In the last few weeks, a lot has been happening in the great American conversation around immigration. A federal court struck down SB 1070, Arizona’s “get-tough-on-immigration-because-the-Obama-administration-won’t-do-diddily” law. Several prominent Republicans have started campaigning against the 14th amendment to the United States’ constitution, which, among other things, grants citizenship to any person born in the Unites States. Then, in the second week of August, both the House and Senate passed an emergency spending bill that will send 600 million dollars to the US border. The money will pay for 1500 border enforcement personnel, it will support the overburdened court system, and it will provide for the monitoring of the border by unmanned aircraft.

Count mine among the Americans who wish to see Washington do something about undocumented migration across our southwest border — not because undocumented persons are harming our nation (they’re not; in fact the United States benefits from illegal immigration), but because each year hundreds of good people die trying to cross our borders. People have been migrating across the landscape now bisected with an international border since long before either the United States or Mexico existed, and they’re not going to stop now. The poverty in Mexico is too extreme, and the economic opportunities north of the border are too alluring.

Rather than laws that will encourage increasingly dangerous (and fatal) border crossings, we need measures that will keep people safe, will promote economic vitality on both sides of the border, and will enable those who work in America to move freely back and forth across the border.

To that end, I have identified five elements that I feel must be included in any morally responsible immigration reform bill. I came up with these elements after spending a lot of time studying the issues, visiting the US/Mexico border, and interviewing dozens of people from many different walks of life for my just-released book, Neighbor: Christian Encounters with “Illegal” Immigration (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010)

• The United States Government must provide visas for seasonal work, particularly for people working in the agriculture sector. Issuing visas for seasonal work would likely have the effect of decreasing the number of immigrants from Mexico living permanently in the United States because with visas, workers could return to Mexico at the end of each season and not feel compelled to move their families north. While writing my book, I found I shared this conviction with liberals and conservatives, Mexicans and Americans, nearly everyone I met who is knowledgeable and wise about immigration matters.</li>
• Families should be kept together. Current laws that separate mixed-status spouses or that deport parents, separating them from their children, should be changed. When parents are deported, leaving citizen children without a mother or a father, no one benefits. </li>
• Children brought across the border by their parents should be treated differently from adults who immigrated alone, even after those children are adults. Under current immigration law, adults who came to the United States as children are treated exactly as if they themselves had made the decision to immigrate. If they lack documentation, they live under the constant threat of deportation, and in many states they are denied drivers’ licenses, seriously hampering their chances of finding meaningful work. Even if they are legal residents, they face the possibility of deportation even for relatively minor offenses.
• The border fence should be left to rust in the desert, or, better yet, uprooted and sold for scrap. If it would do any good, I’d stand by the fence that now runs along the border from the Pacific Ocean to the Rio Grande, and I’d declare with every possible ounce of conviction “Mr. Obama, tear down this wall!” The fence is not necessary — our nation’s southern border already runs through a mountainous desert which provides excellent border protection and national security, and makes the fence redundant. Also, at a cost of more than a billion dollars, the border fence is a ridiculous waste of money and, often, a tragic waste of human life. The wall doesn’t keep people out of the United States; it just encourages people to cross the border in increasingly dangerous places. Besides, as expensive as walls and fences are to build and maintain, ladders are cheap. So are shovels and hacksaws. The only people who benefit from the wall are politicians whose constituents like easy answers to complex issues.
• I firmly believe that the movement of goods and services across the border should be controlled. Duty fees must be collected and contraband must be stopped, but the best way to control the flow of people is with economic development south of the border and with enforcement north of the border that targets not the migrants themselves but businesses that hire undocumented persons.

My opinions are not unique to the progressive community in the United States, nor are they original to me. I heard variations on these themes everywhere I went in the United States and Mexico researching my book. This is not to say that everyone in the United States and Mexico agrees with me — not even close — but when discussions around immigration are educated, thoughtful, and are separated from fear, prejudice and xenophobia, consensus starts to appear and that consensus looks an awful lot like the five points I’ve made above.

It’s time for our leaders to pass comprehensive immigration reform and to do so in a way that fuels the economy, protects families and children, saves lives, and is rational and enforceable. I believe America is good enough, strong enough, and creative enough to make an immigration policy that works for all of us.

Welcome to my blog!  If you’re interested to purchasing my book Neighbor: Christian Encounters with “Illegal” Immigration (and I hope you are), the best way to find the book is through Amazon, or directly from my publisher at a website called “The Thoughtful Christian.”

