The 2014 story of the year: Immigration

In 2014, for a Latino news media organization — and particularly one in the Philadelphia area — there could be no more significant news story, or collective of stories, than immigration.

In January of 2014, President Obama’s new secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, took over the department which had long incurred the wrath of immigration reform advocates and activists thanks to an unprecedented deportation rate that split up families and disproportionally impacted longtime residents with no criminal backgrounds. Early in March Johnson was charged with reviewing the administration’s deportation policies.

Also in March, after an uncomfortable White House meeting between immigration advocates and the President, in which Obama famously “chided” advocates for their criticism of his administration’s policies, the venerable National Council of la Raza, the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization, followed the lead of more activist organizations and publicly named President Barack Obama the "deporter in chief.” Obama and some organizations with strong ties to the Democratic party tried to push back by redirecting that “title” to Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, but they were largely unsuccessful in diverting the mounting frustration directed specifically at the administration.

In April, in Philadelphia, Mayor Michael Nutter signed an executive order saying that local police would no longer cooperate with ICE in holding those suspected of being undocumented immigrants without a warrant to do so....

Read the rest of this editorial here, at AL DÍA News, which you should be reading regularly anyway ;)

Our stories connect us

The New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia (NSM) is sponsoring an evening of storytelling and reflection"Our stories connect us: the Underground Railroad and the Sanctuary Movement" March 22, from 7 to 9 p.m., at Arch Street United Methodist Church in Philadelphia. NSM is a strong advocate for immigration justice and works to protect the human and civil rights of all people. A while back I interviewed Peter Pedemonti, who has since become one of the organization's leaders. Read that interview here.

Perhaps -- given the increasingly hate-filled and polarized views about immigration and the undocumented in the nation -- we will have to adopt the custom attributed to abolitionists and anti-slavery folk along the Railroad routes -- hanging a quilt on a porch railing to indicate a safe sanctuary for those fleeing oppressive laws. Or, as it was in the Great Depression, a pictogram alphabet will develop, helping wayfarers in need identify the "good-hearted" people willing to share a meal or shelter. In the meantime, let's make ourselves "signs." Help fight the drastic cuts to funding for refugees outlined in the House-passed Fiscal Year 2011 budget. Call your senator at 202-224-3121 and ask that the Senate restore all or some of the $827 million cut from refugee admissions and overseas refugee assistance and all or some of the $77 million for refugee resettlement, trafficking victim assistance, torture victim assistance, and the care of unaccompanied alien children. (For more information, visit the Justice for Immigrants web site here.)

The picture at the top of this post is a piece from the quilt I am making my daughter -- as it happens, an immigrant quilt. You can read about its making here.

After Arizona - Stand with immigrants

Philadelphia rallies in support of immigrants and comprehensive reform today:

Philadelphia
noon - 2 p.m.
Elmwood Park, 71st & Buist Ave,, one block from the 36 trolley stop at 71st & Elmwood

Kennett Square
noon - 4 p.m.
North Walnut Rd., Nixon Park Soccer Fields

Tomorrow:

Family Unity BBQ,
Sunday May 2
Philadelphia, 1 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Mifflin Park at 6th and Ritner in South Philly
Celebration of the strength and diversity of immigrant families and a call for the end of the collaboration between local police and ICE

On Wednesday:

Immigration Education Forum
May 5, 7:00 PM
St. John the Evangelist Church
21 S. 13th Street, Lower Church

The forum will discuss the following topics:

• US Catholic Church history as an immigrant church

• Inability for the undocumented immigrants to obtain legal status

• Local policy that impacts immigrant communities

• Value of immigrants to the United States

• Catholic Church calling for provide dignity to the poor and oppressed

• The Church’s position on immigration reform

The panel of speakers will include:

Father Tom Betz – Pastor of Holy Redeemer Parish, Philadelphia
Msgr. Hugh Joseph Shields – Director of the Office of the Vicar for Hispanic Catholics of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia
Sister Mary Kay Flannery – Regional coordinator of the Justice for Immigrants Campaign
Peter Pedemonti – coordinator of the New Sanctuary Movement, Philadelphia
For more information call (215) 990-5730

Who’s counting?

Unbelievably, I started blogging exactly one year ago. Just in time for the Hispanic Heritage Mass then and now. This year’s Mass will take place at 2:30 p.m. on Oct. 11 at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia. Cardinal Justin Rigali will be the celebrant, and as in past years, he’ll be joined by many priests from across the Archdiocese that minister to the Latino community.

And a growing community it is.

Pennsylvania is one of 16 states with at least a half-million Hispanic residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. (The others are Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington.)

