Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
September 17, 2017
OPENING WORDS
Our opening words are by the Native American poet Simon Ortiz:
That dream
shall have a name after all,
and it will not be vengeful
but wealthy with love
and compassion
and knowledge.
And it will rise
in this heart
which is our America.
We come together this morning, people from all different countries of origin,
people of joys and sorrows, people with needs and hopes.
Today we consider a Unitarian Universalist response
to the question of immigration;
which means that today,
we ponder our place in the web of life.
It is good to be together.
See here a statement from Latinx Unitarian Universalists.
SERMON
I met with a Midland couple several weeks ago in my office. They said I could share this story with you as long as I protected their identities.
He made the journey to the States hace once años – 11 years ago – de México. He hasn’t been able to go back to Mexico in all this time. He misses his mom. He misses the beauty of Mexico. He misses his hijo – his son.
He came for a better life, and to send money back to support his mother and sister, who could not make the journey. He walked here; crossed the river. He was ready to work hard. He worked in Dallas for 3 years, and then came here to work in Midland 8 years ago. Here he met his wife, an American citizen.
He adores this country, and has worked hard for it. But he says, “Me han hecho al lado” – they have tossed me to the side.
He had been working here for years for an oil field. His boss knew he was undocumented, and he was grateful they hired him. However, they paid him very little. Many other companies were asking him to go work for them. He thought it over. He knew his work was worth more. He had a family to feed. He told his company he needed to leave.
His boss reported him to immigration.
He didn’t know his boss had reported him until this happened:
He was driving to work, and the police stopped him. They held him while they checked his criminal record. It was clean so they let him go. He begged them to tell him why he had been stopped. That’s when he found out it was his boss who reported him.
Many people are unaware that an undocumented person cannot be arrested by police just for being undocumented. It is not a criminal offense to be in this country without documentation. If a police officer learns someone is undocumented, that officer cannot arrest the individual or hold that person for immigration officials if there is no state law charge. This could all change, however, if Texas bill SB4 goes through – any person at any time could be asked to show their papers, and not only by police and immigration officials but also by campus police, attorneys, city council members, and more. In fact, all those people will be required to investigate everyone’s status.((https://stacemedellin.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/maldefsb4.jpg))
And I can bet you no one will stop me to ask me for my papers. But my Latina friend – how many times will she be stopped, just because of the color of her skin?
Back to our story (a story, which of course is not a story but someone’s life!)…
After being stopped and held that day, he now fears that he could be stopped and deported at anytime.
He says that if he is sent back to Mexico, he cannot stay there. Life there is not livable, he says. There is no work that provides any livable wage. His only hope is to apply for a green card, which he can only do because his wife is a citizen.
The process used to take about 6 months. Things have changed. It could take years and years.
It was about a year ago now that he was stopped that day on his way to work. Since then, because of this very real fear that he will be deported away from his family to a life he deems unlivable – he does not leave his house. Like I say, it’s been a year.
He doesn’t sleep. He is always vigilant for the threat of someone coming to deport him. Every day when his wife leaves for work (she has to work two jobs now), he watches the window to make sure she gets safely in the car. He stays home all day. He cannot leave to work, much less to shop for groceries. If there is a sound, he always checks to see what is happening. Each night, he checks out the window before he goes to sleep. It’s miserable. But he says the alternative is even worse. If he was deported to Mexico, he’d never see his wife again, or their kids. His wife worries. Their children worry. They get depressed. It affects their performance in school, which they must now do while they work as well. They do not take family vacations, needless to say.
It felt different before, they say. It was a good country. Good people. Good work. “Pero ya no es los Estados Unidos,” they say. It’s not the United States anymore. The laws are changing. The racism is growing stronger and more vocal, they say. Before, only the undocumented people who dealt in criminal behavior had to worry. He’s never engaged in any of that. He worked hard for 11 years. And his employers knew he was undocumented, and they benefited from the cheap labor.
This is a story about a couple that live right here in our town.
THE DREAMERS
There are also the stories of the children – dreamers, they are called. As of 5 years ago, DACA enabled them to come out of the shadows. You probably have heard about DACA in the news. These dreamers came to the US as children when their parents entered the US illegally, fleeing poverty and violence.
The average DACA recipient is in their 20s, & half of them came to the US under age 6. They do not remember the country some wish to deport them to – a country their parents risked life and limb to leave. So, before DACA, these were children living in the shadows, unable to get a job because they had no social security number; unable to get a drivers license or go to college. ALL DACA did was allow them to get an identification number and a drivers license so they could get jobs and go to school. They receive no other benefits, and even some benefits they are not permitted such as welfare and Medicaid. 91% of them are employed; 100% have no criminal record. They pay income taxes – almost 12 billion a year. A commonly misunderstood point: DACA did not give them a path to citizenship. In fact every two years they have to reapply for DACA and pay $500. There are 800,000 of them. ((http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/25/key-facts-about-unauthorized-immigrants-enrolled-in-daca/))
SEASONAL WORKERS
Then there are the people who come here as seasonal workers. Almost half of all undocumented people originally came here on a temporary work visa.
Hundreds of thousands of seasonal and temporary workers are brought to the U.S. by jobs that attract few native citizens – such as picking strawberries ten hours a day, or dangerous construction work. Employers rely upon these workers. While here, these workers pay taxes, including $7 billion a year in Social Security that they never collect. Our current system unrealistically limits the number and type of workers allowed to enter the country legally, and so employers circumvent the laws and hire undocumented migrants.