Enjoy reading, and let me know what you think.

Best,

Ben

I’m also working on my second book, while promoting my first. Life is full. My first post on the Huffington Post is a blend of themes from my forthcoming book and my book in progress. Check it out:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-daniel/walls-in-the-desert-are-t_b_650697.html

Because I’ve written a book about immigration, a lot of folks in my family, from my congregation, and among my friends have asked me to weigh in on Arizona’s recently-passed “get tough on immigrants” law. On several occasions I’ve tried to write down my reactions to Arizona’s law, but I’ve had little luck. I have so many thoughts on what has happened in Arizona that whenever I sit down to write about them, all the words get clogged somewhere between my brain and my fingers on the keyboard.

But I think I may have been saved by a video clip of Michelle Obama and an achingly-sweet second grader from Silver Spring, Maryland.

Mrs. Obama and her Mexican counterpart, First Lady, Margarita Zavala, were visiting an elementary school in the Washington, DC suburb when, suddenly, the issues that surround undocumented immigration took on a human face.

A girl raised her hand and asked about the president’s desire to deport undocumented immigrants. “My mom says that Barack Obama is taking everybody away that doesn’t have papers,” said the girl.

Obama relied, “Yeah, well that’s something that we have to work on, right? To make sure that people can be here with the right kind of papers, right? That’s exactly right.”

“But my mother doesn’t have any papers,” the girl explained.

“Well, we have to work on that. We have to fix that, and everybody’s got to work together in Congress to make sure that happens. That’s right.”

So America’s First Lady got a little bit tongue-tied, but the exchange was a gift. It was a rare moment of clarity during which the toxic smog of fear and misinformation lifted and the American people got to see what’s really at stake when we talk about undocumented migration in North America.

The girl’s situation in not unique. Estimates vary, but there may be as many as twelve million people living in the United States without papers, and many such undocumented residents of the United States have family members—usually, but not always, children—who are legal residents or American citizens, and when we talk about getting tough on immigrants, vowing, as so many politicians will do, to send offending migrants “back home,” the policies we discuss and propose affect not just the men and women who crossed the border and now pick lettuce, and bus tables, and stand out in front of Home Depot looking for work as day laborers. Our immigration policies also affect the families and communities of those who are deported.

While working on my book I spoke with (and eventually wrote about) several families who share the little girl’s story: a woman who is living in a church to avoid being deported and separated from her husband and three children, all of whom are citizens; a woman whose daughter requires the attention of a pediatric specialist and must, therefore drive her daughter across town once a week, risking deportation, should she get pulled over for a traffic violation (in California undocumented persons may not obtain drivers’ licenses); two sisters—bloodied and bruised from repeated attempts to cross the border into Arizona so they could return to their families in Los Angeles; and a man who moved from Mexico to Oregon when he was two years old and who was deported, separated from his wife and two children and sent to a place he didn’t know, where he didn’t speak the language, and where he was all alone.

These people all have stories to tell that are similar to the story the second grader told the President’s wife, and these are the stories that should drive our nation’s immigration debate.

If the folks in Arizona had been listening to the child in Silver Spring while making laws, I rather suspect that Arizona’s legislation would look different. As far as I can tell, the law was written with only one kind of undocumented migrant in mind—the person who crosses the border alone, looks for work without success and becomes a burden on our society. Such people are hardly representative of the larger immigrant population in America. For the most part, undocumented immigrants are like most human beings: they live with their families in communities. Their families and their communities are mixtures of people who are documented and undocumented, newly-arrived and well-established in America, and everyone—from the undocumented mother to the sweet, articulate US citizen child—is affected by immigration policies.

The laws that govern immigration in the United States will change because no one is satisfied with the current immigration system. If the coming change to national policies reflects the spirit of Arizona’s state laws (and I think they may, given the popularity of Arizona’s approach to immigration) then, as a nation, we will find ourselves in the uncomfortably immoral position of punishing children like the second-grader from Silver Spring for the actions of their parents and loved-ones. I like to believe my country is better than that.

On Friday, March 19, even as a year’s worth of debates around healthcare were coming to a close, two senators, Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC) wrote a piece for The Washington Post in which they outlined a bi-partisan proposal for comprehensive immigration reform.

