Here I Go...

Have you been following the “coming out” demonstrations around the nation?

Students in Georgia have been responding to the awful Arizona-like laws being passed in my former state-o-residence.

First there were 7 in April, now 6 just this past month.

There have been others, too, coming out all over the country to stand up for their HUMAN RIGHTS. The wife of my grandfather told me about Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer prize winning journalist, who came out as undocumented in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Obama is deporting people at record rates, laws now require county jails to turn in any undocumentable person to INS, many groups and organizations are pressing for their states to pass the same kinds of laws being passed in Arizona and Georgia. 

This issue, of course, goes much deeper than people wandering through the desert, with the hope of cleaning toilets and picking strawberries. This article does a pretty good job of explaining how things are going down at our southwestern border.

Our foreign policy, our history of foreign relations (in this case, especially with South and Central America) and our dependency on their land and resources all factor into this. We are dependent on these people in ways that none of us can even fathom. There is some statistic that says that every American has an average of 4 slaves in some other country. These are the people who make our clothes, shoes, tools, toys. They grow our food, we take their water. We’ve made it nearly impossible for places that have resources we desire to support themselves. So, they are slaves for us in their home countries and when some of them decide to risk their lives and the lives of their families to try to make it in the “land of the free”, we make them slaves here. Because they are unable to obtain documents, they are unable to choose decent work environments. They clean for us, they pick what little food we do grow here, they work for us for pennies on the American dollar! They keep our prices Wal-Mart low! They give us our cheap food, our cheap labor, our cheap shit. And here’s the really brilliant part. We’ve convinced ourselves that they slavery is actually destroying our wealth. So, we arrest them, incarcerate them, throw them back over an arbitrary border and let them die. What does all that mean for us? True, often times undocumented individuals do not pay income taxes (though many do, contrary to popular belief), many depend on emergency room care (when they seek out medical treatment) and their children attend public school, but there are many statistics now showing that undocumented immigrants put far more revenue (through sales tax, income tax, and cheap labor) into our society than they are able to take take out of it. People who have no documents in this country, have no rights and therefore cannot demand or receive fair wages, health care, safe work environments, legal representation or many other “benefits”(or, you know, human rights…) that “cost” us money. Of course, when these people are caught or die, there are hundreds and thousands more waiting. Disposable people make disposable income for all of us.

It’s horrifying to see the direction that our country seems to be going with the issue of immigrants, especially those who are unable to obtain documented status, but it is also breath-taking to see how some undocumented people are meeting this injustice.

Families across the country are being torn apart daily by the criminalization, incarceration and deportation of ordinary people.

The family I am currently staying with is one of those families. I arrived here only a couple of days after a dear friend of the family was locked up for “2 days” after being caught driving without a license. He is a good man, a good boyfriend and a good Papi to one child of his own and 3 children he did not biologically father.

Of course, with the new law requiring county jails to turn in any undocumented person to INS, the two days of jail time turned into a deportation process. He’s been lucky so far. He was only detained for about a month. Many undocumentable people are detained for months or even years before they are deported! We received a call from him this morning from the other side of the border. He had been flown to Monterrey, a city on the other side the dreaded Texas border. Again, he was lucky, having been flown into the city that seems far enough a way (we hope) that he may have avoided encounters with the cartels. He has no money, no car, no family or friends waiting for him. Meanwhile, his family and friends in the US are struggling to find a way to support him from afar. Telephone calls have been made to wire money (that we pray won’t be stolen from him), money is being collected to raise the funds to drive his truck and tools over the border to him. The biggest struggle, is trying to reunite him with his family. With many hurdles to overcome with regard to getting the children across the border, his girlfriend may have a very difficult choice to make. She could take her youngest child back to Mexico and reuniting with her partner (and father of said child), but she would probably be forced to leave her three older children behind. Her other option would be to stay here with her children, with no partner, no co-parent for her children and little support, knowing full well that her own status puts all of them at risk.

This is what our immigration policies accomplish.

How, as Christians, are we to respond to this? Resist this? Not that resistance need be isolated to Christians, as any decent person should be able to see the vulgarity in this. But how as Christians are we called to respond? How does our call to resist empire, resist violence and unify the Body of Christ dictate how we resist this specific sin?