The estimated Hispanic population of the United States as of July 1, 2008 is 46.9 million, making people of Hispanic origin the largest ethnic or race minority in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Hispanics are 15 percent of the nation’s total population.

And to these totals you can add the 4 million residents of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (which is included in the U.S. Census report’s “national summary” data, but not in its “national totals”).

The Hispanic population in the U.S. is younger than the population as a whole. Hispanics comprise 22 percent of children younger than 18 in the nation, 25 percent of children younger than 5. The U. S. Census Bureau projects that by July 1, 2050, the Hispanic population of the United States will reach 132.8 million, and be 30 percent of the nation’s total population.

There were 1.6 million Hispanic-owned businesses in 2002, and the rate of growth of these businesses between the census of 1997 and 2002 was 31 percent. The national average rate of growth for all businesses during the same time period was 10 percent. Hispanic owned businesses generated revenues of $222 billion in 2002, according to census sources, up 19 percent from 1997.

Still, if you read my blog, or other Latino blogs, you already know that the violence, hate and animosity toward Latinos has increased markedly in recent years. The FBI reported a 35 percent increase in hate crimes against Latinos from 2003 to 2006 and a 3.3 percent increase in 2007 alone. Certain communities (Suffolk, N.Y., for example) have become something like hunting grounds where gangs of ruffians target their Latino neighbors for death, and juries and elected officials look the other way. Mainstream Latino advocacy organizations such as the NCLR have been vilified, and the first Latina Supreme Court justice was lampooned with openly racist caricatures during the period preceding her confirmation.

The vitriol in the immigration reform debate has contributed greatly to anti-Latino sentiment.

It is faulty logic to presume that all immigrants are Latino and all Latinos are immigrants, but nativists and commentators with nativist sympathies have reinforced this spurious syllogism. Ongoing air time devoted to the “invasion of America” (commentator Pat Buchanan) by hordes of “primitives” and “women with mustaches” (radio host Jay Severin) who are “changing the complexion of America” (Bill O’Reilly) and are “invaders” and carriers of “leprosy and tuberculosis” (Lou Dobbs) has had its effect on people’s ideas about Latinos and immigrants.

Even those who don’t wholeheartedly buy into anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric express irritation at Spanish-language phone options, or celebrations and parades wherein flags of Latin American countries are flown alongside the U.S. flag. Would the same level of irritation be manifest if the language option were German, say, or Polish? Do the St. Patrick’s and Columbus Day parades with their Irish and Italian flags proudly flown generate the same animus? Clearly not.

Much of current anti-immigrant rhetoric centers around the differences between new waves of immigration and historic ones – but the differences are largely myth.

Earlier immigrant groups also initially settled in mono-ethnic neighborhoods, spoke their own languages, went to church at personal parishes where Mass was celebrated in their native languages and set up businesses that not only served their fellow immigrants but contributed to the growth of the U.S. economy. They eventually learned English, became naturalized citizens, gave birth to U. S. citizens and grew to be integral to the weave of contemporary America.

It has been said that new immigrants don’t want to learn English, yet demand for English as a Second Language classes for adult learners far exceeds supply. With classes or without, more than 75 percent of current immigrants learn to speak English proficiently within 10 years of emigrating.

We’ve also heard that the new immigrants, unlike their predecessors, don’t want to become citizens. But according to U.S. Census Bureau and Bureaus of Citizenship and Immigration Services data, more than 33 percent of immigrants become naturalized citizens. This, of course, can’t begin to reflect the number of immigrants who might want to become citizens if a path to legal residency and citizenship were open to them.

The percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign-born stands at 11.5 percent currently. In the early 20th century, it stood at 15 percent. Immigrants in those days also dealt with anti-immigrant fears about the number of them coming to America, and the same derogatory attitudes about people “without papers” -- the genesis of at least one ethnic slur.

Myth has it that most immigrants today are undocumented. But the Immigration and Naturalization Services statistical yearbook records that 75 percent of current immigrants have legal permanent visas. And they pay U.S. taxes – between $90 and $140 billion a year. (Even undocumented immigrants pay taxes – as evidenced by the Social Security Administration’s “suspense file” -- taxes that cannot be matched to workers’ names and social security numbers -- which drew $20 billion between 1990 and 1998.)

Current immigrants, like their predecessors, contribute to the U.S. economy through their consumer spending and through the income generated by the businesses they set up. According to the Cato Institute and the Inter-American Development Bank, consumer spending of immigrant households and business contribute $162 billion in tax revenue to U.S. federal, state and local governments.

