Here's the sermon I gave today about Arizona's immigration law. If you can watch the video clip “UUs Stand on the Side of Love in Arizona” from http://www.uua.org/events/generalassembly/2010/ga2010/165851.shtml, I really urge you to do that. It is so powerful to hear folks telling their own stories about how anti-immigrant sentiment has personally hurt them and their families.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
“Immigration Reform: How Are We Called to Act?”
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
July 18, 2010
One of my favorite cartoon strips in the newspaper is called “Pickles.” It’s about an old married couple, Earl and Opal.
There was a strip the other day that showed the two of them
sitting on the porch and chatting. Opal says to Earl,
“Did you know that the DNA of humans and chimpanzees
is 96% the same?”
Earl says, “Yes, I do know that. I don’t believe it, though.”
Opal says, “You know it, but you don’t believe it?”
And Earl says, “Absolutely. I don’t believe everything I know.” (Brian Crane, “Pickles,” July 1, 2010.)
And it struck me: that sentiment is alive and well
all over the country, but especially today in Arizona,
where Governor Jan Brewer went on record last month
claiming the majority of undocumented immigrants
are not coming to this country to work,
but to smuggle drugs across the border and terrorize families. (See http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2010/06/27/jan.brewer.drug.mules.ktvk?iref=allsearch.)
Let me just say: she and I have different perspectives.
I am proud to be the sister-in-law of a recent immigrant
from South America who came here
with nothing but his own determination,
who has worked really hard to put himself through college
and become a nurse helping people who are sick and in need.
I have a very different belief
about why most people come to this country, documented or not.
In my own admittedly limited experience,
the immigrants I know—my friends, my family¬¬—
have come here to work
and make enough money to feed their families,
and to escape very scary and oppressive governments—
not to sell drugs or commit violent crimes.
Governor Brewer’s comments don’t make sense to me.
That said, I don’t want to get into a war of perceptions,
my experience versus Governor Brewer’s.
I do want to be really clear that there is no evidence
for Governor Brewer’s highly inflammatory statement
other than her own fears.
In fact, a member of the National Border Patrol Council,
a union of border control agents, has said
Governor Brewer’s comments are “clearly not the case.”
He said, they don’t “comport with reality—
that’s the nicest way to put it.” (See http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/06/25/arizona.immigrants.drugs/index.html?iref=allsearch.)
And you don’t have to take his word for it, either.
Governor Brewer claims immigrants
are bringing crime and violence to Arizona.
In fact, the FBI’s own statistics show that violent crime has been declining in Arizona for the past four years, even as unauthorized immigration has increased.
And on top of that, research going back nearly 100 years
has consistently shown that immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. (See http://immigrationpolicy.org/issues/crime.)
These are the facts.
This is what we know.
But a lot of folks in Arizona and around the country
are awfully ready to believe some pretty wild misconceptions
about a whole group of people, fellow human beings,
rather than what they know or ought to know.
A lot of people are acting out of bias rather than fact,
fear rather than information,
fear of people who come from different countries
and look a little different
and speak different languages.
And this is a very human thing to do.
We can all get blinded by our fears now and again.
The people supporting this law are not bad people,
but they are afraid,
and I cannot condone where their fears are leading them.
Because what’s happening in Arizona,
and sadly in a lot of copycat states around the country,
is that legislators are letting their fears railroad their intellects
into passing laws that are racist and unjust.
Let me remind you of what the situation is in Arizona.
On July 29, a new law targeting undocumented immigrants
is going to take effect.
S.B. 1070, as it’s called, says that when police officers
stop or detain or arrest someone,
they have to “make a reasonable attempt”
to determine the immigration status of that person
if there is a “reasonable suspicion” that they’re undocumented.
Lots of people have already been asking,
how exactly would someone look suspiciously undocumented?
What does an undocumented person look like?
Here’s what African-American newspaper columnist
Eugene Robinson has to say about that:
“Aggressive enforcement of the law would seem to require
demanding identification from anybody who looks kind of Mexican.
Or maybe...those who look kind of Mexican and also kind of poor.
Or maybe anyone who dares visit the Mexican Consulate.” (Engene Robinson, “Arizona turns Latino citizens into second-class citizens,” Stockton Record, April 29, 2010.)
The people who wrote the law keep saying,
they’re not into racial profiling, they’re not targeting Latinos,
but let’s get real.
