The fellow pulled up to our home in an ancient panel truck.

“Can I park here?” he asked me in Spanish, a good question as parking is scarce in our neighborhood and he was going to be blocking some cars.

I said, “Sure, this will be quick.”

And quick it was. Between the two of us we hauled out a queen-sized box spring from the basement and loaded it up into the truck. He slammed the sliding back door closed, shook my hand, and headed off. He had a list of other people with furniture donations that would be going to the newly arrived migrants who were trying to set up a home in the Washington, D.C. area. 

I have been doing a bit of volunteering with different groups that help these new friends and neighbors of our community. Their needs are many, but some of the requests are quite basic—bedding, a table and chairs, plates, flatware. Clothing. A job. Advice on how to handle an appearance in traffic court (“Will I be deported for driving without a license?”). Help a recently-arrived, newly-married couple from Venezuela figure out how to register a change in address with the US government. Simple things that can be resolved with the gift of an extra bed, or a conversation with someone who has been in local traffic court, or the reassurance of a social worker. The things that worry our new neighbors seem small in comparison with what they had suffered over the past couple of years: flight from their home, horrific travel through the jungles of Columbia and Panama, the indescribable horrors of the life of a migrant in Mexico.

These needs, nonetheless, are present day and real: one woman pleaded for an actual bed—a box spring and a bed frame. She was six months pregnant and just could no longer manage getting up off a mattress that was lying on the floor.

“Oh,” she added, “and the rats.”

There are so few programs in our wealthy and creative nation that focus on integrating immigrants into their new communities. There are an extraordinary number of tireless volunteers, legacy faith communities’ efforts, and ingenious and complicated programs to get health care for recently arrived mothers and children. Apart from a couple of exceptions, however,these efforts are not well-coordinated across the nation, and they are not sustainable. This is not the fault of the good Americans doing this work, it is simply that the need far outstrips the resources.  

Sadly, the immigration programs that are sustainable and that function quite well are those that are organized to abusethese vulnerable people. Many Americans know of  the meatpacking companies that happily and illegally hire migrant children. Local authorities conspire to ignore the actions of construction firms delighted to pay a migrant work less than minimum wage.  And less well-organized but ubiquitous are the uncountable numbers of American families that exploit the cheap labor of an immigrant who is a domestic worker.

Politicians, however, run the most efficient, well-funded and seemingly inexhaustible projects focused on migrants. These are programs that encourage and facilitate hatred born of fear. Easy targets for the soulless, the propaganda loud mouths proffer all manner of fear mongering, nearly all of it false and exaggerated. The stunt works, for there are a lot of fearful people in our country, and the hundreds of politicians offering visions of an invasion of poor people of color seems to get to us in a way thatmakes it ok to spend $25 billions of our national budget to “secure the border,” tying up the necessary work of government, and all the while garnering votes along the way.

Texas elected officials are the saddest example of official, organized abuse of the immigrant. The governor ignores in an astonishing manner the most basic tenets of decency, whether laid out in the Bible (Leviticus 19: 33-34) or in the hard-earned dictates from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The Texas politicians proudly trot out one barbarity (concertina wire) after another (“The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder” (says Greg Abbot the governor of Texas, on television). 

The horrible consequences of all of this are soul bending. Texas’ recent drowning of two children and a woman in the Rio Grande, the result of Texas’ National Guard troops refusing Border Patrol agents from attempting to save the family, has become a smirk fest on social media.

“They forgot to get to the facts,” claims the Texas governor.

The facts were that state law enforcement and federal law enforcement knew that these people were in trouble, and could have saved them, but puttered around and passed blame from one agency to the other, a la Uvalde school massacre. The fact was that two children and a woman drowned. The other fact is that this fact did not seem to disturb the politicians one whit. Another fact worth mentioning: for all the hate speech, the legislative grandstanding, the concertina wire and the boots on the ground, despite a policy that has killed thousands of people along the southern border—none of this has created or will ever create anoperational control of the border. People leave their homelands for good reason, and they will continue to risk their lives because their lives back home are in equally grave danger.

                  The politicians are not the only people cashing in on the migrants’ plight. Ironically, smugglers, traffickers, all those involved in moving migrants through Mexico into the United States, have made out royally in the business of the fight against “illegal aliens.” The billions of dollars spent on border enforcement brutalities have increased the traffickers’ profit margin. Five years ago, for example, an individual would have to pay someone about $2,000 to make the trip “safely” from the southern Mexican border with Guatemala into the US. Last week, an advocate who works to protect migrants in Mexico told me that the going rate for the same journey now costs $6,000. A direct correlation between a politician’s gain and a smuggler’s profit margin.

                  People will continue to come to the border, for the are not safe in their homeland and they continue to believe that America and Americans are decent people. We can refuse to engage with this movement of people and continue to be implicated in this waste of human lives, or we can continue to exploit the migrant for cheap political benefit, or we could put into place some of the many intelligent, responsible suggestions for reforming our immigration system.

Elected officials and their constituents continue to claim that the “immigration issue” is all about politics, which of course it is, but the political is an extension of the ethical. The political is how we as a people, a “polis” create systems that reflect our wisest, best selves—our ethical selves. Our best, wisest society cannot be realized if our leaders, be they nationally elected officials or locally recognized leaders, continue to take political advantage of deeply afraid people. A respect for the concerns of constituents is in order, but leadership could inspire people to recognize the true nature of migration to the United States and understand the multiple opportunities we have to integrate migrants into our American community.

In the meantime, those Americans who understand the political grandstanding around immigrants and who reject the fearmongering do what we do best: be generous and helpful at the local level, finding food and housing and beds for those in need even as we aspire to something that is almost biblical in its aspirations: recognize ourselves in those migrant families braving our southern border. 

We US residents are in a position to assuage the migrants’ fears, be it with the gift of a bed, a kind ear, or a place to live.

https://www.aila.org/advocacy-tools/aila-s-advocacy-action-center