Whether they come with a temporary visa or not, once in the U.S. they may face grueling hours or productivity requirements, dangerous working conditions, underpayment for their work, exploitive bosses… If they have a work visa and their employer fires them, they are deported. They cannot unionize, or seek the protection of work safety laws. As my colleague Kendyl Gibbons says, “Some part of the corporate sector has a vested interest in the continuation of this inequitable situation.” ((http://www.uua.org/worship/words/sermon/184793.shtml))
So these are some of the stories of the people we may pass in the grocery store. The people who may be our friends, even our family.
SOME WAYS TO RESPOND
How do we as Unitarian Universalists respond to these stories, to this issue of immigration, whether legal or illegal?
I’m going to talk about three ways we might respond, and you’ll see that while the first two are great, the third may be the most Unitarian Universalist.
THE WAY OF REASON
The first way we might respond is the way of reason. We UUs are so often about reason. So, here I could talk about all of the facts and the data that show that immigrants are good for our country, including undocumented immigrants; that even though we want to build a wall on the border, immigration from Mexico is negative; and the fact that immigrants are not taking our jobs or our kids’ educations.
This response of reason could say – we must reform our immigration system so that, even if we decide we must be highly exclusionary, the system must be logically designed, fairly administered, and humanely enforced – none of which is currently the case. This response of reason is important – it is surely essential to educate and inform, to correct the misinformation in our country related to immigration.
But this response of reason may not be enough.
THE WAY OF THE HEART
A second response is the way of the heart. The stories of immigrants and refugees could solicit our empathy, could lead us to recall the words etched on the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
This response of the heart would say, how could you deport a young person who came to this country at 5 weeks old and had no idea she was undocumented until she grew to age 15 and asked her parents to start attending drivers ed…and they sat her down and told her she would never be able to get a drivers license or even apply for a job.
The response of the heart asks us to call on our principle of the inherent worth and dignity of all people, regardless of what country they happened to be born in.
The response of the heart says, “Welcome. We extend to you our hospitality.”
But as I pondered how to write this sermon, this typical response of the heart, this appeal to hospitality, did not sit right with me.
“HOSPITALITY” (?)
To find out why, let’s venture into the third response – the third way.
I realized the concept of welcome, generosity, hospitality in relation to immigrants doesn’t sit well with me because those concepts are about sharing with someone something that is ours.
Well, when it comes down to it, this country is not ours. Of course, if it belongs to anyone, it belongs to the indigenous people – to the Native Americans.
So, the more I thought about it, the more the concept of hospitality to immigrants felt like false charity. In searching for responsive readings for this service, I kept finding readings that appealed to our generosity and sense of welcome. It felt off.
So when I ran across this next piece written by UU minister Alicia Forde, I said: That’s what I’m talking about. This is the paradigm shift we need.
She writes:
[I am] a guest here. Here in this House. Are you?
[We are] guests here. Here in this House. And, whose House do we inhabit?
In the small world of our lives the borders between us: easements, fences, gates, hedges—serve to delineate, to separate us. To remind us of where my property begins and ends.
Where your property begins and ends.
If you cross over: you are a trespasser or a guest in my house.
You’ve worked to own this small plot of land and the house erected on it.
You’ve claimed it. It is now part of …your definition of self. Your identity.
If I cross over your fences: I am a trespasser or a guest in your house.
What does it mean then, that in 1845, the United States crossed over into Mexico…and took half of that country? Took land, resources, labor?
Was the U.S. trespasser? Guest?
Are there to be no consequences for taking what does not belong to you?
Should we simply forget whose House we inhabit?
…
Hospitality, in this case, implies that the “house” belongs to us.
That the land, the resources that are a part of this House is ours and we, who now live here, are being virtuous in our willingness to share.
It erases the history that would have us remember that those who cross the border today those choosing to brave the harsh conditions of the desert those who face the possibility of death, imprisonment, deportation, criminalization are doing so because the U.S. once crossed their borders to extract their resources and…labor.((Here she is sourcing Testimony from a Scholar-Activist by Miguel A. De La Torre))
It is, for them, a matter of survival.
It is, for the U.S., a matter of restitution.
The prospect of restitution is scary.
Where do we begin?
With Mexico?
With Native Americans?
With territories?
With the descendants of those who were enslaved?
How do we acknowledge and address the complexities of our [past], present and — if we’re not conscious — future of dominance?
What would right relationship look like?
…
And. For us — Unitarian Universalists — what would it mean for us to shake off the idea of hospitality as a central principle …and delve into the concept of restitution?
Whose House do we inhabit?
For we are not hosts… not owners.
Nor are we guests.
What, then, is our responsibility?
A THIRD WAY: WE BELONG TO ONE ANOTHER
This is a paradigm shift because it moves us away from an individualist view to an interdependent view.
We are here only because others were. We are embedded in a history – a history we can ignore, but that does not ignore us.
This interdependence, this history…humble us.
This humility calls us to a response that is built into our faith as Unitarian Universalists: that we belong to one another, that we can help create a world marked by love and justice, not the happenstance of where and to whom you were born.
She asked, “Whose House do we inhabit?” capitalizing House, I imagine to urge us into a view of ourselves as part of something bigger than nation or race – whether we call that humanity at our best, or whether we call that children of God.
We were all given life; we were all given this earth – nothing we did or didn’t do made us earn those gifts.
What response makes sense other than gratitude, humility, and responsibility?
I’ll close by telling you about the end of my interview with that couple – the man whose real fear about deportation has kept him in his house for a year.
He said he and his wife know that there are still many good people here in this country, people who love other people, people who will help you, no matter what your race. He and his wife said this experience reinforces for them the principle that even when you succeed in life, you must continue to respect the people who happen to have less. They are grateful for the solidarity they see in some.
They say are grateful that there are people who learn about other people’s problems and try to solve them.
I would just add: These are not “other people’s” problems. For we belong to one another.
We can figure this out. ¡Sí se puede!
May it be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
See here a statement from Latinx Unitarian Universalists.