In Arizona the vast majority of undocumented people
are Spanish-speaking Latinos and Latinas.
It seems pretty clear that the people who are going to get hassled
are people who look Latino and speak Spanish,
no matter if they are U.S. citizens
or if their families have lived here for generations.
Now, President Obama’s administration has already filed a lawsuit
arguing the Arizona law is unconstitutional
on the grounds that Arizona is usurping a function
that properly belongs to the federal government.
And if that argument is enough to get the law overturned,
I for one will rejoice.
But that’s not really why I oppose this law.
That’s not where it gets me in the gut.
And it’s not even the racial profiling aspect of this law
that gets me the most,
even though I absolutely do find it offensive and wrong and racist.
What really gets me at a gut level—
you know, that place deep in your core where your energy lives
and when you are touched you know you have to act—
what really gets me—for me, it starts with a very deep knowledge
that diversity is a good thing. It’s a joyful thing.
I want to live in a United States where people come from all over
and bring their traditions and their history and their language
and keep them alive.
We all know this country is changing.
We’ve all heard the statistics that tell us soon the United States
will not be a majority-white country any more.
Here in the Central Valley it’s already happened,
and I say that is a beautiful thing.
It is such a blessing to live in a place
where people from all different places can come together
and share with one another
and become friends and partners and family members.
Here in the Valley we are the future of the whole country,
and we know ethnic and cultural diversity is wonderful.
It’s exciting. It’s good for our kids, it’s good for all of us.
And even beyond that, here in this church,
we have inherited a faith that diversity of all kinds—
diversity of belief, of sexual orientation, of culture,
of age and gifts and every kind of human variation there is—
makes us stronger.
This is a deep knowledge that we have won
through our living in community.
I want us to find ways to witness to that knowledge,
because our country needs it, right here and right now.
If this law goes into effect,
real people in this country are going to be hurt:
real human beings,
some of whom happen to have been born in another country
where life is so much harder that they would risk everything
to come to a country where they hope they can be safe,
a place where they can earn enough for their labor
so that their families do not have to go without food or clean water
or medical care—the kind of basic necessities
most of us have the luxury of taking for granted.
Last year I told you my own family’s story.
My brother-in-law is an immigrant from Venezuela.
Where he comes from, the electricity is dicey.
You probably won’t have hot water every day.
If you don’t support Hugo Chavez, the president,
you get blacklisted.
It’s not easy there.
My brother-in-law and my sister have a six-year-old daughter,
my beautiful niece,
who was born with a congenital heart defect.
After two surgeries, she’s doing just fine now,
but she will need special medical care for the rest of her life.
Today my brother-in-law is proud to be a naturalized U.S. citizen.
But while he was going through the application process,
things got really messed up, and for a time there was a real risk
that he was going to be deported and not allowed to return, ever.
Never allowed to come back to the country where his only child
has to stay in order to get the medical care she needs.
And this is a guy who has become a bilingual nurse,
a health-care professional that our country urgently needs.
If it can happen to him, it can happen to anybody.
I am so grateful that his story ended well.
But I am so aware that, for so many immigrants, it’s not that way.
Workplaces are getting raided, people rounded up
and thrown into detention centers
and dumped across the border to start over as best they can.
Families are getting torn apart.
This is not the kind of country I want to live in.
The country I want to live in honors its history
and remembers that every single person within its borders
was an immigrant once:
the native peoples who came from Asia
so many thousands of years ago;
the earliest English and Spanish colonists—
the WASPiest Daughter of the American Revolution
comes from an immigrant family too;
the African slaves kidnapped and brought here against their will;
Irish and German and Italian and Chinese immigrants;
Filipino and Japanese and Norwegian and Polish;
Jewish and southeast Asian and Haitian and Cuban refugees
and a hundred other peoples:
all of us come from immigrant families
just as much as the so-called “illegal aliens”
who have risked everything to be here.
The country I want to live in has a heart of compassion
for everyone who comes here scared and desperate and brave
and in need. Because this is where we come from.
This is who we are.
If you agree with me that Arizona’s immigration law is wrong,
I urge you today to do more than just think it.
I urge you to get involved and help stop it.
The need is so clear.
In our unison reading today,
Mark Morrison-Reed spoke of what happens when you realize
your life is connected to someone else’s,
and it changes you so that you have to act. (Singing the Living Tradition #580.)
