“Immigrants Are Human”
the Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne, October 21,2007

Reading Before Sermon
Our reading this morning is from a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center on Guestworker Programs in the United States entitled “Close to Slavery.” It is the story of a woman named Irla.

In December 2000, Irla’s husband left his small town in Guatemala for the first time to work in the United States. With an H-2B visa in hand and a job planting pines in the forests of the South, he hoped to earn enough money to make a better life for his family.

He incurred debt to pay about $1,000 in fees to a recruiter and was told to leave the deed to his house with a lawyer in town to guarantee his return when the seven-month visa expired.

He didn’t earn much money planting pines. But after three months, the planting season ended and he found other jobs. He worked in a factory, harvested grapes and worked in tomato and tobacco fields. Only at this point was he able to send more money home. To some guestworkers, this is known as the “visa libre” period, and recruiters sometimes promise such opportunities even though this type of arrangement violates the rules of the guestworker system.

“We all knew the men would not earn much in the actual planting season,” Irla said. “My husband and the others would work their three months with the planting company and then would find other work. My husband could not afford to send money to us or to pay his debt until he had a different job.”

Irla’s husband continued to go to the United States every season for the following four years. The deed to his home stayed in the hands of the lawyer in Guatemala. Many other women in Irla’s community were in the same situation. They stayed at home to care for the children, waiting patiently for money that rarely arrived.
“We do this for our kids,” Irla said. “We have to work so they can eat, and it is not the same when the husband is not here.”

After completing his fifth three-month planting season in the United States. Irla’s husband again found other work. On the way to his job, he was killed in a car accident. At 32, he left five children behind. The last time Irla saw him was in November 2004.

Even after five years, he still owed about $700.
“He should have earned a lot of money with all that time in the United States,” Irla said. “There were no earnings to show. Now I am working without him for our five kids. I think it will take me about three years to pay this debt. I am the only one working for the food.”
The lawyer will not give Irla back the deed to their house until she repays the debt. “If I don’t pay this debt they say they will take my house.”
Irla now wishes he had remained in Guatemala picking coffee. “It would have been better if he had not gone and we could have just eaten greens and tortillas. I would rather have him here now.”

Sermon
Influential television reporter, CNN’s Lou Dobbs, claimed there have been 7,000 new cases of leprosy in the United States in a recent three year period, and that this alarming rise in leprosy is due to what he called “unscreened illegal immigrants.” He said that to try to scare us. However, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an organization I trust, says the number of leprosy cases peaked at 361 in 1985 and has been in decline ever since. It seems we can’t trust Lou Dobbs, but because he is so popular, CNN features him nightly where he continues to fan fears and spread misinformation about immigrants. He is less concerned with rational arguments than with positioning himself as some kind of popular hero to the so-called “Nativist Movement.”

But you don’t need Lou Dobbs to know that immigration has become a major issue in the U.S., and Americans are worried about it. To be more accurate I should say there are many issues around immigration, and trying to understand and sort through them is very confusing. And, the issues have become politicized, with candidates blaming immigrants for everything from overcrowded schools and the high cost of medical care to terrorism. Without a doubt, I am not an expert on all these issues, and I won’t pretend to have answers for all the problems immigration may bring to our attention. Today, I just want to put immigration into human perspective, to help us see through the heated rhetoric and have some idea of what it’s like in real life.
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In the last year we saw on television massive rallies of immigrants in major cities around the country, and we heard about armed militia along the Mexican border. These may seem to us - like many of the events in the national news – other people’s problems. The Northern Hills of Cincinnati, such a sweet place to live, seems insulated from most of the immigration turmoil. That may have been true until last August 28th when more than 300 federal ICE agents, ICE is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, raided the Koch Foods chicken plant in Fairfield, Ohio, near West Chester, and arrested more than 160 employees. At a news conference after the raid, an ICE “agent said they would be taken to a processing facility in the Cincinnati area and procedures to remove them from the United States would begin… Immigration advocates in Cincinnati said the force used during the raids was terrifying the local community, including U.S.-born children who fear their immigrant parents will be taken away… Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones, one of the country's most outspoken opponents of immigration, told the news conference. ‘I personally have no sympathy for you whatsoever, None. Zero.’"

The Koch raid was one of several targeting businesses which employ immigrant workers. On December 12th 2006, the holiday celebrating the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe, more than 1,000 ICE agents raided Swift & Company meat plants in Utah, Colorado, Texas, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota. A fleet of government vans carrying heavily armed federal ICE agents backed up by riot clad local police surrounded the Swift beef processing plant in Hyrum, Utah not far from where I lived. ICE agents terrorized the entire workforce herding them into collecting areas, pepper spraying those who didn’t understand orders barked at them only in English. In the high profile raids, ICE took into custody over a thousand immigrant workers. Suddenly, the folks living near the plants had to deal personally with immigration.

