Faith communities from coast to coast will hold events in 15 U.S. cities this month to demand a change in the country’s immigration policies, which they call broken and inhumane.
“We are in a dark period in our country on the issue of immigration,” said the Bishop John C. Wester of the Archdiocese of Salt Lake City during a teleconference Tuesday to launch the national movement. “Instead of moving forward with reform of our broken immigration system, our current national immigration policy consists of a series of work site enforcement raids that accomplish little if anything to solve the problem of illegal immigration.”
Wester, who is also the chair of the Committee on Migration and Refugee Services for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, criticized the raid tactic for the separation of families, dislocation of immigrant communities, and the victimization of U.S. permanent residents and citizens, including children.
“Immigrants continue to be scapegoated for our economic ills and often dehumanized by the use of anti-immigrant rhetoric,” the bishop further complained. “As a nation – a nation of immigrants I might add – we cannot continue to accept the labor of immigrants while also undermining their basic human dignity. We cannot have it both ways.”
Jewish leader Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, also threw his support behind the call for a comprehensive immigration reform. He explained that the immigration issue is important to the Jewish community because it has been the “quintessential immigrant community in human history,” often forced to move from place to place.
Meanwhile, Hispanic evangelical leader the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, complained that the issue of immigration was not given enough attention in presidential debate and receiving negative coverage in the media.
“The fact of the matter is that politicians are ignoring this issue because it is the elephant in the room,” he said. “It is the one that everyone refuses to speak to because it is so controversial, so polarizing…”
He urged the religious community to become the “moral firewall” to xenophobic and nativist rhetoric that has taken over the immigration debate.
In Colorado, an organization called the Colorado Council of Churches is taking action to educate Christians on a faith-perspective understanding of the immigration issue.
Dr. Jim Ryan, council executive of the Colorado Council of Churches, said his organization has developed a professional film about immigration that will be used in the Sunday school curriculum. The film was mailed out to 850 congregations in Colorado this week.
“What we are trying to say to folks is what we tend to do is put on our American citizen hat and try to study immigrants,” Ryan said. “What we want the study to do is force our folks within the faith community to put on their faith hats, their faith lens actually, to look at this issue through their faith perspective of what Jesus calls us to do within the Christian community regarding loving our neighbor."
The “Tour of the Faithful,” as the month-long campaign is called, will feature in total 18 pro-immigration reform events this month. They include a press conference with faith leaders in Raleigh, N.C.; an interfaith prayer vigil in Columbus, Ohio; a march in Chicago, Ill.; and an educational workshop in Los Angeles.
“Faith communities are an important voice in this debate and have the responsibility of defending the basic dignity and rights of the human person,” Wester said. “We hope to lift our voices to call attention to this important human rights issue in the days and months ahead so that a new congress and a new administration will address the situation humanely early in 2009.”
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Did Obama support the murder of Christians in Kenya? Aparently he raised $1 million dollars to his uncle who did.
I live in San Diego. Immigration is fine. Illegal immigration is a serious problem. I cannot support any organization that allows for illeagal entry into another country. Mexican government encourages its' citizens to cross over and abuse our system. Stopping this is the christian thing to do. Allowing this and supporting this is the libratarian thing to do.
Romans 13: 1 Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves.
1 Peter 2: 13 Therefore submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, whether to the king as supreme, 14 or to governors, as to those who are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of those who do good.
John 10 Parable of the Good Shepherd: 1"Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter by the door into the fold of the sheep, but climbs up some other way, he is a thief and a robber.
Luke 17: "3Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him,"
These folks fail to see the difference between welcoming the legal, law abiding Stranger and welcoming the law-breaking Illegal Immigrant. Maybe I missed something, but to date I have not seen any Illegal Immigrants come forward and turn themselves in to authorities, saying "forgive me". Instead, I see many unrepentant Illegal Immigrants who have plenty of excuses as to why they broke the law, who continue to use false documents, who have plenty of demands to change our law, and who are quick to demand their "rights". Is not breaking the law because you covet something your neighbor has a sin? Is not identity fraud bearing false witness and thus a sin? Thus is not forgiving unrepentant sin the same as condoning that sin, and thus participating in that sin? Or maybe these folks think that when it comes to Illegal Immigrants those pesky Ten Commandments and other such pronouncements against breaking the law are just guidelines to be ignored when inconvenient? And especially to be ignored if someone has a family? I would appreciate someone pointing out that part of scriptures that says that if you have a family you can violate the law with impunity.
Blackshoe89: You neglected to mention that so many U.S. corporations are never held accountable for hiring illegal workers. That seems to be the biggest cause of this problem.
I wonder what Palin plans to do about it?
I really praise this article. The immigration situation is certainly broken; tearing families apart, confusing school systems, demoralizing and exploiting the low-wage workers. The best way to tackle this issue is surely one of faith and government.
As a citizen of a state with many, many illegal immigrants, I can tell you that the problem with illegal immigration is not the people, it is the governments.
Illegal immigrants are given a free ride on traffic and auto insurance issues, on debt collection, on hospital bills. Our schools are failing because they must be re-geared to teach in Spanish, leaving the English speakers frustrated and uneducated. All of this because the governments of the US and (primarily) Mexico are using immigration as a safety valve for Mexican social problems, and as near-slave labor for the US. This situation is definitely not Godly, and harms the legal citizens of the US.
Having seen firsthand the devastating poverty in Mexico, I can bot excoriate the people for fleeing. I can, however, demand that our government know the identities of everyone crossing our border, and I can demand that the US government pressure Mexico to stop the human rights abuses that force these people into underground, illegal, dehumanizing slavery.