I want to show you a short video now
showing how Unitarian Universalists in Phoenix, Arizona
are already having to deal with what’s happening,
so you can hear their stories in their words.
(Video clip “UUs Stand on the Side of Love in Arizona” from http://www.uua.org/events/generalassembly/2010/ga2010/165851.shtml)
The prophet Micah asks us:
“what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).
And Mark Morrison-Reed reminds us
church is where we come to expand our vision
and share our strength.
I want our church and our faith to shine out
with compassion and respect for all people
as the struggle for immigrants’ rights goes on.
We can begin right now.
July 29, two Thursdays from now,
is the day S.B. 1070 is scheduled to take effect.
Immigrants’ rights groups have called on us to make it
a “National Day of Non-Compliance,” and I urge you to honor that
by writing a letter or making a phone call to your legislators,
telling them what you believe about immigration.
In your order of service
you’ll find a list of just a few of the ways you can get involved.
In particular I want to invite you to an after-church discussion
on August 1 to talk about how our church might respond
to immigration as a moral issue.
And I’ll tell you another thing:
Every year, Unitarian Universalists from all over the country
get together for a national convention called General Assembly.
The sites for the General Assemblies are chosen years in advance,
and it just so happens that the 2012 site is Phoenix, Arizona.
At this year’s General Assembly, the delegates realized
we simply could not ignore the coincidence.
There was no way we could just show up
and go about business as usual.
We talked about boycotting, but that didn’t feel right either.
The UU congregations in Arizona have been deeply engaged
in the struggle for immigrant rights,
and they begged us to come and be in solidarity with them
and the immigrant rights groups they’re working with.
So what we decided was, we’re going to come to Phoenix
for General Assembly, but it’s going to be something we’ve never done before: a Justice General Assembly,
focused on education and witnessing about immigration
from start to finish. We will have study trips to the border.
We will march to witness to our truth.
And we will make our presence felt in solidarity
with our immigrant brothers and sisters
in Arizona and around the country.
I hope a lot of us will be able to come and do this too.
It’s not too early to put June 20-24, 2012 on your calendars.
I am so grateful for your compassion
and your passion for justice.
Let us join together and help this country live into its promise.
Let us stand with our brothers and sisters in faith who need our help.
Let us witness with our voices and our hands and our hearts
for the dream of one nation,
with liberty and justice for all.
May this be so, starting right now.
Amen.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
Family Across Borders
This coming Sunday I'll be preaching on how we can respond to Arizona's immigration law SB 1070. In the meantime, I wanted to share a very personal sermon I gave last year for Mother's Day about how U.S. immigration law nearly tore my own family apart. I'm so very grateful that our story ended well, and all too aware that many others do not.
“Family Across Borders”
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
May 10, 2009
The family I was born into has been in this country
for just about as long as any white people have,
and we are just about as WASPy as you could imagine.
Both the Hortons and the Winterses (that’s my mom’s side)
go back almost to the Mayflower.
We’ve got our share of Puritan-era Obadiahs and Ezekiels
in the family tree.
The most recent relative in my personal family tree who wasn’t born
in this country was my great-grandmother Annie MacDonald,
whose family had emigrated from Scotland to Newfoundland.
(I carry her last name as my middle name.)
So, at first glance,
it might look like my family’s story is pretty far removed
from the story of immigrant families in the U.S. today.
But, in fact, the truth is very different.
Today, my sister Amy, my brother-in-law Juan,
and their daughter Grace are living happily in Miami, Florida.
But just last year,
they found themselves struggling to keep their family together.
Juan was born in Venezuela and came to the U.S. ten years ago.
He got his green card right around the time he and my sister got married. Grace was born a couple of years after that.
Juan had always hoped to become a U.S. citizen
and began the naturalization process a couple of years ago.
Everything went smoothly until they hit a bump
in the form of a hostile, autocratic immigration agent.
In the course of one horrifying interview,
Juan was told that that Immigration had the power to deny his citizenship application and deport him permanently without recourse.
Thank goodness that didn’t happen. Saner heads prevailed,
and Juan’s application for citizenship was approved within a month.
Today he is extremely proud to be a U.S. citizen.
But for days before the good news came through,
Juan and Amy were terrified that by some horrible fluke of the process, Juan might end up getting deported
with no chance of coming back to the U.S., ever.
They didn’t know what they would do if that happened,
and I am so glad they weren’t forced to make a choice.