ICE didn’t let the workers eat or drink or go to the bathroom. They weren’t allowed to use phones to make arrangements for their children at school. The community was totally unprepared for the disaster. Local schools, churches and relief organizations pitched in to help take care of stranded children. Family members went to the plant only to see their loved ones handcuffed and loaded into waiting ICE busses. No one knew who all was taken or where they were going. No official was there to respond to families’ questions or to help the shattered families. Days and even weeks later, while the workers were held in a far away detention center, people struggled to care for the children and families left behind.

“Department of Homeland Security ICE Assistant Secretary Julie Myers would later claim that Operation Wagon Train, as the raids were dubbed, dealt a major blow in the “war against illegal immigration.” What the raids actually accomplished other than traumatizing several hundred Latino families and costing Swift & Company over $30 Million dollars in lost production is questionable. However, there is no doubt federal immigration policies have increasingly become militarized. Halliburton is building detention centers near the Arizona-Mexican border where they deploy military technology designed for Iraq. ICE is now the largest arms bearing US agency outside the military. The government justifies repressive policies against immigrants using a national security and anti-terrorist framework. They intend for these strategies to create fear and hope they have a chilling effect on immigration.

And life inside these detention centers is pretty awful, too. In March of this year “the ACLU filed lawsuits on behalf of ten immigrant children, who were being held illegally in a Texas medium-security prison which has been converted into a “Family Residential Facility.” The lawsuits charge these children were imprisoned under inhumane conditions while their parents await immigration decisions. In a facility that is still functionally and structurally a prison, children are required to wear prison garb, detained in small cells for 11-12 hours each day where they cannot keep food and toys, and denied all privacy, even when using the toilet. Some children did not go outdoors in the fresh air during the whole month of December 2006. Despite urgent needs, many children lack access to adequate medical, dental, and mental health treatment, and are denied meaningful educational opportunities. Guards frequently discipline children by threatening to separate them permanently from their parents, and children are prohibited from having contact visits with non-detained family members.”
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Most, but not all of the people in the examples I just gave you were undocumented workers, also known as illegal immigrants. In order to control these immigrants, President Bush proposes to add millions of new workers into the US guestworker system, called the H-2 program. In 2005, over 100,000 people were brought in to the U.S. under the H-2 program for jobs in forestry, seafood processing, landscaping, and construction. Though this is called the guestworker program, “these people are not treated like guests, rather, they are systematically exploited and abused.” Because they cannot legally change jobs, they are bound to their employers who routinely cheat them out of wages, force them to live in squalid conditions, and provide no medical benefits for on-the-job injuries in their often high risk workplaces. This is the program Irla’s husband was in, the one we heard about in the reading before the sermon. “House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel recently put it this way: “This guestworker program’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery.”

All the worker abuse, low pay, dangerous conditions, ICE raids, detention and so on, has not slowed the flow of immigrants. For millions of Mexicans, coming to the US for work is the only option for survival. In an article in “The Nation” magazine, Marc Cooper interviewed a couple “I'll call them Domingo and Emilia; both are in their early 30s. Domingo, an undocumented Swift worker since 2001, was picked up in the December raid, briefly jailed in El Paso and then dumped across the border into Juárez. After a quick trip to see his extended family in Guanajuato, he put together $2,000, paid a coyote and, along with seven other deported Swift workers from his hometown, dodged the Border Patrol and trudged across the Arizona desert back into the United States. "I walked for three days and three nights. I was already diabetic, but now I think my leg is ruined," he says, massaging his shin. "But I would do it again tomorrow. And tomorrow and the next day," he says, nodding toward his 3-year-old son, who's running on the threadbare rug in Spiderman pajamas. The boy is a US citizen, as is his 1-year-old sister.

Domingo says that from the moment he was detained, he was determined to come back. He knows he can't return to Swift, where he made $12.75 an hour, but he also knows he can't take his family back to Mexico. "There is no work there," he says. Emilia says the only option to be discarded is returning to Mexico. "This country may not be our country, but it is the country of opportunity," she says, hugging her husband.”

NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, was supposed to have made life better for both US and Mexican workers, but - whatever you think of the theory behind NAFTA, it hasn’t had that effect. In fact, for many workers, it has had the opposite effect. For example, since NAFTA’s implementation in 1994, the influx of US government subsidized corn into Mexico caused the price of Mexican corn to decrease until millions of Mexican small farmers who could no longer afford to grow corn left their fields and headed north. Earlier this year, after the US government announced its support for using corn to make ethanol, corn tortilla prices doubled in some parts of Mexico, fueling protests and concerns for the 50 million poor Mexicans who depend on tortillas for the majority of their daily caloric intake. I do not know if NAFTA is the cause of the lack of work for Mexicans, but I am saying Mexico has not been saved by NAFTA. I’m not sure what the U.S. can do to help the economy of our neighbor state, but as it is now, should we be surprised that Mexico's poor come here looking for jobs? Millions sit in poverty and yearn for a chance to work in the land of opportunity.

