The Real Reason for Washington, Part 1.

Ok, so it wasn’t quite tomorrow. I’ve had a busy week. But anyway, time to talk about the reason the Wesley Foundation and I were in Washington to begin with, and why I ended up talking about terrorism in a Senator’s office.

I’ll start by saying that this is going to be a lot more serious than previous posts, with a fair bit more of my personal faith and political opinions affecting it. Just so you’re ready.

We were in Washington to go to the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church (GBCSUMC?), which works from a building just behind the Capitol. They’re responsible for setting the social agenda of the UMC and run seminars for church groups on various issues. We were there for a seminar series on immigration. To be honest that didn’t appeal too much to me at the start, as I thought it would have much relevance to me when I go home. I mainly signed on for the sightseeing. That view changed.

I should clarify that I am not an immigrant here. I have a non-immigrant visa that lasts until June, after which I have to leave.  Just so that doesn’t confuse people about where I’m standing.

I’ve always had a somewhat sceptical view of the immigration debate. Both here and in Britain it’s usually used as a buzzword to score political points. Not an election goes by without someone promising that they’ll be tough on immigration, and gaining popularity for it. Very rarely is what, or who, “the immigration issue” means discussed.

Some statistics to start off, but I’ll put in a warning: Don’t take this home; I’m just trying to put this into context. Too often immigration, along with many other issues, is talked about only in numbers and statistics. One of the main themes of the week was to see the face behind these numbers.

With that in mind, some numbers. The total foreign-born population of the US is just under 32 million (as of January 2010). Ten million of these are undocumented (I’m not going to use the term illegal immigrants. There is no such thing as an illegal person). Between quarter and half a million undocumented people enter the US every year. The number of deportations per year is at a record high, nearly four hundred thousand last year. I’ll get into some of the reasons for that last statistic in a bit.  

On the first day we started with a very interesting conversation about justice and mercy, and the differences thereof.   We found it was very easy to talk about acts of mercy we could do and had done, like giving to charity, working as a volunteer etc, but when it came to justice, to challenging and changing systems, we found it much harder to find places to act. Part of the challenge was to define the differences between mercy and justice.  We threw out words: Mercy meant personal, immediate, single, controlled.  Justice involves words like systematic change, long term, and dynamic. In many ways, justice is harder, because whilst mercy doesn’t affect us, justice often forces to think hard about what we do and how we live.

Next we looked at some of the reasons that America has so many people wanting to come here (Much of this also applies to Britain). The main reason is that, bluntly, it’s a better place to live that pretty much anywhere else.  We looked at the imbalance in the amount of resources we have compare to everywhere else, resources that allow America to not only be a better place to live, but also, directly and indirectly, to make other places worse by controlling trade and farming practices. We looked at the push and pull factors of immigration (in an eerie flashback to Year 9 geography), such as lack of money and education or violence in immigrants home countries and opportunity and wealth here. 

The next part was for me one of the highlights of the week. We had a guest speaker in from the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who talked about the politics on immigration from an Islamic point of view. What was fascinating about it was the way everything he talked about was rooted in the teachings of the Qur’an. It was enlightening to discover that there are Muslim who are taking a fresh look at the Qur’an and seeing how it’s teachings apply to modern life and politics, in the same way that many Christian groups are doing.

He talked about some of the legislation that’s going through the Capitol at the moment (and getting pretty much nowhere).  They are interested in Comprehensive Immigration Reform, radically changing the system to make the process fairer and easier.  This is needed badly; the current process of becoming a US citizen, or getting any documentation at all, is incredibly complicated and difficult.  I asked him about where he thought we should draw the line on who comes in, which is something I wonder about when there are debates on limiting immigration. Stopping serious criminals was pretty much the answer he gave.  

All of that talking was good, but the next morning we actually went to meet some immigrants. Jobs for Justice, a charity that works with migrant workers, introduced us to some Guatemalan day labourers. These are people who stand around in the cold waiting for people to picke them up to do a day’s labour. Often they will be victims of wage theft, not paid at the end of the day. Many days they won’t get work at all.

We went and gave them some breakfast, which is a great start to meeting someone new. Jesus ate with people a lot and that helped me to see why. Talking to them two things struck me.  When one man, who had been here for five years, started talking about home it became quite clear that he did to want to be here. And if doing this was better than before than his life at home must have been terrible. These weren’t people who were “coming here and taking our jobs”. They were here doing the jobs we don’t want because they were absolutely desperate.

After that somewhat challenging experience, we headed back to the UMC building to meet a representative of the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium, who gave a different perspective: People who had moved here not out of desperation, but for the opportunities it offered. One of the main things she talked about was the difficulty in getting legal immigrants who had got thorough the system to help those on the way. A lot of this had to do with the Secure Communities legislation that is popping up in several states in America, leading to many people being deported for minor errors on their documentation if they ever get involved with the police.  I won’t go into the details here, but to any American readers: If you’re interested comment or something and I can talk more about it.

To say that I’d changed my mind about my interest in immigration by now is understating it a bit. I’m thinking I’m going to need about the same again to finish talking about this, so I’ll leave it here for now. Part two (three?) will be on it’s way soon…