"Not in Our Backyard": Victimizing Immigrants Across the U.S.

There's a scary trend sweeping across the U.S.

In the absence of a successfully enacted immigration reform law, local communities, motivated by fear and an increasingly publicized rhetoric of misunderstanding about immigrants, are taking matters into their own hands.

In the areas surrounding Washington, DC, alone, some quite unbelievable proposals are being considered. In July, the Board of County Supervisors in Prince George's County, MD, authored a resolution calling for police to check the immigration status of violators of any laws, criminal or civil, and for public services to be denied to undocumented persons.  The police department responded by introducing a new policy in which police would now be required to check the immigration status of immigrants stopped for misdemeanors like traffic violations. So, failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign might now lead to deportation.

Bordering the District on the other side, in Virginia, the GOP announced legislation Aug. 29 to prohibit public colleges and universities from admitting undocumented persons, effectively barring their access to the higher education that would guarantee their ability to become productive members of society.

These are only two examples local to where I live, but hundreds of such proposals have begun popping up throughout the nation since Congress failed to pass an immigration reform law.  The proposals, often a response to fear, mistrust, and the exaggerated (and often untrue) rhetoric of anti-immigration campaigners, are a travesty for many reasons: they divide instead of unite communities; they create an atmosphere in which neighbors do not trust one another and immigrant communities do not trust police; they are patchwork "solutions" that do nothing to address root causes; and worst of all, they paint the immigrant as an "other" and deny the human dignity of those who have often fled to our country trying to escape the horrible realities of poverty, suffering, and persecution in their own. The problem with these local initiatives is that they dehumanize immigrants, masking the fact that they are really fellow human beings, dignity-filled human beings, created, as we are, in God's own image. The local proposals treat people as problems, and instead of trying to heal communities and bring diverse backgrounds together for dialogue, they seek to divide and separate.

In his Labor Day statement, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, the chairman of the Domestic Policy Committee for the U.S. bishops, expressed grave concern about the trend. He described the local laws enacted as "a patchwork of conflicting policies, punitive measures, and local disputes" that "cannot fix a broken federal system, but they can further enflame the divisions that make real progress more difficult."

Instead, the debate "should be shaped and measured by fundamental moral principles," the Bishop said, like the fact that human dignity is "a gift from God, not a status to be earned." Human dignity is a gift from God, not a status to be earned. How true this is. Yet how blatantly it is denied in the corrosive local proposals being introduced around the country. As citizens of the world and people seeking to live lives of solidarity, we have to stand, even if our local communities won't, for human dignity.

by Jill Rauh, Education for Justice Project, Center of Concern

Comments

[Frank Sudlow]

Here in the UK the concerns resonate with equal vigour. Yet, like the US, there are few in these islands who are not themselves from immigrant stock. I stand up and say, "I am an immigrant too, though my forefathers came here long ago to plunder and spoil." Today, the immigrant, be they refugee or economic migrant, comes to find a place of safety and security in which they can contribute and prosper. In the UK immigrants contribute far more to the national wealth than they take from it in terms of benefits like health and education, yet they are still perceived as a threat and a burden. Only when we truly recognised the dignity of all, ourselves as well as our new neighbours, will we discover the real security of being one family.