Listen to Ann Petry tell how an outsider feels:
“The world was one of great contrasts, she thought, and if the richest part of it was to be fenced off so that people like herself could only look at it with no expectation of ever being able to get inside it, then it would be better to have been born blind so you couldn’t see it, born deaf so you couldn’t hear it, born with no sense of touch so you couldn’t feel it. Better still, born with no brain so that you would be completely unaware of anything, so that you would never know there were places that were filled with sunlight and good food and where children were safe.”
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Ann so eloquently describes one piece of the immigration puzzle. In the eyes of most of the world, the U.S. is that place of sunlight and security, a place where their children could have a better future. Though we could build a fence all the way around our beautiful country, that won’t hide it from the world. Nor do I think we want to hide it. We want to be proud of what this country offers to its citizens, and we wish there were not so many poor people in the world living in such stark contrast to our prosperity that they are dying to come here.

In America, we believe all people should be treated equally, that all people deserve the same basic human rights. There are benefits which accrue to U.S. citizens which others may not share, but immigrants, as much as any human being, deserve fair treatment and basic human rights. That’s a principle I live by, but I don’t think everyone in the U.S believes no one is to be written off, to be treated as less than human. In our country the poor don’t have good schools and adequate medical care. We don’t ensure that all jobs pay a living wage. There are lots of American citizens who aren’t sharing in the American Dream. The way we treat Immigrants is not much different from the way we treat the poorest US citizens. Our attitude toward Immigrants and the poor citizens of this country should be based on the principle of equality of rights, opportunity, and treatment for all people.

When we realize we are a part of the interdependent web of all existence, we learn reverence for all life. Albert Schweitzer said, “In the very fibers of our being, we bear within ourselves the fact of the solidarity of life.” This is what creates true, great, compassion which motivates people to help others. Schweitzer concluded that, “Reverence for life gives rise to a moral imperative for love in interpersonal relationships, justice in social relationships and trusteeship in our relationship with our environment.”

I used to think that little word, all, didn’t add much to the meaning of a sentence. I routinely edited it out, believing it a superfluous little modifier. Reverence for life; reverence for all life – what’s the difference? It’s the difference between all people are human and deserve human rights or only some people do. I have changed my mind about all. I now believe all is the most important word when it comes to how we treat people. The ordering principle for liberal religious social ethics is Reverence for all life. If our public policy was all people are treated with human dignity, citizens or not, we would be a substantially kinder and gentler people. And, dare we dream – that might lead to recognizing the inherent worth and dignity for people everywhere?
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It is time for Immigration reform in the US. According to the National Immigration Forum, “There are no [viable] avenues for people without advanced skills to enter and work legally in the United States. This has led to the situation where one out of 20 U.S. workers is an undocumented immigrant. The current system institutionalizes an underclass of exploitable workers, breeds chaos at our borders, and engenders instability for American businesses and families. With the American people demanding a solution to the immigration mess,” the 110th Congress took up immigration reform but failed to pass legislation.

I urge you to keep the pressure on your elected representatives to reform immigration law. This is a fight about what America means. The end product should allow immigrants to live and work without fear and to have doors opened to them. Of course, taking care of those already inside our borders is not all that needs to be done. It is time our national policy included economic cooperation with Mexico that shows real concern for Mexico's poor. Let me rephrase a statement coined for a much different purpose, “If we help them over there, maybe we would be helping ourselves here, at the same time.”

We live with immigrants as neighbors and friends. Don’t hold them at arm’s length; reach out and get to know the people who have most recently come to be part of this country. This is not a ‘we and they’ thing, it’s a ‘we’re all in this together’ thing.

Cohen, J. Richard, Letter to CNN President Jonathon Klein from Southern Poverty Law Center (Montgomery: May 9, 2007).
Hopkins, Andrea. Reuters (Cincinnati: August 28, 2007).
Cooper, Marc. “Lockdown in Greeley: How Immigration Raids Terrorized a Colorado Town,” The Nation (New York: Jan 26, 2007) 11.
Lovato, Roberto. “Immigrants Regroup,” The Nation (New York: Nov. 13, 2006) 28-29.
ACLU.org website March 6, 2007.
Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States, Southern Poverty Law Center (Montgomery: April 2007) 1.
Rangel, Charles. Speaking on CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, (Jan. 23, 2007).
Petry, Ann. “Sunbeams,” The Sun (Chapel Hill: Nov. 2006) 48.
National Immigration Forum website, http://www.immigrationforum.org/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=879