It was a mixed bag. I gave an analysis of their proposal in an earlier post, and, for the most part, I was critical of what the two senators set forth as a first step in the long journey toward comprehensive immigration reform. Such criticism is not particularly constructive, however, unless it is coupled with alternate ideas and suggestions for what actually will work; to that end I have identified five elements that I feel must be included in any morally responsible immigration reform bill.

These five elements come from the introduction to my forthcoming book Neighbor: Christian Encounters with “Illegal” Immigration. (The book, by the way, will not be released until the middle of August, but, thanks to the foresight and quick work of the folks at Westminster John Knox Press, you can pre-order a copy at Amazon.com.) My book primarily is about people and not policy, but it seemed fair, at the beginning of the book, to say which elements I believe should be a part of immigration reform legislation. I came up with these elements after spending a lot of time studying the issues, visiting the U.S./Mexico border, and interviewing dozens people from many different walks of life. Here, then, are the elements I believe must be part of moral, comprehensive, immigration reform:

1. The United States Government must provide visas for seasonal work, particularly for those working in the agriculture sector. Issuing visas for seasonal work would likely have the effect of decreasing the number of immigrants from Mexico living permanently in the United States because with visas workers could return to Mexico at the end of each season and not feel compelled to move their families north. This is a conviction I share with Senators Schumer and Graham and nearly everyone else I have met—liberal and conservative, in Mexico and in the United States—who is knowledgeable and wise about immigration matters.

2. Families should be kept together. Current laws that separate mixed-status spouses or that deport parents, separating them from their children, should be changed. When parents are deported, leaving citizen children without a mother or a father, no one benefits.

3. Children brought across the border by their parents should be treated differently than adults who immigrated alone, even after those children are adults. Under current immigration law adults who came to the United States as children are treated exactly as if they themselves had made the decision to immigrate. If they lack documentation, they live under the constant threat of deportation, and in many states they are denied drivers’ licenses, seriously hampering their chances of finding meaningful work. Even if they are legal residents, they face the possibility of deportation even for relatively minor offenses.

4. The border fence should be left to rust in the desert, or, better yet, uprooted and sold for scrap. If I could do so with any kind of efficacy, I’d stand by the fence that now runs along the border from the Pacific Ocean to the Rio Grande, and I’d declare with every possible ounce of conviction “Mr. Obama, tear down this wall!” The fence is not necessary—our nation’s southern border already runs through a mountainous desert which provides excellent border protection and national security, and makes the fence redundant. Also, at a cost of more than a billion dollars, the border fence is a ridiculous waste of money and, often, a tragic waste of human life. The wall doesn’t keep people out of the United States; it just encourages people to cross the border in increasingly dangerous places. Besides, as expensive as walls and fences are to build and maintain, ladders are cheap. The only people who benefit from the wall are politicians whose constituents like easy answers to complex issues.

5. I firmly believe that the movement of goods and services across the border should be controlled. Duty fees must be collected and contraband must be stopped, but the best way to control the flow of people is with economic development south of the border and with enforcement north of the border that targets business that hire undocumented persons rather than the migrants themselves.

My opinions are not unique to the progressive community in the United States, nor are they original to me. I heard variations on these themes everywhere I went in the United States and Mexico researching my book. This is not to say that everyone in the United States and Mexico agrees with me—not even close—but when discussions around immigration are educated, thoughtful, and are separated from fear, prejudice and xenophobia, consensus starts to appear and that consensus looks an awful lot like the five points I’ve made above.

On March 19, 2010 The Washington Post published a bi-partisan outline for immigration reform. Penned by Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC), the proposal rests on four pillars:

1) the requirement of “biometric Social Security cards to ensure that illegal workers cannot get jobs”;
2) “fulfilling and strengthening our commitments on border security and interior enforcement”;
3) the creation of “a process for admitting temporary workers”; and
4) the implementation of “a tough but fair path to legalization for those already here.”

For the last two years I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about immigration. I’ve done a good bit of research, I’ve traveled to the border, I’ve spoken with and interviewed scores of people including several undocumented migrants, and I’ve written a book about what I learned from my research, travel, and personal encounters with migrants (the book, which is being published by Westminster John Knox Press, is called Neighbor: Christian Encounters With “Illegal” Immigration; look for it in stores and online this summer).

