SERMON: Immigration

Sermon offered by Rev. Dr. Maureen Killoran
at River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation, Bethesda, MD
February 5, 2012, to launch the month-long program, IMMIGRATION: LIVES MATTER

This program was unique in RRUUC's history in that it was a genuinely cross-congregational endeavor,
involving all aspects of the congregation from Sunday services, religious education for children and youth,
all-ages activities and adult enrichment, as well as educational lectures and programs.  A key feature was an 
exhibit of photographs by artist Gwen Lewis.  The month's logo was designed by Barbara Lewis. 
 All aspects of the month were planned by an interdisciplinary team of lay leaders, ministers and staff.


READING:  from the Reverend Victoria Safford, Walking Toward Morning: Meditations (California: Dyeing Art Books, 2008).

 You know, we do it every day. Every morning we go out blinking into the glare of our freedom, into the wilderness of our work and the world, making maps as we go, looking for signs that we're on the right path. And on some good days we walk right out of our oppressions, those things that press us down from the outside or (as often) from the inside; we shake off the shackles of fear, prejudice, timidity, . . .  selfishness, self righteousness, and claim our freedom outright, terrifying as it is --  our freedom to be human and humane.  . . .  Every day, we gather what we think we'll need, pick up what we love and all that we so far believe, put on our history, shoulder our experience and memory, take inventory of our blessings, and we start walking toward morning.

 

SERMON:   

It seems a little weird, you know – calling people “illegal aliens.”  I was one, back in 1986, when the official label WAS “illegal alien.”  I had a job offer, was in line for a professional visa.  But the wheels of the then Immigration and Naturalization Service turned slowly.  The church year began.  Said the congregation:  “Be here by Labor Day, or we’ll hire someone else.”  I’d finished nine years of schooling, jumped through all the hoops it takes to be a minister.  My student loans were due.  So I came. 

 And in the several months before my visa came through, I was aware every minute that I needed to keep my head down.  I couldn’t open a bank account. I didn’t get paid.  I lived in a trailer in someone’s back yard.

 What does an immigrant look like?

 I was once the lead ministerial candidate for the Unitarian congregation in Adelaide, Australia.  The congregation and I were ready to roll -- until an immigration lawyer pointed out that I was too old . . . To protect their health care system from aging immigrants, Australia had amazingly high financial restrictions for prospects over 50, even for work visas.     

 What does an immigrant look like?  Why do people emigrate, anyway?

 “Every morning,” wrote Victoria Safford, “every morning we go out . . . into the glare of our freedom, into the wilderness of our work and the world.”  That we is us, that we is everybody, all people.  People seeking to better themselves, seeking to connect with their families, to escape poverty and disaster and violence. 

 Every day we, every one of us, we walk into the morning, and sometimes that means departure. It means pulling up roots.  It means leaving.  And whenever you leave, whenever you begin a journey, you head out, praying you are on the right path, as Victoria Safford says, “making maps as we go.”

 I can’t help thinking of the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of men, women, children, making maps with their feet.  Walking from Mexico, from Latin America, following the migration patterns of generations trying to reach America.  I am far from being an economist, but I know what my husband Peter and I saw when we briefly taught ESL amidst the radical poverty of rural Mexico.  Every family was dependent on someone, a father, a mother, an uncle, working in and sending remittances from the US.  It was taken for granted, “the way things were” and, in the memories of the young people we taught, this was the way it “had always been.”

 It used to be that US growers recruited Mexicans for agricultural work as part of a “guest worker” program.  They signed on for only poverty wages and lived under conditions not all that different from slaves.  They worked through harvest time . . . strawberries, sugar beets, cucumbers, cotton . . . and then most of them returned home.  What you had was an ebb, and a flow.   As reported in the El Paso Herald Post in 1956:   "More than 80,000 braceros pass through El Paso annually. They're part of an army of 300,000 or more that marches across the border each year to help plant, cultivate and harvest . . .  crops throughout the United States.  And most of them go home when the work is done.”  (April 28, 1956)  
 
My point is not whether the guest worker program was good or bad.  My point is that maps were reinforced.  Patterns of migration.  You come.  You work.  You earn money.  You go home. 

The bracero program ended in 1964, but workers, now “illegal aliens,” kept coming, continuing the ebb and flow.  And in 1994 a wall was started, an attempt at “control through deterrence,” trying to dam the rivers of migration.  

 And yet the need remained.  Some blame NAFTA for shifting Mexico’s economic bases in unanticipated ways.[i]  Others look to global warming.  Whatever, the people kept coming -- men, women, and more recently children, families whose opportunities had tanked.  People following their dreams for work and a better life, for themselves and the people they loved.

 But the wall rose.  The easy routes were blocked. So hundreds of thousands of feet sought other paths into the untracked desert. Going home was not easy, so more and more often, migrants came and stayed.  Entrepreneurs known as “coyotes” -- some principled, others not -- made promises to convey migrants through the desert at an ever-rising price.  Fees for a service by no means assured, for many ensuring indebtedness, possibly for the rest of their life. 

 And so there came more wall.  More militarization.  More crime, as bandits and drug traffickers joined the flow.  People started dying, dying in the desert of exposure, of injury, of exhaustion. The Border Patrol estimated 500 deaths in 2005, and the reality is that not all bodies are found.  American citizens started being arrested, prosecuted for trying to help . . . for providing water stations and food in the desert . . .[ii]

 Other Americans got jobs with the expanding Border Patrol.  Please don’t misunderstand me, jobs are good.  But is it “good” when “we the people” employ some among us to use high tech militarization to chase human beings – undocumented migrants, yes, but human beings.  To keep them in cages until they can be deported.  To make no difference between drug runners and desperate families? 

