Annunciation House Newsletter - Winter 2005

WELCOME THE STRANGER, WELCOME THE LIGHT

BY: Ruben Garcia

While speaking about the horror of having entered the US through the Arizona desert, an immigrant was asked, “What was the most difficult part of the experience for you?” His response was quick and to the point, “Not to give up!”

Earlier in the year, an unaccompanied 15-year-old from Honduras arrived at one of our houses. He made the journey primarily by hopping Mexican freight trains that immigrants refer to as la bestia – the beast – because of the number of immigrant lives that these freight trains take. The experience across Mexico was nothing short of traumatizing. There were many days when he had to do with little or no food. He risked his life every time he jumped on and off the train and on several occasions he was dragged by the train. At one point the cold so disoriented him that he ended up on the wrong train that then took him on an almost 500 mile detour. He heard immigrants fall off the moving train, escaped criminals who prey on immigrants, and was continually hiding from the infamous Mexican migra, who extort money and are not unknown to beat up on immigrants. His greatest nightmare was that he would fall off the train in the desert and be left in the middle of nowhere. Months after having arrived in El Paso, the nightmare still haunts him -- it’s night, he’s alone and in the desert, and the train has left him -- terrified, he wakes up crying.

But he made it to the US. He survived. Hundreds of others were not so fortunate. This past summer, some 400 immigrants died all along the border in the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Some drowned in the Rio Grande and others were killed by vehicles on roads that run near the border. But mostly they died of heat stroke in the deserts. Human rights activists who work with immigrants tell us that when people have entered the final stages of heat stroke, they become disoriented, rip off their clothing, and move about crazily in the desert. Devastating to everyone is when the articles of clothing found are small; then there is silence. They belonged to a child.

There is so much now being said, written, reported, and televised about immigrants -- most of it increasingly negative and critical. Disconcerting is the success of all this rhetoric in connecting in people’s minds the words immigrant, security, and terrorist. There is not a politician out there who, when speaking of immigrants, does not raise the issue of national security. The cacophony of voices calling for greater border control and tougher enforcement can be deafening at times. Congress has been allocating ever-increasing dollar amounts to employ more Border Patrol agents, integrate the latest technologies, build new detention facilities, and expand the authority of the agent in the field to deport immigrants with ever-greater speed.

There is a solution to the immigrant issue – legalization. People enter the US illegally because the avenues for legal entry are so restrictive and insurmountable for the vast majority of immigrants. The US economy creates hundreds of thousands of low-paying jobs that are then filled by undocumented immigrants who must first pass the gauntlet known as the journey to el Norte. If the immigrant survives, he or she gets one of these low-paying jobs. It is designed to work this way and the political will to end this deadly cycle of employment for the survivors of border gauntlets is absent. And not only is the necessary political will to bring about immigration reform absent, the alternative has increasingly been to apply force – armed force – against immigrants and thereby create, in effect, an environment of low-intensity warfare with the corresponding use of military technology and the resulting casualties.

Politically a case might be made for closing the border in the absence of any kind of a connection or relationship between the people of the US and those of Latin America. But that is simply not the case. There was another unaccompanied teenager from Honduras who arrived at one of our houses a while back. He was from a rural area of Honduras and the abject poverty of his family led his mother to tell him, “I can no longer feed you. Go and find a job someplace so that you can at least feed yourself.” At 14 years of age, he left his family and moved to San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ largest city and its industrial hub. There he found a job in a maquila working on an assembly line manufacturing denim jeans destined for export to discount stores in the US. He earned a little more than $20 a week for a six-day workweek - less than what maquila workers in Juarez earn. He rented an unfurnished room in an old building with another maquila worker. On $20 per week, he could barely support himself, much less help his family. He decided to take on the challenge and risk of the gauntlet and headed north to the US.

Why is it so acceptable for a 15-year-old to work 6 days a week for $20 making jeans so that people in the US can buy these jeans at K-Mart, Wal Mart, Target, etc. for as little as $12 per pair? And when this 15-year-old comes to realize that he cannot survive on such low wages, that he can no longer bear the pain of watching his family struggle in such great poverty and goes to the US, what exactly is it about this 15-year-old that then makes him such a threat or danger to our security? Is the real terror that the US economy loses the manufacturing production of another laborer?

