Immigration

Ihope you all got a chance to place pins on our world map. These pins show where we or our ancestors lived before coming to the United States. To be more accurate, I should actually say “what is now the United States.” Some of our ancestors came before the United States existed. A few of us in this congregation were born in another country and came as immigrants.

My purpose in having us place pins in a map this morning is visually to reinforce an obvious point: we are all immigrants or descendants of immigrants.

In my own case, my father’s parents came from Spain. They first came to Mexico, but soon moved up to south Texas. My mother’s family lived along the U. S./Mexican border on both sides. A century ago there was no border patrol as we know it. People just moved across the border if they wanted to. A few years ago I learned a funny story about my maternal grandmother, Isidria López. As an adult she had become a naturalized citizen. However, it turns out she was born on the American side of the border. She had married a man born in Mexico and believed that if you married a Mexican you became a Mexican citizen. In any event, I am sure she could not prove which side of the border she was born on. Her family was poor and could not speak or read English. These are typical stories for south Texas and for San Antonio, where I grew up. The vast majority of the millions of Latinos in south Texas whose families have been there for several generations have ancestors who were technically illegal immigrants.

Ah, but let’s go back another 80 years or so, back to early 19th century. Let’s look at history that did not get mentioned in my Texas history textbooks. The textbooks I read as a kid told a tale of freedom loving heroes that rebelled against tyrannical Mexico — heroes like Davy Crockett and Sam Bowie. At that time San Antonio and Texas were part of Mexico. In fact, a large part of what is now New Mexico and a large chunk of Colorado were part of Mexico and Texas. What happened was that a bunch of undocumented anglos came pouring across the United States border into Mexico. What never gets told in the textbooks is that some of these men owned slaves. Slavery was legal in the southern United States, but illegal in Mexico. The Mexican authorities were threatening to limit or eliminate slavery in Texas. The anglo settlers saw slavery as the key to their economic future. Southeast Texas is good cotton growing country. The protection and expansion of slavery was a key part of why the anglos revolted. Once the revolution was won, the Republic of Texas immediately made slavery legal and a flood of slaves was imported. I wonder why no one ever told me this story when I was growing up.

Our nation is in the throes of a debate about immigration. We hear a lot of talk about about people who are legal and people who are illegal. Our government is writing new laws and talking about building hundreds of miles of new fences on the Mexican border. Our president is about to send the National Guard to help patrol that border.

I do not pretend to have all the answers. Reasonable and good hearted people are going to disagree about which policies are the best. I do not believe we should open every border and every international airport to unregulated immigration.

However, I am deeply troubled by the racist hysteria that I am hearing. I am deeply troubled by a self righteous language of legal rights and talk of mass deportations and of criminalizing tens of thousands and even millions of our neighbors.

First, let’s get past this self righteous talk about legality. Let us never confuse what is legal for what is moral and ethical. The undocumented anglos who poured into northern Mexico in the 1830’s and fomented a revolution were acting illegally. When these same anglos, whose descendants still control power, became the “legal” government, they immediately made slavery legal. They had the power to make slavery legal, but slavery remained immoral and inhuman. What is legal and what is just are different. Our task, as religious people who seek to do what is right, is to ask first what is moral and what is just. Our task as citizens is to create laws that seek to embody what is just.

We desperately need some historical perspective in our discussions on immigration. Two hundred and fifty years ago the United States did not exist. Colorado did not exist. There was a string of English colonies along the east coast. Most colonists had come willingly, but not all. Thousands upon thousands of Africans were dragged to this continent in chains as slaves. In the nineteenth century great waves of migration came west, pushing native people off land they had occupied for centuries. Even here I would have us not be romantic. Native peoples also came in waves of immigration and migration thousands of years ago. They pushed each other off of land, too. The waves of migration continue today. Most of us in this sanctuary were not born in Colorado.

So who has a moral right to be here? If your ancestors came over on the Mayflower and mine walked across a bridge crossing the Rio Grande, do you have more of a right to live in Colorado than I do? My ancestors came a century ago. Does that mean I have more of a moral right to be here than someone whose family crossed the Rio Grande 50 years ago? What if they crossed 50 days ago?

Who has a moral right to be here? Who has a moral right to come here next week? Can our most deeply held religious convictions provide us any guidance in this debate about immigration?

Let’s start with our principles. We affirm the inherent worth and dignity of all people. We affirm justice, equity and compassion in human relations. We say we want peace. We say we acknowledge that we are all part of an interconnected web.

As we look to the wisdom of the religious traditions that gave us birth, what guidance do we find?

In a famous passage from the book of Leviticus in the Hebrew scriptures, the voice of God tells the people “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 citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” (Leviticus 19:32-33)

In this passage the Hebrew people are reminded that what goes around comes around. They are reminded that they were once aliens, too.

