Last year Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided a factory on the south coast of Massachusetts in New Bedford. They found more than two hundred illegal immigrants hard at work sewing bullet proof clothing. Those workers were immediately taken into custody and bussed to the federal detention center two and a half hours to the north in Devens.

As you’ll recall, families were separated that day, including nursing mothers and infants, and children who were stranded at day care. The stress on families who didn’t have contact with their loved ones for days was enormous (and continues to be). Furthermore, the people who were arrested all faced immediate deportation, regardless of whether or not they had a spouse or child who was a legal U.S. resident.

This event is part of an increasing trend in the enforcement of U.S. immigration policy that points toward big problems with our current laws and policies. Even more than just indicating political or public policy problems, I believe there are ethical and religious dimensions to these issues. As we heard in this morning’s reading, all the world’s religions have ethics about how to treat strangers, travelers and foreign born workers. In the Hebrew bible we hear, “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the stranger.  The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you.  You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt...” (Leviticus 19:33-34) This is a big topic, one that deserves far more attention than one sermon. So this is an overview, followed by some suggestions about what Unitarian Universalists can do, are doing, including UU’s in this congregation.

Mae M. Ngai is a historian and writer whose focus is U.S. immigration. She notes that until the last twenty years, for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a few exceptional periods, the U.S. has had a mostly liberal immigration policy. She writes: “There were so few restrictions on immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries that there was no such thing as “illegal immigration.” The government excluded a mere one percent of the 25 million immigrants who landed at Ellis Island before World War I, mostly for health reasons. (Chinese were the exception, excluded on grounds of “racial unassimilability.”)…

Furthermore, if you did enter the U.S. without documentation, after one to five years the statutes of limitations ran out and you wouldn’t be deported. Which was fine, because there were lots of entry level jobs for almost anyone who wanted one. Ngai notes that while they faced great prejudice, “In the early 1900s, immigrants from Europe provided cheap, unskilled labor that made possible the nation’s industrial and urban expansion. They shoveled pig iron, dug sewers and subway tunnels and sewed shirtwaists.” (unquote) Or as the song from “Ragtime” puts it, they “traveled on the wheel of a dream.”

After WWI Congress began to limit immigration from various countries. While this didn’t stop people from coming to the U.S., it did create large numbers of people who lived and worked illegally in this country. Still, Ngai writes, “Our legalization policies recognized that once a person settled here, had a family, a job and a home, he or she became a part of society. Separating families was seen as detrimental to individuals and society, and deportation was likened to banishment.”

So, for example, if you had an American born child, for most of the 20th c. it was easy to obtain U.S. citizenship. Also during this time, Congress passed many acts that allowed people who had been living in the U.S. illegally to become citizens: in 1929 you could become a citizen simply by paying a $20 registration fee, and from 1935 to 1950 by going to Canada and reentering the country legally.

However, public policy began to change significantly in 1986 when Congress decided that separating foreign born parents from their U.S. born children was no longer a hardship. And since 1996, if a foreign born person has been in the U.S. illegally for more than one year, they must return to their homeland for ten years (though visa violations carry penalties of fewer years outside the country).

Laws proposed and passed in the last few years have been even more harsh; in 2005 the House of Representatives passed a bill making it a criminal offense to aid and assist an undocumented foreign born person; this measure was defeated in the Senate. It also sparked great protests by millions of undocumented workers in May of 2005. However, the law that rescinded 1000 years of Habeus corpus in 2006 directly affects persons who are here illegally—suddenly they don’t have the right to know the charges against them if they’re arrested.

It’s estimated that there are 12 million undocumented individuals living in the U.S. today. Some entered the country legally, then never left when their visas expired. They overstay their visas because, as the Mennonite’s Central Committee says, “Contrary to popular belief, few could have immigrated through legal channels. Temporary work permits are difficult to obtain, immigrant visas are rarely issued to unskilled workers and family visas can involve long waits (up to 22 years). And once a person enters without authorization, U.S. law often provides no mechanism to adjust status. For children brought here by parents and raised in the United States, this result can be particularly frustrating.”

And now, there are documented stories of children who have been born and raised in this country who are suddenly facing deportation with their families to what is to them essentially a foreign country. Imagine growing up in New England or California or Alabama and at age 14 being deported, out of the blue, to your parent’s country of origin, a totally different culture in Mexico, Bosnia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala or Uzbekistan a place where even your parents no longer belong.

Leaving one’s homeland is not easy physically, emotionally or spiritually, but entering this country with a visa is a relatively easy way to arrive. Many people don’t have that option, and they risk traveling on foot through deadly conditions such as deserts, or over oceans in shipping containers to get here. They also endure the risk of terrible financial and physical exploitation. So while much of the current national conversation focuses on keeping people out, I think it’s really important to ask, “Just why is it that people would want to come here?”

In his book, Across the Wire, Luis Alberto Urrea writes, “One of the most beautiful views of San Diego is from the summit of a small hill in Tijuana’s municipal garbage dump. People live on that hill, poking through the trash with long poles that end with hooks made from bent nails. They scavenge for bottles, tin, aluminum, cloth; for cast-out beds, wood, furniture. Sometimes, they find meat that is not too rotten to be cooked….[from] this view spot…garbage pickers can watch the buildings of the city of San Diego gleam gold on the blue coastline. The city looks cool in summer when heat cracks the ground and flies drill into their noses. And in the winter,…when cold makes their lips bleed…and babies are wrapped in plastic trash bags for warmth, San Diego glows like a big electric dream. And every night on that burnt hill these people watch.”

