On May 1, 2006, immigrants and their allies staged historic work stoppages and marches for justice across the United States and abroad. That day, I took the Whitman College students in my course on “Politics and Religion” to the main park in Walla Walla, Washington, where our college is located. As Mexican American teenagers shouted hip-hop riffs into a microphone, families spread out a pot-luck lunch, and community college students held break-out sessions on immigration reform, my students and I discussed contemporary Christian perspectives on immigration. We looked closely at two documents: the 2003 joint statement on migration by the U.S. and Mexican Catholic bishops, “Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope,” and a recent speech by Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention.
While the bishops’ letter included lengthy segments on distressing social conditions in Latin America, Land seemed uninterested in the question of why immigrants make the long, arduous, trek to the United States. Land’s focus was all on “us”: our security, our rights, our laws, our jobs. These concerns are not to be lightly dismissed. But what about the lives of immigrants – their rights, their families’ needs, their capacities and hopes for work, their languages and cultures? How does our perspective on justice change and grow when we try to understand what immigration is all about by listening to the voices of immigrants themselves?
Several years ago, I conducted a series of interviews with immigrant Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan food-processing workers in the U.S. West who had made extraordinary efforts to revitalize their unions and to challenge hazardous conditions in their workplaces. I wanted to find out why they relocated to the United States. How might knowing more about their experiences as immigrants help explain why they had so boldly taken action in the face of mammoth corporations like Tyson Foods and Cargill? And how could attending to their stories help shift the conversation about immigration from a preoccupation with how (or whether) immigrants can “assimilate” to our national culture toward appreciating how immigrants can help radically transform our undemocratic and unequal society?