A short time ago, we received a letter from a donor in response to a thank-you letter we had mailed out. The writer wrote to tell us that he could no longer support the work of Annunciation House “while it involves itself in political action.” He went on to admonish us to “stick to your basic mission.”

Many would have us believe that the poor of the world are poor in a vacuum – that the poverty of the poor and the reasons why they are poor are somehow accidents of nature. We like feeling that the only thing asked or required of us is human compassion and the charity that flows from that compassion. We comfort ourselves – or might it be, excuse ourselves - in the belief that since we have such limited control over the forces of nature, we don’t actually bear responsibility for the oppressive reality and the horrific suffering in which so many of the world’s poor eke out an existence. Because so many of the guests who have passed though the houses come from Mexico and Central America, we feel as if we know something about the struggles of these peoples to simply subsist. Their poverty is not an accident. Their poverty stems from an inability to affect, impact, and change global structures that divide the world’s resources in sinfully disproportionate ways. A system that pays individuals $20 for a 6-day workweek so as to make $12 jeans available to families with an annual medium income of $30,000 is sinful and unjust.

The environment in the US is changing to such an extent that to speak out, to act on behalf of the poor in migration is increasingly being attacked and criminalized. And these attacks are having their intended effect. The quintessence of this situation is exemplified in the arrest on July 9th of two Colorado Springs college students providing humanitarian assistance to immigrants trying to navigate the Arizona desert during the summer’s scorching hot months. After consulting with a medical professional and an attorney, the medical professional asked that the three immigrants, with blisters on the soles of their feet, vomiting, and one of them with bloody diarrhea, be transported to where they could obtain medical care. For doing this, these two college students were arrested, charged, and will go to trial a couple of weeks after Christmas. The words ring in our heads, “Stick to your basic mission,” and “Don’t become politically involved.” In other words, remain silent. Do not act in such a way that your actions make a statement.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him, nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

St. John tells us that from the very beginning, the God of creation was a God who would not only not remain silent, but one who speaks categorically. And the Word that comes from the mouth of this God is not merely the kind of word one reads on a page, but a Word that is an action in and of itself; and that Word is to be “the light of the human race.” God’s Word is a Word that comes into the world to specifically and concretely challenge the darkness in the world. There is absolutely nothing more political than to shine light onto the darkness of human suffering. In any moment, in any place, in any circumstance where the darkness of injustice is found and perpetuated, there exactly is where the Word of God seeks to shine His light.

Archbishop Oscar Romero, martyr of El Salvador, also has an admonition for us, “We cannot segregate God’s word from the historical reality in which it is proclaimed. That would not be God’s word. The Bible would be just a pious history book in our library. It is God’s word because it enlightens, contrasts, repudiates, praises what is going on today in this society. Not just purgatory but hell awaits those who could have done good and did not do it. It is the reverse of the beatitude that the Bible has for those who are saved, for the saints, who could have done wrong and did not. Of those who are condemned it will be said: They could have done good and did not.”

And at a time when the bodies of so many of the poor in migration are being found all along the border; when the millions of undocumented immigrants working in the lowest of paying jobs are pushed further and further underground; when it’s perfectly acceptable to take the fruits of the sweat of the poor who are paid subsistence wages and then reject and disparage those worker; when countless human beings are exploited, abused, and trafficked because they lack legal status; and when individuals are being arrested and prosecuted for taking medically-at-risk human beings to obtain medical care; then indeed, it is a time to shine the light of the Word of God into all of that darkness.

This is a time when the witness, and the power, and the light of hospitality must shine brightly into the darkness into which the undocumented have been forced. When governmental policies build more fences and walls to keep the poor in migration out, hospitality must open doors of welcome. When so many are rounded up like cattle and detained in barracks the undocumented refer to as el corralon, hospitality must offer recognition of the dignity of the human person. When laws arrest individuals who would serve the immigrant, hospitality must call forth in even greater numbers those willing to accept the risk of arrest in remaining faithful to the work of welcoming the stranger in our midst. All across this nation, from border to border, churches, faith communities, and religious congregations will be forced to define themselves over the suffering, persecution, and oppression of the undocumented. The bright light of the Word of God is shining into the darkness of the suffering immigrant. Let us offer hospitality and welcome the Light into our communities, into our churches, into our homes, and into our humanity.