometimes tragic endings to trips across the
desert, or folks who die in shipping containers. I don’t know if anything has matched what has
been happening in the Mediterranean Sea, where thousands have drowned
attempting to reach Europe.
Another way of being compassionate is to
make laws enforceable and sensible so that a tempting incentive doesn’t lead
people to take unreasonable risk. Migration
has been a constant of human existence.
It is rare that migration doesn’t come without some kind of conquest,
either in a militaristic or cultural sense.
If these migrations were actually invasions nations would fight to
protect themselves. They would see the
coming of hundreds of thousands of “foreigners” as an attempt to supplant the
indigenous folks, or to eradicate their cultural and religious traditions. These modern migrations don’t have tyrants,
conquerors, or generals behind them but they are culturally transformative even
so. Do nations have a right to protect
themselves from that?
Europe especially faces this question, and
it is exacerbated by the migration of religious populations that do not want to
assimilate into the majority culture.
Certainly when the Europeans came to North America they weren’t
interested in assimilating into Native American culture, rather they wanted to
convert the natives, or supplant them by killing them, depending on which group
of Europeans one reads about.
The struggle in the U.S.A. is not the
supplanting of Ketchup by Salsa as the number one condiment, but the resistance
of some immigrant groups to assimilate into our political and linguistic culture,
and the despising of a broken immigration system. The hype about immigrant crime, about
exploitation of government aide and resources, and even about Democratic party
use of the issue to gain votes isn’t statistically worth the amount of print or
verbal debate used on it. We have more
than enough indigenous crime and abuse of the welfare system to reveal that
immigrants mostly work hard, very hard, and take care of themselves compared to
many of our born here citizens. We won’t
protect ourselves from bad people by building bigger fences, but by building a
better and more just immigration system, and allowing people with an aspiring work
ethic to help build the wealth of our nation.
It is my expectation that nations will
become more conservative in regard to receiving massive amounts of immigrants,
legal or illegal, legitimate refugees or not.
They will stop adhering to the United Nations standards of providing safety
for these migrants, and they will send them home or refuse to help them. This will especially be true of those nations
in the developing world that become “holder” type nations, near neighbors of
places from which people are fleeing but which do not have their own resources
or infrastructure to care for such large groups of people. It is becoming all too commonplace for huge
refugee camps to exist for too many years, condemning whole generations of
children to grow up in them as a displaced people. War and famine, but slow national and
international adjustments to these realities as well, create horrible results.
For us in America we have to figure out how we
can remain true to our heritage as a nation of immigrants, even those forced
here by slavery, and provide a sensible, just, and compassionate avenue for the
huge amount of folks who want (at risk of exploitation, loss of their wealth,
loss of life, and detention) to come and live here. It is not compassionate to simply throw the
doors open and think this will solve the problem, it will in actuality make it
worse, and create a stampede which will inevitably trample those attempting to
get here and create a fresh xenophobia. Since our political hysteria has created a
paralysis of using our American ingenuity and “can do” attitude we are now
beset with a minority sub-culture of “illegals.” This issue is so full of political demagoguery
that any possible leadership on the issue gets sabotaged by the ideological
extremists of either party. Somebody in politics hear me, “stop using fear
and give us some creative solutions!”
No
matter the political attractiveness of a self-righteous call for “no amnesty,”
we have to figure out a way of clearing the table for a just system. Clearing the table means an over-haul of how
we identify every person who is here in the shadow world and bring them into the
light, and make them legal in some form or fashion. We must find a way to incentivize this path. In
the case of real criminals they should be imprisoned enough so they won’t just
come right back after a fast deportation. If we do this in such a way as to make it
clear enough, attractive enough, arduous enough, systematic enough, and
inviolable enough from cheating or gaming the system, we can then reform how
large the doorway is for new aspiring and legal immigrants. That doorway is too small, and too confusing,
and just invites cheating. My call is
for a renewal of American generosity, a reform of a broken system, and a strong
and enforceable policy that cannot be easily circumvented.
END.
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