But many families are not so lucky.
Our government does indeed have the power to separate families,
to tear non-citizen parents away from their U.S.-born children,
in many cases with no recourse whatsoever.
Luckily my family’s story ended well,
but many undocumented immigrants threatened with deportation
are faced with a heart-rending dilemma:
do they bring their U.S.-born children to their own country of origin—a foreign country to their children—
depriving them of all the advantages they had hoped to give them
by coming to the U.S.,
or do they leave their children behind in the U.S.
and accept the heartbreak of a permanent separation?
And you should know: this is not just a few families here and there.
A new report, from which the first reading came this morning,
estimates that in the last ten years,
literally hundreds of thousands of families have been affected. (James D. Kremer, Kathleen A. Moccio, and Joseph W. Hammell, Severing a Lifeline: The Neglect of Citizen Children in America’s Immigration Enforcement Policy (Dorsey & Whitney LLP, 2009), p. 2.)
So what would you do?
Can you imagine?
In the ancient story of the Judgment of Solomon (1 Kings 3:16–28),
two women both say they are the true mother of a young child.
Solomon says to them both:
Cut the child in half and give half to one woman, half to the other.
The false mother accepts this, while the real mother cries out,
“No, don’t kill my child—give him to her instead.”
In the story, Solomon praises the real mother
and gives her back her child.
But our government is not King Solomon,
and no reward awaits the sacrificial choice of deported parents
who leave their children behind—
just the pain of separation and the knowledge that they are doing
the best they can to give their child a better future.
If your heart goes out to these mothers and fathers and children,
I urge you to do two things.
One is something I believe is really important,
something that we as a congregation can do much better
than our government can:
Come with me while I do some theology
about immigration and national borders, and about what it means to be born in a particular place.
This may sound a little strange—why theology?
But I believe theology is extremely important. It’s what underlies
all our social policies, all our thinking about how things should be
in our country and in the world.
Let me remind you what I mean by theology.
It’s a Greek word that literally means “speaking about the Gods”:
logy is “speaking” or “studying,” as in eulogy, or biology, or cardiology;
theo means “about the Gods,” as in monotheism or atheism.
But in the liberal religious tradition, of which this church is a part,
when we talk about theology,
it isn’t limited to that old question of whether God exists.
When we in this tradition say “theology,”
we’re talking about all the ways we as human beings
try to answer the really big questions:
questions like,
How did we come to be here? Where do we go when we die?
How are we connected to the rest of the universe?
And what should our society be like?
How are we supposed to live with other people and other beings?
Our society—any society—makes a law because collectively
we think it’s a good idea.
The why we think it’s a good idea—that’s theology,
the way we make sense of the world.
When we talk about immigration, there are always theological questions lurking just under the surface of our usual arguments.
Here are some:
Is it moral to exclude people from this country?
Is it moral for a country to defend its borders,
and if it is, why is it moral?
Is it ever right for a group to band together
and keep out others who “don’t belong”?
Let’s think about this.
The fact is, whether it’s right or not,
every human society that I know of does this,
And it’s not just a human thing.
Wolves and polar bears defend their territory; birds do; insects do too.
Animal behaviorists tell us
animals tend to defend the resources they need to live
when those resources are scarce. (See Animal Behavior Society, “Crickets and Territory Defense,” online at http://www.animalbehavior.org/ABSEducation/laboratory-exercises-in-animal-behavior/laboratory-exercises-in-animal-behavior-crickets-and-territory-defense)
Probably most of us would agree territoriality in animals
isn’t immoral or wrong; it’s just instinct;
it’s just the life-force in them rising up to protect its own existence.
Well, we human beings are animals too.
The life-force is strong in us too.
There is something very basic and deep
about the urge to protect our lives.
And, bringing us back to immigration,
I think any theology of national borders has to give some due
to what I would call the divinely given urge of all beings to live—
and that includes people.
We have a deep-seated fear that letting other people onto our turf
will mean less for us—maybe so much less that we’ll die!
The truth is that immigrants actually contribute far more to our economy than they receive. Study after study shows this.
But some people still have that instinctive fear
that letting people into their country will mean less for them.
Even in the wealthiest country in the history of the world,
that fear of scarcity can get so strong,
it can even override our wish
for families to stay together and be happy and strong.
That fear sits deep inside us. We didn’t choose it; we’re born that way.