Applying what I’ve learned while writing a book about immigration, I can say that Schumer and Graham’s plan is a mixed bag. I’m glad the process of serious immigration reform has begun, and I’m glad that it is bi-partisan so far, but I wish it were more practical and less political, which is to say that while some of the solutions the senators offer are really good, others are either immoral or they make no sense in the real world.

First, the good. We really need a process by which temporary workers may be admitted into the United States to do seasonal work, particularly in the agricultural sector. Willing workers have been crossing our nation’s borders to harvest our food for as long as there have been borders, and, for the most part, those who have been able to return after a harvest have done so. As it became more difficult for workers to go back and forth, workers stayed in the United States and brought their families north to stay with them. Most seasonal workers would be attracted to the possibility of earning dollars but supporting their family in pesos, especially if that means they can keep a home in the place where they have family ties and cultural roots.

While writing my book I interviewed a liberal congresswoman, a conservative federal judge, and several assistant U.S. attorneys; I visited the border with pastors and activists from the United States and Mexico and I spent time with lots of undocumented migrants in the United States as well as well as with Mexican migrants preparing the cross the border without permission or papers. Everyone I met while writing my book expressed a desire to see seasonal visas issued to temporary workers. It just makes sense.

The other three pillars of the Schumer/Graham proposal look good on the surface, but they are deeply problematic; I’ll address them from least difficult to most repugnant.

1) Biometric cards that ensure the citizenship of those who are employed are not a bad idea. The best way to keep people from entering the United States illegally is to take away the availability of jobs for those without proper paperwork. The problem is that while biometric cards certainly will keep people from using false identification to get jobs which issue paychecks (complete with taxes and social security withheld—something that benefits the rest of society), the biometric cards will do nothing to discourage people from working for cash, and therefore, the issuance of biometric cards actually has the potential of driving more people into the shadows of society where they are at greater risk for exploitation, and where no withheld taxes flow into the government’s coffers.

2) The idea that we can implement a “tough but fair” process of legalization for those who already are here also sounds good and it will play well to those American voters who are both compassionate and law-abiding. The devil is in the details of what Schummer and Graham propose:

For the 11 million immigrants already in this country illegally, we would provide a tough but fair path forward. They would be required to admit they broke the law and to pay their debt to society by performing community service and paying fines and back taxes. These people would be required to pass background checks and be proficient in English before going to the back of the line of prospective immigrants to earn the opportunity to work toward lawful permanent residence.

Here we must ask a few questions. First, to the back of which line would they go? Would they have to return to their countries of origin and wait? If so, how is that not deportation? Would going to the back of the line simply mean that they would have to wait a little longer for their visas to be approved while continuing to reside and work in the United States? If so, how is that going to the back of any line, and how will it discourage future migrants from making the trip north?

And what about those who entered the United States illegally while they were children? Will we require a third-grader to pay back taxes and do community service? This problem doesn’t go away when undocumented children reach adulthood, either. Is it fair to ask an adult who grew up in the United States and received an American education, who is culturally, linguistically, and soulfully American, to suffer punishment because his or her parents decided to move the family north decades ago, when the person in question was still in diapers? If we assume that no child chooses to immigrate, doesn’t punishing those who migrate as children amount to punishing a person for actions committed by someone else?

3) Finally, there is the issue of border enforcement. Schumer and Graham write,

We would bolster recent efforts to secure our borders by increasing the Border Patrol’s staffing and funding for infrastructure and technology. More personnel would be deployed to the border immediately to fill gaps in apprehension capabilities.

Schumer is from New York, Graham is from South Carolina, and I wonder if either of them has been to the U.S./Mexico border. The “recent efforts to secure our borders” that the senators say they would bolster have been a disaster. Despite the fact that the United States already has a mountainous desert on its southwestern flank—providing better national security than any artifice of human ingenuity—we have spent more than a billion dollars building a steel fence between Imperial Beach, California and El Paso Texas, and it keeps falling down. This is a truth I saw with my own eyes just west of Agua Prieta, Sonora. I walked up an arroyo to a place where seasonal flashfloods wash out sections of the fence, as flooding does wherever water crosses the border. The fence also will fall down in places where sand shifts, rocks slide, or roots grow, which is to say, lots of places in that part of the world. Besides, as expensive and as difficult as it is construct a fence across mountains in the desert, ladders are cheap to buy and easy to use. So are shovels and hacksaws. A fence won’t stop undocumented migration across our borders. (For a good illustration of this point—if you don’t mind salty language and gratuitous nudity—see Penn and Teller’s Bullshit season 5 episode 6 on immigration.)

