"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the
golden door."
The famous
inscription on the Statue of Liberty is an inspiration to many,
but in 1886, the year the lady with the torch was dedicated, the
Cleveland Gazette, an African-American newspaper in Ohio,
called the idea of liberty enlightening the world from the
United States “ridiculous in the extreme. This government is a
howling farce. It can not, or rather does not protect its
citizens within its own borders.” The paper suggested the statue
should be shoved into the ocean until “the liberty of this
country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and
industrious colored man to earn a respectable living for himself
and family, without being ‘ku-kluxed,’ perhaps murdered, his
daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed.”
Today, the
sincerity of the statement is being challenged again as America
deals with the quagmire of illegal immigration. As always, there
are at least two sides to the story. On one hand, there are
those who maintain that illegal immigrants are a boost to the
economy. Illegal immigrants are routinely paid lower wages which
keeps production costs down and, in turn, helps consumers save
money. There are an estimated 2.6 million illegal immigrants
working in California alone, 200,000 of them in San Diego where
Erik Larson of the city’s Farm Bureau insists that the five
billion dollar a year agriculture industry is absolutely
dependent on migrant workers.
“The
avocado trees that blanket the hills of Fallbrook and Valley
Center, those all go away without farm workers,” Larson says.
“So do the oranges here in San Pasqual Valley, the nurseries of
San Marcos and Vista, the Carlsbad flower fields.” Construction
and tourism are also dependent on low-wage workers. The opposing
arguments include the charge that illegal immigrants, though
benefitting the upper classes who employ them as everything from
farm workers to maids, are an economic burden on the middle
class who are saddled with the cost of their education and
health care. Immigrants, they insist, are also taking jobs away
from Americans. “The workers who face the most competition from
illegal immigrants would be U.S. workers who haven’t completed
high school,” said UCSD professor Gordon Hanson. “That’s less
than 10 percent of the total labor force.”
Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan is clear about where he
stands on the issue, and his concern goes beyond the question of
economics. In 2006, while promoting his book, State of
Emergency, he told Time that “If we do not get
control of our borders and stop this greatest invasion in
history, I see the dissolution of the U.S. and the loss of the
American Southwest - culturally and linguistically, not
politically - to Mexico.” He went on to say that the U.S. was in
danger of becoming more like the Roman Empire, “a conglomerate
of races and cultures held together by a regime.”
So what
are we to think of those who provide humanitarian aid to people
crossing the U.S./Mexico border?
For John
Fife, economics and cultural concerns are not the issue. Human
lives are. In addition to risking arrest, those attempting to
cross the border put their lives on the line. Death from
exposure is common, and some respond to opportunities for
employment only to find themselves victimized, sometimes sold
into slavery, often as prostitutes, with no legal recourse due
to their illegal status. For Fife and others, the Statue of
Liberty’s promise is less important than Leviticus 19:34: “The
stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native
among you, and you shall love him as yourself.”
Reverend
John Fife served for 35 years as a minister at the Southside
Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona. Like the late Reverend
Martin Luther King, Jr., who chose to do more than preach
against injustice from the pulpit and took the fight for civil
rights into the streets, John Fife sees suffering and tries to
alleviate it. In 1985, when the U.S. government welcomed
refugees from Eastern Europe but withdrew the welcome mat for
those fleeing death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, Fife
posted a painted sign outside his church that read: THIS IS A
SANCTUARY FOR THE OPPRESSED FROM CENTRAL AMERICA. The sign
marked the official beginning of the Sanctuary Movement, an
organization founded by Fife whose members included more than
500 churches, all dedicated to helping refugees cross the border
and find freedom from the oppressive governments of their
homeland.
Remembering those times in an interview with Amy Goodman of
Democracy Now, Fife justified his actions. “People fleeing the
death squads and the repression and the massacres of entire
villages in El Salvador and Guatemala were arriving at this
border. The whole international community informed the United
States government that they were refugees entitled to at least
temporary asylum until conditions changed in their countries and
they were able to return.”
No good
deed goes unpunished, however, especially when politics are
involved. The United States government was providing political
and economic support to the very regimes running the death
squads, and, as a result, their victims were denied refugee
status by the U.S.