And yet, for thousands of years,
religious people and moral philosophers have been saying,
just because we have an instinct to do something,
doesn’t mean it’s right.
People are gifted with the power to examine our fears
and think before we act.
We have the power to think about how others are going to be affected by what we do.
We have the power to make moral choices.
Simply saying it’s our human instinct to defend our borders
is not going to fly as a moral argument.
One day when I was in elementary school, I instinctively pulled a chair out from under a kid who wouldn’t get out of my seat.
That doesn’t mean it was a good instinct!
Our country has been driven far more by unconscious fears of scarcity
than by generosity and compassion,
or even plain old economic reality!
I do believe everybody has the right to protect their own life.
But, when it comes to immigration, I believe we have
a moral obligation to examine our fears—
to remind ourselves of how much we in this country really do have,
and to remember every person wants to live without fear of scarcity.
We might do well to remember the words of a fellow heretic,
the English reformer John Bradford.
He’s the one who said, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Those of us who were born in this country
can hardly help asking ourselves, why was I so lucky?
Why was I born here and not in North Korea or Darfur?
We know that people all over the world,
and indeed within this country,
are born into very different circumstances.
And we can’t help but question, why is this so?
To speak very personally,
why was I born into a wealthy family here in the U.S.
while my brother-in-law was born into a poor family in Venezuela?
Why is anyone born into the circumstances we are?
Is it chance? Is it some kind of divine plan?
We can’t know for sure, though I often wonder.
This is a mystery that we will never solve in this lifetime.
The one idea I can’t accept
is the idea that seems to underlie our current immigration policy—
the idea that those of us born into wealth and comfort
were born with some special merit, some inherent right to live a life
that’s safer and easier and better than someone else’s.
Just saying that idea out loud makes me feel awful inside.
I can’t give you any scientific proof that it’s false,
but along with the founders of this country
I hold this truth to be self-evident, that all people are created equal.
In spite of their failures and, no doubt, my own,
I still hold on to that vision.
And more than that, my theology tells me
that everybody all around the world is connected.
I believe we are one human family across all the borders that divide us.
So why should any one group of us
have the right to hoard all the good stuff for ourselves?
If our brothers and sisters are in need of food to eat
and education to feed their minds, and work to support their families,
and we have those things in our country and they don’t,
can it really be right for us to tell them, “Too bad and keep out!”?
I can’t believe that’s right.
I believe everyone in the world
has just as much right to the stuff we need to live as anyone else.
I also know we can’t do everything and we can’t save everybody.
But, as a nation, the very least we can do
is to care for the people who are here,
the people within our borders right now.
For hundreds of years,
tradition and law have divided people up into countries,
each country taking responsibility to care for its own people,
at least in theory.
Of course, sometimes the reality is pretty far from the theory,
and too many of our brothers and sisters are trapped
under governments that abuse and exploit them.
I don’t believe our system of countries is a perfect
or a divinely ordained system.
I still hold out the hope that one day human beings will create
a system of government that brings all people together
in a spirit of justice and mutual love.
But that is not the reality today.
And we have to work with what we’ve got.
So is it too much to ask that, at the very least,
we in this country care for the people who are here now?
Is it too much to ask that children who were born here,
accepted as U.S. citizens in every way, though their parents are not
should get to stay here in the only home they know
with their parents here to love and protect them?
This is very personal for me.
As some of you know, my niece was born with a heart defect.
If her dad had had to leave the U.S.,
there’s no way he and my sister would have taken her to live
in a country where she couldn’t get the medical care she needs
to stay healthy.
In all likelihood, they would have made the sacrifice
to split up their family so that Grace could grow up safe.
But what a choice!
And even that is a choice some families don’t have.
Four years ago, Maria Roa gave birth to a little girl named Hazelle. Maria and her husband Victor were both undocumented immigrants living in San Francisco. And Hazelle was born with a heart defect too.
At seventeen months, Hazelle had a heart surgery at UC San Francisco
to enlarge one of her arteries and save her life.
The doctors told her parents
she would need specialized medical care for the rest of her life.
Meanwhile, U.S. immigration officials told her parents
to report for deportation two weeks after the surgery date.
At the last minute they were granted a one-year reprieve. (See Amr Emam, “Ailing Toddler’s Parents Get Deportation Reprieve,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 13, 2007, online at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/13/BAGTDQVMMG1.DTL&type=health.)