 You may well say with a shrug, “Hey, they’re doing something illegal.”  In the words of an anonymous blogger,  “It’s sad that people hitch their fates to extorting, raping Coyotes or walk through an oven. But that being said; they made those choices. It was their own lives that they gambled on.  And being illegal is WRONG.”[iii]

 Yeah.  Being illegal is wrong, just as I was in 1986.  But I still ask:  once those people are out there in the desert, is it RIGHT to chase them down? to ignore them?  to let them die?  Setting aside the drug runners and unscrupulous coyotes, is it RIGHT TO abandon compassion for people whose main crime is trying to make things work for their families?  

 And  is it right to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars  border militarization, at a time when just about every domestic program is being challenged?  In terms of Homeland Security, should we remind ourselves that, to date, no terrorist identified on U.S. soil entered this country illegally?

 What about the damage to the planet that’s come from building a wall, from blocking water flows, soil migration, the movement of animals and the propagation of the fragile desert ecosystem.

 What about the impact of all this on Americans living near the border?  A UU minister serving in the Rio Grande Valley says she feels caught in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Not because of immigrants trying to get in, but because of the drug cartels shooting it out in the street and even at the local mall.”[iv] 

 “On some days we walk right out of our oppressions,” wrote Victoria Safford, but for desperate immigrants, undocumented immigrants – God love them, “illegal aliens” – rather than walking out of their oppression, what they too often find is that their real suffering is about to begin. 

 Safford again: “Every morning we go out blinking into the glare of our freedom . . .  looking for signs that we are on the right path.”  It is in this sense of seeking the “right path,” that I ask:  What does it mean for each one of US, to be citizens of a nation that deals with undocumented immigrants by enacting both human and environmental violence?  Because make no mistake, however we vote and whether or not we protest, in the eyes of the world, what is done by our government is done in each one of our names.

               I think of people.  Of human beings.  What does an immigrant look like? 

 Yes, I know, we have laws.  I know our nation has a responsibility to maintain security of its borders.  I know laws mandate that immigrants must have documentation.

 People have legitimate concerns about jobs for Americans. People are anxious about their own lives, their own families, their own dreams.  People are afraid of change, afraid of losing what they perceive they have, or might have, or wish they could have . . . as indeed people, taken in the collective, always have been.  Whether it was the Chinese, the Irish, or the Eastern Europeans, or people from the Caribbean, from India, or, now, Latinos . . . waves of immigrants have always been met by concern, by a sense of difference, by a fear that something foundational is about to change. [v]

               But still, I can’t help thinking we are going about all this in the wrong way.  Military historians like to say that generals are always fighting the last war.  Meaning they’re looking backwards, trying to defend themselves, their armies, their nation, against the last war’s mistakes.  What they miss is that their current battle exists in a new context.  It has new priorities.  And for sure it will have a whole new set of mistakes.  

               And so we have immigration, with a nation increasingly militarized, increasingly torn.

              People are dying.

              Our government’s policies treat undocumented immigrants in ways that are – to use the kindest terms possible – frequently both unjust and inhumane.[vi] 

               Recent polls show that 60% of Americans support strong laws such as Arizona’s police enforcement – and yet at the same percentage say that undocumented immigrants should have a path to citizenship.  By a wide majority, Americans are opposed to criminalizing citizens who offer humanitarian aid in the desert.

               Then we have the economic impact – according to the Brookings Institution, undocumented workers currently pay over $7 billion in Social Security taxes . . . and generate something like $150 billion in economic activity annually.[vii]   A quick eyeballing of the people tending our lawns and gardens and working in restaurant kitchens suggests that many Americans – I suspect some of us – are benefiting from the labor of undocumented immigrants.

               Put up a wall?  Yeah.  They did that in Berlin.

              Militarize the border?  Look at Israel and Palestine.

              Chase them? Isn’t this the approach that “we”, our nation, used in what American mythology thinks of as “how the west was won?”  Or how plantation owners captured “their” escaped slaves?

               In the debates about immigration I long for a primary consciousness that we are talking about living, breathing, hoping, human beings.  I long for awareness that the needs of our global village are not neatly coterminous with the borders of nations. And above all, I long for acknowledgement that it is the essence of culture continually to evolve and change.  

Think about it.  I’ve come out this morning as one who was, for a brief time, an “illegal alien.”  This country has been good to me; this nation is now my home.  But I still wonder, what does an immigrant look like?

 I invite you, if you are willing, to stand or raise your hand as any of these categories apply to you:

 If you were born in another country, please stand and remain standing.

If your parents were born in another country, please stand.

If your grandparents were born in another country . . .

If you have close kin who are citizens of or who were born in another country, including  children who were born elsewhere . . .

 What does an immigrant look like?   I say to you that Lives Matter.  With or without documentation, an immigrant is a human being.

 We come to an end, and I know, I haven’t offered answers.  I am not a lawyer or a economist, not a demographer or even really an activist.  My business is ethics, and the spiritual imperative of being human.  

THE PURPOSE of this congregation’s month-long focus on “Immigration:  Lives Matter.” is for you to explore, to think about it, to determine what it means to you.

 You’ll have a whole variety of opportunities to learn about the broad subject of immigration. To participate in conversations.  To press your thinking, your awareness, your feelings . . .  

 I urge you to take this opportunity seriously.  Because what it will mean to “be an American” tomorrow depends in large measure on what Americans choose to do around issues of immigration – what WE choose to do today