Increasing numbers of people look across the border from places like the Tijuana garbage dump because that’s where they are reduced to living after changes in global trade and manufacturing have destabilized major sectors of their country’s economy. In 1992, Canada, the U.S. and Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, which opened Mexican markets to US and Canadian corn and other commodities. This undercut the price of Mexican corn to the point that Mexican farmers just couldn’t compete. While a small number of elites in all three countries have prospered because of NAFTA, great numbers of people at the bottom of the all economies, and particularly the Mexican economy, are suffering tremendously.

So it’s no surprise that over the past 20 years the tide of undocumented workers from places like Mexico has increased dramatically. One thing however that’s different about some of the new immigrants from Central and South America and the Caribbean nations is how often they return home. When people came from Poland and Germany, Ireland and Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries often they never returned to their homeland; this was of course also true for most of the people who arrived here as slaves from Africa and as indentured laborers from China. But it’s not uncommon for modern undocumented workers to return to their homeland every few years to visit family for a few months at a time. Since there are no jobs there, they return here; relatively cheap cell phone coverage even makes it possible to keep in touch spouses and growing children…. Possible, but not easy. And I wonder, what happens to one’s identity and sense of self when you live such a minimal existence on the margins of not just one but two cultures, two economies, two languages, two lives?

Margins, borders….Ursula K. LeGuin writes of such places, “The Borderlands—the trouble zone between two countries, between two languages, the poverty which is the huge shadow of affluence, the place where you live when life is impossible,…the region where the saints and outlaws are…borderlands…of horrors and marvels, tenderness and rage.”

It’s as if globalization has opened up a crack in the world, a gap where identity, language, customs and human rights can disappear. It’s a powerful threat, one borne mostly by the people at the bottom, though the threat is not lost on people in other social strata. Some American people are angry about their unstable economic situation in places that manufactures have left, places like Detroit, Milwaukee, North Carolina. They know how shaky their situation is and some of them are angry at immigrants.

However, the problem with undocumented workers in this country isn’t mainly that they taking jobs away from Americans. Those jobs often have been redistributed on purpose by companies seeking to maximize profits at the expense of human beings. When they hire undocumented workers they can threaten them with deportation if they try to unionize, if they ask for benefits and fair wages. Undocumented workers make far less money than American workers, even if they were recruited as professionals. If they had the choice, many of them would be working in their homelands, but there are no jobs for them there. They want more of a life than living on a garbage dump.

What business and governments refuse to acknowledge is what religious people have to speak out loud: Our immigration system is badly broken. It doesn’t work for undocumented workers who are vulnerable to financial exploitation and safety violations. And when undocumented people work and drive and get sick side by side with others, their risk becomes everyone’s risk.

Even more, when a person loses herself with constant border crossings and encounters with a culture that refuses to see her, refuses to care about her, what happens to her mental and emotional health and well being? What happens to her child who said good-bye to her one morning and never sees her again because the mother gets arrested at her workplace and deported before they could even say good-bye?

Our faith holds up the sacred truth that we live in an interdependent world. What affects one of us affects us all. Immigration issues don’t just affect people from developing nations; they affect citizens of affluent nations too, our wallets, our minds, hearts, and our souls.

What will we do with our privilege? Are we willing to look into the borderlands, the places where identities and lives can disappear and see and hear and smell and feel what we don’t want to know? Are we willing to acknowledge the inherent worth and dignity of fellow human beings who are living in conditions that are the stuff of our nightmares?

We can begin by asking, what are our current immigration policies about? Who benefits from this? Which businesses and industries make profits?

We can join our strength to the strength to others who are working to uphold the principles of the International Declaration of Human Rights, which says that everyone has a right to enter and leave their country, that people have a right to asylum in any country, that everyone has the right to a union and collective bargaining.

We can work with groups like Massachusetts Immigration and Advocacy (MIRA) to educate ourselves and others, and advocate for humane policies that build strong communities around the globe.

We can support the recommendations of the Interfaith Statement in Support of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, and UU statements of conscience and Acts of Immediate Witness on Immigration—all of which can be found on the UUA website. They call for such things as regularizing the status of undocumented workers, halting deportations that separate family members, and enforcing safety and labor laws for everyone, and addressing structural issues created by trade and aid policies.

I was heartened to realize the significant things this congregation is already doing in this area:

This month’s collection in support of immigrant and refugee issues

Our past support of the Imam and his family;

the Social Justice Committee’s Fair Trade sales—Fair Trade really makes a difference! You can attend the talk this afternoon by Dia Cheney to learn more about Fair Trade.

In regard to this most complex and difficult issue, perhaps the most significant thing we each can do is open our hearts and cross arid places inside ourselves that would be fatal to our own humanity, our own souls if we knowingly stayed in them.

Even to study and learn helps to welcome the stranger and strengthen the interdependent web of existence, the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Amen.

Sources for this sermon:

Luis Alberto Urrea, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border, New York, Doubleday, 1993. (this is also the source of the Ursula K. LeGuin quote)

For You Were Once a Stranger: Immigration in the U. S. Through the Lens of Faith, Interfaith Worker Justice, 2007. (see p. 18 for the article by Mae M. Ngai)

Interfaith Worker Justice
1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave., 4th Floor
Chicago, IL 60637
Phone: (773) 728-8400
Fax: (773) 728-8409
www.iwj.org

Massachusetts Immigration and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA) (source for the report on the effects of the New Bedford ICE raid on children and families)

Mennonite Central Committee

Unitarian Universalist Association (search key word: “immigration”)