The worst part about enhancing the border’s “infrastructure and apprehension capabilities” is the cost in human life. Fences and patrols don’t stop people from crossing the border but they do encourage people to cross the border in places where it is not safe. Our policies around securing America’s southern border have driven people out into the desert where, with increasing regularity, they die from thirst and exposure and where they are prey for bandits and drug-smugglers. Thanks to the border’s fence and the strict enforcement by the U.S. Border Patrol the United States has created a humanitarian disaster along the border. Claiming to be tough on enforcement may be good politics, but too many people have died in the deserts of Sonora, New Mexico, Arizona, and California to say that it is good policy.

Schumer and Graham deserve credit for starting what will be a difficult journey toward immigration reform. Unfortunately, they’ve gone several steps in the wrong direction. My prayer is that the lawmaking process will amend the pillars of Schumer and Graham’s proposal in such a way that render immigration policies that are healing and life-giving for citizen and migrant alike.

I’m proud to say that Frank has written the foreword of my forthcoming book.

To be fair, the President did take on the proposed Ugandan law that would make homosexuality a capital offense. Here is his speech

It is a very good speech, but I do wish he’d been more forceful on the Ugandan issue.

In an op/ed piece published in The New York Times on November 11, 2009, David Brooks takes the American media to task for their initial reticence to portray Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as a radical Muslim terrorist. Maj. Hasan, in case you haven’t been following the news, is the man who murdered thirteen of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas last week. According to witnesses, he shouted “God is great” in Arabic before pulling out his pistol and killing people.

Naturally, folks want to know about this murderous madman, and the first details to emerge painted a portrait of a troubled soul—a loner traumatized by the violence of war and scandalized by what he saw as atrocities committed by the military he served. This, according to early analysis in the media, was someone who snapped. Later, details about Hasan adherence to radical Islam began to emerge. About the earlier, seemingly sympathetic portrayals of Maj Hasan Brooks writes,

A shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.

There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.

… The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

Brooks’ preference would be for Americans to understand Maj. Hasan’s actions to be reflective of a chosen narrative in which Islam is at war with Christianity and Judaism, a narrative that

…has emerged on the fringes of the Muslim world. It is a narrative that sees human history as a war between Islam on the one side and Christianity and Judaism on the other. This narrative causes its adherents to shrink their circle of concern. They don’t see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so.

I am disturbed and troubled by Brooks’ way of thinking. We know that Nidal Malik Hasan was disturbed and we know he was a Muslim. David Brooks seems to want Americans to see radical Islam as the source of Hasan’s craziness. I don’t share this desire. I believe we have a moral responsibility to distinguish between mental instability and religious belief when we speak of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, just as we distinguish between the criminality of those who bomb abortion clinics and the Evangelical Christianity to which they usually adhere; just as we don’t consider the murderous actions of the IRA to be a product of Catholicism.

It is a fact that an overwhelming majority of religious people do not commit acts of terror, and I’m not just talking about moderate-to-progressive-peacenik-let’s-get-along-American-Protestant types like me. Most extremist, fringe-dwelling religious people don’t commit atrocities either, no mater what their pastor, rabbi, priest, or imam says. As Frank Schaeffer points out in his book, Patience with God: Faith for Those Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism), “most people are better than their theology.”

If we don’t recognize that there is a difference between Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s criminality and his religious proclivities, we put ourselves in danger of adopting the very narrative Mr. Brooks would have us repudiate. And if we adopt the narrative of eternal enmity between Islam and everyone else, we make Nidal Hasan merely an enemy soldier instead of a criminal.

This is not to say that violence never has a religious motivation. As a pastor, I can attest to the fact that mentally ill people are attracted to religion and use religion as a tool for manipulation and, sometimes, violence. I have feared for my own safety and for the safety of my family because people attending my church have taken their Christianity to odd and unhealthy extremes. The fact that Hasan’s violence seems to have had a religious motivation doesn’t surprise me; and it wouldn’t surprise me if the next person to commit such an atrocity were to be a Presbyterian.

So what do we do with Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan or any other person who is inspired by a misreading of his religious tradition to commit violence? We treat Maj. Hasan like the criminal he is and leave religion out of the equation. Otherwise we will ramp up the power of the conflict narrative by indicting 1.5 billion Muslims for the heinous crime of a single, sick man.