But what happens after that?
Will both those parents have to leave their daughter behind?
Who would take care of her?
I’ve been trying to find out what’s happening with this family right now. I haven’t been able to yet. I’m sorry about that—but I wanted to share as much of their story as I knew because it shows so clearly the craziness of our current system.
So, on behalf of all the families who are in danger of being torn apart
by our immigration laws,
I ask you to do one more thing this week.
If your heart is touched by these families,
let us speak up together in their defense.
If you turn to your order of service, you’ll find there
a postcard that you can take home to sign and mail,
in support of a really good piece of legislation that has been stalled out
in our House of Representatives: the Child Citizen Protection Act.
This would give immigration judges
the power to stop immigrant parents from being deported
when it’s in the best interest of their U.S.-born children.
The postcard was created by an immigrant organization
called Families for Freedom (http://www.familiesforfreedom.org/),
made up of people who have intimate knowledge
of the fear of deportation.
On behalf of my family and Hazelle Roa’s family
and all the families suffering from our immigration policies,
I ask you to please consider taking this one simple step
and sending this postcard.
We can’t do everything and we can’t save everybody.
But on this Mother’s Day, let us do what we can do
to build a land where all families are free to stay together,
where the spirit of compassion overcomes all fear,
where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning.
Let us build that land—our land—together.
So may it be.
Amen.
“Family Across Borders”
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
May 10, 2009
The family I was born into has been in this country
for just about as long as any white people have,
and we are just about as WASPy as you could imagine.
Both the Hortons and the Winterses (that’s my mom’s side)
go back almost to the Mayflower.
We’ve got our share of Puritan-era Obadiahs and Ezekiels
in the family tree.
The most recent relative in my personal family tree who wasn’t born
in this country was my great-grandmother Annie MacDonald,
whose family had emigrated from Scotland to Newfoundland.
(I carry her last name as my middle name.)
So, at first glance,
it might look like my family’s story is pretty far removed
from the story of immigrant families in the U.S. today.
But, in fact, the truth is very different.
Today, my sister Amy, my brother-in-law Juan,
and their daughter Grace are living happily in Miami, Florida.
But just last year,
they found themselves struggling to keep their family together.
Juan was born in Venezuela and came to the U.S. ten years ago.
He got his green card right around the time he and my sister got married. Grace was born a couple of years after that.
Juan had always hoped to become a U.S. citizen
and began the naturalization process a couple of years ago.
Everything went smoothly until they hit a bump
in the form of a hostile, autocratic immigration agent.
In the course of one horrifying interview,
Juan was told that that Immigration had the power to deny his citizenship application and deport him permanently without recourse.
Thank goodness that didn’t happen. Saner heads prevailed,
and Juan’s application for citizenship was approved within a month.
Today he is extremely proud to be a U.S. citizen.
But for days before the good news came through,
Juan and Amy were terrified that by some horrible fluke of the process, Juan might end up getting deported
with no chance of coming back to the U.S., ever.
They didn’t know what they would do if that happened,
and I am so glad they weren’t forced to make a choice.
But many families are not so lucky.
Our government does indeed have the power to separate families,
to tear non-citizen parents away from their U.S.-born children,
in many cases with no recourse whatsoever.
Luckily my family’s story ended well,
but many undocumented immigrants threatened with deportation
are faced with a heart-rending dilemma:
do they bring their U.S.-born children to their own country of origin—a foreign country to their children—
depriving them of all the advantages they had hoped to give them
by coming to the U.S.,
or do they leave their children behind in the U.S.
and accept the heartbreak of a permanent separation?
And you should know: this is not just a few families here and there.
A new report, from which the first reading came this morning,
estimates that in the last ten years,
literally hundreds of thousands of families have been affected. (James D. Kremer, Kathleen A. Moccio, and Joseph W. Hammell, Severing a Lifeline: The Neglect of Citizen Children in America’s Immigration Enforcement Policy (Dorsey & Whitney LLP, 2009), p. 2.)
So what would you do?
Can you imagine?
In the ancient story of the Judgment of Solomon (1 Kings 3:16–28),
two women both say they are the true mother of a young child.
Solomon says to them both:
Cut the child in half and give half to one woman, half to the other.
The false mother accepts this, while the real mother cries out,
“No, don’t kill my child—give him to her instead.”
In the story, Solomon praises the real mother
and gives her back her child.
