Shrine to the Deported
Art Courtesy of Jim Burklo
Shortly, I'm going to put up a shrine in front of the church I serve, dedicated to the memory of our law-abiding undocumented neighbors who have worked hard and built lives in this country for ten, twenty, thirty years or more, and now face the frightening prospect of being deported. I hope many other faith communities do the same. (If you set up something like this, please let me know right away, and I'll work on getting national publicity for it! Let's get creative and share our ideas...) Now is the time for our churches and temples to join together in making a public moral witness for humane treatment of immigrants and refugees.
“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the native-born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the your God.” Leviticus 19: 33-34.
Deporting long-term undocumented immigrants is a clear violation of this admonition. They should not be punished for the failure of this country to come up with fair and humane reforms to our immigration system. They should be given a path to citizenship, so they can come out of the shadows and contribute even more to our country.
I doubt seriously that the great majority of Americans want to treat immigrants and refugees with the callous disregard currently aimed at them by the Trump administration. Indiscriminate deportation and ending the resettlement in the US of carefully-vetted refugees is not what most folks voted for.
It is way past time for common sense and decency to prevail. For God’s sake, let’s make it happen now.
Trump has an historic opportunity to do the right thing about immigrants and refugees. He’s got a slim mandate to take action on the subject. So far, he has chosen the path of performative cruelty. But we still have time to pressure him to do the right thing, and actually fix our immigration system rather than destroying it.
And that is to balance justice with mercy, humanitarianism with practicality. It isn’t a radical new idea. Twenty years ago, the bipartisan McCain-Kennedy proposal was introduced in Congress. It would have secured the border and provided a path to citizenship for long-term, otherwise law-abiding undocumented migrants. Republicans scuttled the plan because they saw the immigration issue as a rich vein of voter resentment that they could exploit for partisan gain. That crass cynicism brought us to this present moment of vicious treatment of immigrants and refugees by the Trump administration. For Trump, “America First” means no immigrants entering the country at all.
But for God’s sake, let’s remember: America = immigrants. Some came fifteen thousand years ago, and the rest came long after, and more keep coming, and that’s what America is all about. The American people want a sustainable number of immigrants and refugees and asylees to enter this country through a humane and orderly process. No, we don’t want people to be so desperate that they hop fences and walls and cross into our country through treacherous deserts where so many die of thirst and exposure. No, we don’t want people to enter our country with insecure, temporary status awaiting asylum hearings that might not happen for many years for lack of judges to adjudicate them. We want an adequately funded judicial system to consider their claims fairly and quickly. We want fully and properly vetted refugees to be able to enter our country, with limits on their numbers.
And no, we do not want our hard-working undocumented neighbors who have been here for decades and have behaved themselves, like the great majority of the rest of us, to be uprooted from the country they call home. They’re as American as the rest of us, despite their lack of papers. The fact of their long-term presence is an indictment of our nation’s failure to reckon with the immigration problem in a sensible and humane way for so very long. It is completely irresponsible and inhumane to deport people today if they’ve been here for many years, contributing to our common good. If they have proven themselves worthy of citizenship, they should be awarded it. But people who have come here recently without documentation can be subject to deportation, prioritizing those with criminal records. Few of us want our borders to be wide open to anyone who crosses without permission.
We also want a system of temporary workers from other countries to take jobs our own citizens won’t fill, with a structure that affords them dignity and protection. And we want a certain number of high-skilled workers to come into our country to power our tech industries. All this can be accomplished with careful calibration that protects our own citizens’ economic security.
This isn’t rocket science. The solutions have been in front of us for decades. For God’s sake, let’s drop the hyperbole and just get down to common decency and practicality. We can do this. Let’s demand it of our politicians, whether we like them or not. Let’s make it as easy as possible for them to do the right thing, and to do it sooner than later.
(More on the faith response to the immigration crisis HERE)