And Alan Greenspan, while he headed the Federal Reserve, pointed out that 70 percent of immigrants arrive to the U.S, in prime working years. As part of our workforce they will contribute $500 billion toward our social security system over the next 20 years.

An enduring myth about current immigrants is that they emigrate to receive public benefits. There is data from the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the Urban Institute that shows that immigrant tax payments total $20 to $30 billion more than the amount of government services they receive.

Recent surveys have shown that new immigrants are actually much healthier than longtime immigrants (who in turn are healthier than native citizens). Which is lucky because legal immigrants are restricted from accessing any public health benefits for the first five years of their residence in the United States. Undocumented immigrants are precluded from accessing any public benefits at all.

It is hard to believe that any of us want to see our fellow human beings ill and suffering and barred from receiving any medical treatment; just as it is hard to believe any of us want to see people dying while trying to be reunited with their families, or while trying to escape violence or poverty. And yet, existing health care legislation and immigration policies compound these problems while offering no solutions.

Fortunately, we are heirs to a system of governance that permits us to challenge standing legislation. We can pass better laws. Laws that create a path to citizenship for people who desperately want to be here. Laws that ensure that U.S. citizen children aren’t separated from their undocumented parents. Laws that reflect compassion for our brothers and sisters in need, and that open to hope rather than a wall.

In the year I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve shown you signs that read “Hispanics keep out” and “Speak English.” I’ve posted videos that portray immigrants the same way blacks were depicted in early minstrel shows, and have referenced news about a teen who endured ethnic taunts while being dragged with a noose around his neck. I’ve written about a young man who was snatched right off a train platform on the basis of his Spanish accent, and linked you to horrifying stories about hate-crimes against Ecuadorian and Mexican immigrants in this and adjoining states.

But I’ve also written about people who stand for more and better.

Peter Pedemonti and his cohorts at the Catholic Worker house and in the New Sanctuary Movement in Philadelphia who believe they are “entertaining angels” when they welcome the stranger.

Msgr. Hugh Shields. Anna Vega, Tim O’Connell, Sister Lorena and countless other unnamed religious folk and laypeople who believe we are all one family under God and so extend to immigrants the love we usually reserve for blood family.

Robert Nix, who journeyed to Shenendoah, Pa. after Luis Ramirez was killed to publicly urge community reconciliation.

I’ve pointed you to El Diario/La Prensa, which reports stories about immigrants and Latinos the mainstream media doesn’t even venture to cover.

And I’ve quoted the words of the U.S. Bishops, including our own Cardinal Justin Rigali, who have consistently sought to remind us that, in the words of Christ, “whoever receives the one I send receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.”

Going into my second year of writing this, I’m not sure what effect, if any, blogs can have in our thinking about issues as complex as immigration or the upswing in anti-Latino sentiment in the nation. Particularly blogs like this one, with a small readership that, in all likelihood, already recognizes popular immigration myths for what they are and finds the words of the nativists and anti-immigrant commentators as repugnant as I do.

But I have to think it’s worth it.

There are local voices here that are too quiet to be heard in the nasty national debate. There are voices of local immigrants, and the voices of local people of faith who walk with them. There are voices of those who have overcome unbearable hardship and the voices of those who have taken up their advocacy. Not all of those voices are in the blog posts – some are in the comments, both public and private, made in response to the posts.

And despite the bad news and bad feelings I sometimes point to in my posts, it is the wonder and awe of knowing there are good people out there -- willing to protect and love and do for their fellow human beings -- that really keeps me writing.

We’ll leave the light on for you

Sanctuaries are amazing. At the heart of consecrated buildings, sanctuaries – no matter how grand or how small and unadorned – emanate a peculiar resonance.

On a thoroughly mundane level, acoustic theory acknowledges that sounds persist within structures long after the source of the sound is gone. The reverberation of thousands of prayers swirl through sanctuaries: pleas for intercession, songs of trust and gratitude, words wherein exile is overcome. Even our imperfect human hearing detects something special in these spaces.

On another level, sanctuaries hold the light of belief. Of God eternally present. Of Christ, quite literally, in residence.

Talk about resonance.

It is impossible to think about sanctuaries without thinking about the 1980s, when churches in the United States became not only spiritual but physical sanctuaries for people fleeing the undeclared wars in Central America.

U.S. policy of the day held that those were “friendly governments” therefore people seeking to escape into the United States could not be classed as refugees. The churches that opened their doors to those unofficial refugees did so outside the law.

Policies are temporal. The ways we classify other human beings at any given moment in history are temporal. Laws and walls and borders – all temporal. Intervening years have proven that those refugees were escaping unbelievably dangerous and repressive governments. That they should have qualified for refugee status. That the command to succor the stranger in our midst and treating him as brother is a law higher than those of the land.