But our government is not King Solomon,
and no reward awaits the sacrificial choice of deported parents
who leave their children behind—
just the pain of separation and the knowledge that they are doing
the best they can to give their child a better future.
If your heart goes out to these mothers and fathers and children,
I urge you to do two things.
One is something I believe is really important,
something that we as a congregation can do much better
than our government can:
Come with me while I do some theology
about immigration and national borders, and about what it means to be born in a particular place.
This may sound a little strange—why theology?
But I believe theology is extremely important. It’s what underlies
all our social policies, all our thinking about how things should be
in our country and in the world.
Let me remind you what I mean by theology.
It’s a Greek word that literally means “speaking about the Gods”:
logy is “speaking” or “studying,” as in eulogy, or biology, or cardiology;
theo means “about the Gods,” as in monotheism or atheism.
But in the liberal religious tradition, of which this church is a part,
when we talk about theology,
it isn’t limited to that old question of whether God exists.
When we in this tradition say “theology,”
we’re talking about all the ways we as human beings
try to answer the really big questions:
questions like,
How did we come to be here? Where do we go when we die?
How are we connected to the rest of the universe?
And what should our society be like?
How are we supposed to live with other people and other beings?
Our society—any society—makes a law because collectively
we think it’s a good idea.
The why we think it’s a good idea—that’s theology,
the way we make sense of the world.
When we talk about immigration, there are always theological questions lurking just under the surface of our usual arguments.
Here are some:
Is it moral to exclude people from this country?
Is it moral for a country to defend its borders,
and if it is, why is it moral?
Is it ever right for a group to band together
and keep out others who “don’t belong”?
Let’s think about this.
The fact is, whether it’s right or not,
every human society that I know of does this,
And it’s not just a human thing.
Wolves and polar bears defend their territory; birds do; insects do too.
Animal behaviorists tell us
animals tend to defend the resources they need to live
when those resources are scarce. (See Animal Behavior Society, “Crickets and Territory Defense,” online at http://www.animalbehavior.org/ABSEducation/laboratory-exercises-in-animal-behavior/laboratory-exercises-in-animal-behavior-crickets-and-territory-defense)
Probably most of us would agree territoriality in animals
isn’t immoral or wrong; it’s just instinct;
it’s just the life-force in them rising up to protect its own existence.
Well, we human beings are animals too.
The life-force is strong in us too.
There is something very basic and deep
about the urge to protect our lives.
And, bringing us back to immigration,
I think any theology of national borders has to give some due
to what I would call the divinely given urge of all beings to live—
and that includes people.
We have a deep-seated fear that letting other people onto our turf
will mean less for us—maybe so much less that we’ll die!
The truth is that immigrants actually contribute far more to our economy than they receive. Study after study shows this.
But some people still have that instinctive fear
that letting people into their country will mean less for them.
Even in the wealthiest country in the history of the world,
that fear of scarcity can get so strong,
it can even override our wish
for families to stay together and be happy and strong.
That fear sits deep inside us. We didn’t choose it; we’re born that way.
And yet, for thousands of years,
religious people and moral philosophers have been saying,
just because we have an instinct to do something,
doesn’t mean it’s right.
People are gifted with the power to examine our fears
and think before we act.
We have the power to think about how others are going to be affected by what we do.
We have the power to make moral choices.
Simply saying it’s our human instinct to defend our borders
is not going to fly as a moral argument.
One day when I was in elementary school, I instinctively pulled a chair out from under a kid who wouldn’t get out of my seat.
That doesn’t mean it was a good instinct!
Our country has been driven far more by unconscious fears of scarcity
than by generosity and compassion,
or even plain old economic reality!
I do believe everybody has the right to protect their own life.
But, when it comes to immigration, I believe we have
a moral obligation to examine our fears—
to remind ourselves of how much we in this country really do have,
and to remember every person wants to live without fear of scarcity.
We might do well to remember the words of a fellow heretic,
the English reformer John Bradford.
He’s the one who said, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Those of us who were born in this country
can hardly help asking ourselves, why was I so lucky?
Why was I born here and not in North Korea or Darfur?
We know that people all over the world,
and indeed within this country,
are born into very different circumstances.
And we can’t help but question, why is this so?
To speak very personally,
why was I born into a wealthy family here in the U.S.
while my brother-in-law was born into a poor family in Venezuela?
Why is anyone born into the circumstances we are?