“When they
picked them up on the border or in communities across the United
States,” Fife explained, “(they) were placing them in detention
centers, flying them back in handcuffs, and turning them over to
the very guys who tried to kill them in the first place.”
The
Sanctuary Movement was a “new underground railroad” that moved
people from the border to safety, sometimes to Canada where the
rights of refugees were respected.
The
government infiltrated the movement, and Fife and others stood
trial on charges that they had violated federal immigration
laws. “This is the first time in the history of our nation that
the government has acknowledged under oath that it has
infiltrated church worship services and Bible study sessions
with paid agents,” Fife told Time.
In 1986,
after being sentenced to five years probation, Fife told the
judge, “We had no choice. None of us ever had a choice. Our only
choice was whether we wanted to sell our souls.”
When
defending himself against criminal charges, Fife pointed to the
Refugee Act of 1980 which grants safe haven to those persecuted
by their government. Fife had even written a letter to then
Attorney General William French Smith in 1982, informing him
that his church was opening its doors to Central Americans. Fife
never received a response.
Although
the judge in the case believed Fife and his fellow defendants
had acted illegally, he also acknowledged that they had been
motivated by humanitarian concerns. Fife challenged the verdict,
however, and insisted that the United States government was
breaking the law by denying refugee status to those fleeing
political persecution in Central America.
“Bottom
line in all of these activities,” he told Goodman, “is the
government’s failure to observe human rights standards and the
lives of literally thousands of poor, desperate people . . .”
Among
those Fife attempted to help was a 15-year-old boy whose family
had been executed by Death Squads in El Salvador.
“The
haunting thought that came to me was if that was my boy, what
would I want the church to do?”
At the
conclusion of the trial, Fife said, “I don’t think the trial has
changed anything. After the government spent $3.5 million and
two years of time on this case, the only effect has been that
the sanctuary movement has doubled and redoubled in strength.”
Fife is
working to make his words prophetic. In 2002, he was one of the
founders of the Samaritan Patrol, a coalition of religious leaders in Tucson working to
prevent the deaths of immigrants crossing the U.S./Mexico
border. As their web site explains, they embrace Faith-Based
Principles for Immigration reform and focus on the following
themes:
• Direct aid that extends the right to provide humanitarian
assistance
• Witnessing and responding
• Consciousness raising
• Global movement building
• Encouraging humane immigration policy.
The
government is now using death in the desert as a deterrent to
crossing the border, Fife says. “That’s a gross violation of
human rights, this policy, this strategy of deterrence by death.
And to resist that, we have volunteers out in the desert to try to save as many lives as we
can.”
Government
policies relating to illegal immigrants are often ambivalent.
When the second Bush administration proposed amnesty for illegal
immigrants in 2004, a record number of immigrants died as they
attempted to cross the Arizona border with dreams of being
welcomed into the U.S.
“We’ve
created an incentive to take foolish risks,” said Mark Krikorian,
executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Crossing the Sonoran Desert, immigrants died from intense heat,
or froze in the frigid cold of the Baboquivari Mountains. “What
they’ve done is created this gantlet of death,” Fife said. “It’s
Darwinian - only the strongest survive.”
Even
Border Patrol agents charged with enforcing laws against illegal
immigrants were horrified by the inhume conditions as they
alternately arrested and tried to save the lives of those
crossing the border.
“The
hardest thing was, I sat with this 15-year-old kid next to the
body of his dad,” Leon Stroud told The New York Times.
“His dad had been a cook. He was too fat to be trying to cross
this border. We built a fire and I tried to console him. It was
tough.”
These
days, many Border Patrol officers either look the other way or
provide assistance to those helping immigrants because their
priority is saving lives. Although he appreciates the Border
Patrol’s respect for human life, Fife calls it “the moral
equivalent of starting a forest fire and then going in to rescue
a couple of people.”
For John
Fife, there is no question that the United States benefits from
the migration of workers between the United States and Mexico.
“We ought to roll out the red carpet from this side of the
line,” he told Democracy Now, “because those workers and their
labor are essential for the well-being of our communities and
our nation and our economy.”
The debate
is far from over, but John Fife’s dedication to saving lives
transcends all the arguments about economics and culture. As
Daniel Strauss, a student volunteer observed, “It’s never a crime to save someone’s life.” Perhaps
those words should be inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.
by
Brian
W. Fairbanks