Later, Christian teachings extended this approach to its radical logical conclusion: that we are all same, that our ethnicity and our nationality are not important. We are all human. The early church was confronted with the question of whether to be a Jewish sect or a religion that extended beyond one ethnic group. In what was truly a radical departure, the early church, led by the apostle Paul, came to insist that the gospel was for everyone. It did not matter if you were a Jew or a gentile.
What we see in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures is the growing realization that the alien is just like us, that we are all part of the same human family.

So where does our reflection on our religious tradition and our reflection on our historical context leave us?

First, I think that we need to acknowledge that all of us live on stolen property. Unless you can trace your ancestors all the way back to the first wave of humans who came across the Bering Strait about 20,000 years ago, we all live on land we and our ancestors stole from somebody. At one level, none of us has a right to be here. At another level, each of us has an equal right to be here.

We also need to recognize that our political boundaries are artificial human creations. National and state boundaries are not sacred; they were not created by God. National boundaries are not natural. They were created fairly recently by people who had gained the power to create them.
I also believe that we always need to stop and look at our present situation in context. I have mentioned some of the historical context of the southwest. We also need to look at the recent influx from the south in the context of international politics and economics. We have had a hand in creating the desperation that drives many people to this country. It is a little disingenuous, for example, to shore up a dictatorship in Guatemala, have a hand in training death squads that kill tens of thousands, and then complain when desperate people flee the killing and come here.

The recent influx of immigrants from Mexico is an international issue, not just an American issue. Immigration from Mexico exploded tenfold in the 1990s. It went from about 50,000 people a year to 500,000. This is in large part because the Mexican economy virtually collapsed. That economy is tied to ours. Decisions we make and decisions of major American corporations affect Mexico. The best way to slow the flood of immigration from Mexico is to help the Mexican economy develop.

It is a great irony that a nation built by immigrants fleeing oppression and seeking new opportunity should suddenly become paranoid about new immigrants fleeing oppression and seeking opportunity.

Ultimately, however, I believe that to ask who has the moral right to be here is the wrong question. When we ask the wrong question we always get the wrong answer.

The question we need to ask our selves is this: What kind of world are we going to create? And here is where our deepest religious values come to the rescue. Here is where our values can guide us.

How do we create a society where everyone, including immigrants, is treated as though he or she has inherent worth and dignity? What does our commitment to compassion demand of us? What does justice look like?

These are urgent questions. Today we are celebrating rights of passage among our young people—the coming age class and the bridging of others to a new stage in life. All of our children are going to live their adult lives in an America that will be quite different. They will live their lives in an America that is even more culturally and ethnically diverse. We need not fear cultural diversity. We are a religious people who embrace the wisdom of all human religious traditions. We need to set an example of openness. We need to embrace change.

Yes, I think we probably need to have better control of our border. Clearly, the rate of recent immigration is so fast that it is causing fear and straining our ability to integrate people. I am not sure what the answer is, but I am skeptical of making our border look like the border between nations that are enemies.

Imagine our country guided by our highest ideals and our treasured principles.
I imagine a country that is a good citizen of the world—a country that is a good neighbor and a partner that helps our southern neighbors develop. We have a shameful history in much of Latin America. I would like to see us change that.

I imagine a country that cares for all the children that are here. None of them decided to be here. None of them knowingly broke any law. We can immunize these children. We can give them basic health care and a good education. They did not come here to foment a revolution; they just want to grow and live. They are no different from our children. I believe we strengthen America by caring for all our children.

I imagine an America that makes it easier for people who are here to participate fully. There is a lot of talk about insisting on English these days. This is pure demagoguery. Eighty percent of third generation Mexican immigrants can no longer speak Spanish. Nobody wants to live their whole life here and not speak English. You and I and the English language are not threatened by having information available in Spanish or Chinese or Vietnamese. Why go out of our way to make life harder on people? It takes time to learn a new language. Try learning Spanish well enough to read Don Quixote or the novels of Gabriel García Marquez. Even try learning Spanish well enough to take a driver’s test or fill out a medical questionnaire. It takes a while.

We have a fundamental choice when it comes to immigration. Ultimately it is a spiritual choice. On the one hand, we can be guided by our fears. If we allow our fears to guide us, we will turn our border into something that looks like a cold war border between East and West Germany — complete with guard towers and barbed wire. If we let fear guide us, we will pass measures that make it harder for immigrants to thrive. We will make it harder for recent immigrants to use the only language they know, harder for their kids to get an education, harder for their kids to stay healthy.

And it won’t work. It doesn’t have a chance. Looking back never works. We can never recapture the past.

Our other option is to be guided by hope and love rather than fear. We can embrace the world that is coming. We can learn to live in a more diverse world. We can learn from each other. We can respect each other. We can discover that aliens aren’t really so alien. We can create something wonderful and rich.

Love and hope can guide us. Fear will destroy us. Let us choose love and hope.

We are all immigrants, every single one of us. May we work hand in hand, mano en mano, to create a world worthy of our dreams.

Amen.