The Christian Post has featured several articles since February about a growing Evangelical effort to push for reform in immigration laws, citing current policies as unjust, inhumane, and responsible for unfairly breaking up families. The effort is underscored by the belief that God calls his followers to welcome the stranger with love, compassion, and respect, and believers should make every effort to shape a society that will accomplish that with justice and mercy for immigrants and their families.
Here are the articles with more information:
Faith Leaders Re-Ignite Immigration Debate
Immigration reform, an issue that has been pushed to the backburner due to the state of the economy, was revived Wednesday when a diverse group of faith leaders launched a large-scale campaign to push U.S. lawmakers to quickly tackle the complex and emotionally charged problem.
Five religious leaders from Christian and Jewish traditions were joined by two U.S. congressmen to launch the “Prayer, Renewal and Action on Immigration” campaign. The campaign seeks to engage and educate congregations and people of faith on the immigration reform debate.
…All the speakers, from religious leaders to the U.S. Congressmen, criticized current U.S. immigration laws for breaking up families and mistreating illegal aliens. They call for new policies that provide a pathway for undocumented immigrants to earn residency.
“Immigrants are not the problem,” said United Methodist Bishop Minerva G. Carcano of the Desert Southwest Conference.
“Immigrants are part of the solution to our national problems,” contended Carcano, the first Hispanic woman to be elected to the episcopacy of The United Methodist Church.
“As people of faith, we cannot stand and will not stand while families are separated, while individual freedoms are ignored and the immigrant community in the United States is mistreated unjustly and inhumanely,” she said.
…“We have, literally, tens of thousands of American citizens whose wives are being deported, whose husbands are being deported,” said U.S. Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.). “We have millions of American citizen children who when they wake up in the morning to go to school fear all day long whether or not their parents will be there at the end of the day.”
Read the full article here.
Evangelicals Make Case for Welcoming Immigrants
Usually, conservative evangelicals are not known to support immigration reform. But several prominent leaders of the movement made their case Tuesday evening for new immigration laws, joining a growing number of Christians who refer to the Bible for support in “welcoming the stranger.”
The evangelical leaders – including Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals – urged American evangelicals to engage in the immigration debate and call upon the U.S. government to work on new immigration laws this year.
…“I get asked a lot, why this issue? Why as Christians and evangelicals, in particular, do we need to care about immigrants and policies in particular,” said Matthew Soerens, co-author of Welcoming the Stranger, at the book’s launch event on Tuesday. “It is because those people we talk about, those immigrants, those aliens, they are us as part of the church.”
Soerens, who works directly with immigrants as a World Relief staff, says he has met many Hispanic, Asian, and African immigrants in his line of work. What he realized was that the church, which the Bible says is the body of Christ, includes a lot of immigrants in the United States.
“Corinthians tells us if one part of the body suffers then the whole body is suffering,” he said. “As Christians, as part of the church, we don’t have a choice but to engage in this issue. And people are suffering, they are living in fear.”
The leaders also referenced the New Testament story in Luke 10 of the Good Samaritan – “a stranger or alien himself” – who stopped to help the Jewish man.
“This and other parables remind us that ‘we are all aliens sent out to help other aliens find a place of safety in this world,’” says a 2006 statement by World Relief in support of comprehensive immigration reform. The statement references Jonathan Robert Nelson’s 2006 remarks for The American Bar Association’s “Fortress America: The State and Future of U.S. Immigration Law and Policy” event.
…Anderson and other evangelical leaders talked about the inequality in current U.S. immigration laws and criticized how they break up families. He also called on the government to provide adequate finances to implement immigration laws and reduce the “enormous” waiting time for immigrants applying for legal status.
Pastor Derrick Harkins of the historic black Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., stated, “We are calling for nothing more than for those persons who are presently immigrants to be able to function and thrive within the context of what is just. We are talking about an earned right to citizenship. We are talking about them operating within the framework of a just set of laws.
“But we also talk about extending mercy. I hope that again – the language of the church thrives in this regards – that we understand that we are called to extend that measure of mercy. And that mercy means that the issue of family reunification act is indeed significant priority.”
Immigration Reform Advocates Renew Calls on Postville Anniversary
To mark the one year anniversary of the Postville raid – the largest immigration raid in U.S. history at the time – proponents of immigration reform renewed their calls for new laws that protect workers and family unity.
Faith leaders joined with labor spokesmen to remind the public of the dire consequences that immigration raids have on communities. They recalled the hundreds of workers who were arrested and their children who had no one to care for them after the massive raid at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, last year.
Speakers during the media call on Monday sponsored by Justice for Immigrants and the Interfaith Immigration Coalition urged lawmakers to quickly move on creating new immigration laws.
“As we commemorate this anniversary we stand in solidarity with the 389 workers who were detained,” said Sister Mary McCauley, BVM, who was the pastoral administrator for St. Bridget’s Parish in Postville at the time of the raid. “We vigorously call for comprehensive immigration reform, just labor practices, family reunification and an end to raids.
…Government officials carried out a massive immigration raid last May on Agriprocessrs Inc. – the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse. Dozens of federal agents and two law enforcement helicopters were deployed in the crackdown operation.
In the months that followed, church leaders reported that many families had left Postville to find jobs elsewhere, while a sizable number of illegal immigrants stayed behind taking refuge in churches. Those that lived in churches depended wholly on charity to survive on a daily basis since they could no longer work.
Some Postville pastors after witnessing the devastation caused by the raid urged politicians and Americans to not just look at the immigration issue as political, but to look at people as people and ask why they want to come to the United States and work.
“Although you might not find famine, you will find all kinds of political and economic problems [in their home country],” the Rev. Steve Brackett, senior pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Postville, said in a media call in December.
…Bishop John C. Wester, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Committee on Migration, called the current immigration policies “broken.”
He said that although he understands the “right and responsibility of the government to enforce the law,” the Postville raid did not solve the problem of illegal immigration but further added problems such as family separation and destruction of immigrant communities.
“Our religious and social response to such harm to our God-given human dignity is based on Scriptures, which call believers to welcome the newcomers among us, to treat the alien with respect and charity, and to provide pastoral and humanitarian assistance to individuals and their families,” Wester said.
So what’s your take on this urge for reform?
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