Today there is also a sanctuary movement – one challenging us to look at immigration issues with an eye to this higher law. The interfaith initiative (www.newsanctuarymovement.org) has as its goals to protect immigrant workers and families (especially those facing deportation); to change the public debate about immigration; and to make visible immigrant workers and families as children of God.

In Philadelphia, Peter Pedemonti is part of the New Sanctuary Movement (NSM). The 30-year-old works full-time providing hospitality at the House of Grace Catholic Worker house on Lehigh Avenue, but first heard about NSM when he was the director of education and outreach at an environmental organization in New York State.

“At that time the Sensenbrenner bill [H.R. 4437] was being debated. It made it a crime to help immigrants,” he said. “I remember being really outraged at what was happening in my country.”

Like so many of us, Pedemonti is the child of an immigrant. His father came to the United States when he was 13, after World War II, when dire economic conditions in Italy made starvation a real possibility.

Pedemonti sees a parallel with recent immigrants, many of whom emigrate because the economic conditions in their rural communities are calamitous.

“The impact of our economic policy is the part of the equation that is always left out of [the immigration debate],” he said. “A critical piece is NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement, implemented in 1994] which we pushed through. It has benefited our economy at the expense of the Mexican people. Today, 78 percent of the corn in Mexico is from the U.S.”

Still, it wasn’t economics, but faith, that drew Pedemonti to NSM.

“This is a faith-based movement,” he said. “We are here because of our beliefs. We can’t forget the basic call of the faith to welcome the stranger, to love our neighbor. It is a very clear call. It is not only how we must think, but how we must act…”

The NSM coalesced in 2007, with several economic justice alliances serving as its coordinating organizations. But local NSM efforts build through word of mouth, and through the work of the faith-centered individuals of many religious communities.

The group is heavily Catholic, according to Pedemonti and much of their educational outreach work – “Know your rights” workshops, forums discussing immigration with a religious or faith and morals perspective, and “Immigration 101” workshops – take place at parish centers and churches. They will, however, present the workshops for whoever is interested: community centers, schools, etc. (E-mail nsmphiladelphia@gmail.com for more information.)

A “Know your rights” workshop is slated to take place at 7 p.m. on Jan. 14 at St. Vincent de Paul Church, on the corner of Price and Lena Streets in Philadelphia.

But much of the work Pedemonti and the NSM group does is hands-on, “walking with” the immigrants and their families.

They have worked with immigrants arrested in the 7/08 workplace raid in King of Prussia, providing food, clothing, money.

Pedemonti himself has been working with a Pakistani family with immigration troubles. F., the 40-year-old father of two was in detention in York, Pa., where most of the undocumented from Philadelphia are sent. F’s wife called Pedemonti soon after the arrest. Since then, Pedemonti has accompanied them to deportation hearings and court, or wherever he might be able to help.

When I first spoke to Pedemonti in early Dec., F. had just had a deportation hearing. The result was the withholding of his deportation/removal – a favorable outcome that will allow him to remain in the United States and to get working papers. F. will never be able to depart the country, nor will he be able to apply to become a lawful permanent resident. In some cases, a withholding of deportation/removal bars deportation to a specific country, but not deportation to countries unspecified in the order.

Several weeks later, via e-mail, Pedemonti said F. had just been released from detention. “It has been such a blessing to work with him and his family,” Pedemonti wrote, “and a real joy to speak with him knowing he is home with his family for Christmas. He had some incredible reflections to share about his time in detention, faith, and the trial.”

Nobody in the Philadelphia NSM has had to provide physical sanctuary yet, but one member knows exactly what it might mean: he was in sanctuary during the 1980s. Because seeking physical sanctuary is a public act for the undocumented immigrant and his or her family, it is not a step taken easily. But for some, it may be the only hope for keeping a family together.

It also requires that the whole congregation be in agreement about providing sanctuary. In Chicago and Los Angeles, the churches and religious centers that have done so have been the targets of picketing and some heated rhetoric.

Still, the full congregation of a synagogue in Manayunk has committed to providing physical sanctuary for an undocumented immigrant (or family) in the Philadelphia area if it ever becomes necessary to do so.

Which doesn’t mean that the synagogue, or any of the churches involved in the sanctuary movement, support illegal immigration. What they uphold is the dignity of our fellow human beings – the God-given right to keep a family together and to seek relief from inhumane conditions (be they economically or politically driven).

Some entertain angels. Others see the face of Christ in the least of their brothers. All of them know that a house doesn’t become a home - much less a sanctuary - until we leave a light on.