Is it chance? Is it some kind of divine plan?
We can’t know for sure, though I often wonder.
This is a mystery that we will never solve in this lifetime.
The one idea I can’t accept
is the idea that seems to underlie our current immigration policy—
the idea that those of us born into wealth and comfort
were born with some special merit, some inherent right to live a life
that’s safer and easier and better than someone else’s.
Just saying that idea out loud makes me feel awful inside.
I can’t give you any scientific proof that it’s false,
but along with the founders of this country
I hold this truth to be self-evident, that all people are created equal.
In spite of their failures and, no doubt, my own,
I still hold on to that vision.
And more than that, my theology tells me
that everybody all around the world is connected.
I believe we are one human family across all the borders that divide us.
So why should any one group of us
have the right to hoard all the good stuff for ourselves?
If our brothers and sisters are in need of food to eat
and education to feed their minds, and work to support their families,
and we have those things in our country and they don’t,
can it really be right for us to tell them, “Too bad and keep out!”?
I can’t believe that’s right.
I believe everyone in the world
has just as much right to the stuff we need to live as anyone else.
I also know we can’t do everything and we can’t save everybody.
But, as a nation, the very least we can do
is to care for the people who are here,
the people within our borders right now.
For hundreds of years,
tradition and law have divided people up into countries,
each country taking responsibility to care for its own people,
at least in theory.
Of course, sometimes the reality is pretty far from the theory,
and too many of our brothers and sisters are trapped
under governments that abuse and exploit them.
I don’t believe our system of countries is a perfect
or a divinely ordained system.
I still hold out the hope that one day human beings will create
a system of government that brings all people together
in a spirit of justice and mutual love.
But that is not the reality today.
And we have to work with what we’ve got.
So is it too much to ask that, at the very least,
we in this country care for the people who are here now?
Is it too much to ask that children who were born here,
accepted as U.S. citizens in every way, though their parents are not
should get to stay here in the only home they know
with their parents here to love and protect them?
This is very personal for me.
As some of you know, my niece was born with a heart defect.
If her dad had had to leave the U.S.,
there’s no way he and my sister would have taken her to live
in a country where she couldn’t get the medical care she needs
to stay healthy.
In all likelihood, they would have made the sacrifice
to split up their family so that Grace could grow up safe.
But what a choice!
And even that is a choice some families don’t have.
Four years ago, Maria Roa gave birth to a little girl named Hazelle. Maria and her husband Victor were both undocumented immigrants living in San Francisco. And Hazelle was born with a heart defect too.
At seventeen months, Hazelle had a heart surgery at UC San Francisco
to enlarge one of her arteries and save her life.
The doctors told her parents
she would need specialized medical care for the rest of her life.
Meanwhile, U.S. immigration officials told her parents
to report for deportation two weeks after the surgery date.
At the last minute they were granted a one-year reprieve. (See Amr Emam, “Ailing Toddler’s Parents Get Deportation Reprieve,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 13, 2007, online at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/13/BAGTDQVMMG1.DTL&type=health.)
But what happens after that?
Will both those parents have to leave their daughter behind?
Who would take care of her?
I’ve been trying to find out what’s happening with this family right now. I haven’t been able to yet. I’m sorry about that—but I wanted to share as much of their story as I knew because it shows so clearly the craziness of our current system.
So, on behalf of all the families who are in danger of being torn apart
by our immigration laws,
I ask you to do one more thing this week.
If your heart is touched by these families,
let us speak up together in their defense.
If you turn to your order of service, you’ll find there
a postcard that you can take home to sign and mail,
in support of a really good piece of legislation that has been stalled out
in our House of Representatives: the Child Citizen Protection Act.
This would give immigration judges
the power to stop immigrant parents from being deported
when it’s in the best interest of their U.S.-born children.
The postcard was created by an immigrant organization
called Families for Freedom (http://www.familiesforfreedom.org/),
made up of people who have intimate knowledge
of the fear of deportation.
On behalf of my family and Hazelle Roa’s family
and all the families suffering from our immigration policies,
I ask you to please consider taking this one simple step
and sending this postcard.
We can’t do everything and we can’t save everybody.
But on this Mother’s Day, let us do what we can do
to build a land where all families are free to stay together,
where the spirit of compassion overcomes all fear,
where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning.
Let us build that land—our land—together.
So may it be.
Amen.
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