Have We Forgotten Our Sense of Decency?
I couldn’t stop thinking this week about the migrants from Venezuela who were lured into getting on a charter flight from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard after being lied to about jobs and housing waiting for them there. How to fathom the heartlessness and cynicism of such a political ploy? Have we lost our sense of decency?
Heartening, though, was the reaction of Martha’s Vineyard residents, who turned out to provide food, shelter and a welcoming atmosphere for the migrants. They modeled what it means to behave as Christians as opposed to being a so-called “family values” politician.
On a six-hour drive between Illinois and Minnesota, I listened to a conservative talk radio show to see how the political right was portraying the decision by two Republican governors to send off these migrants. One conservative commentor took pains to say he wasn’t opposed to asylum seekers or to immigrants in general. They just need to come legally, he said.
Anyone who does five seconds-worth of research into our immigration system will see what a gross over-simplification this is. People come illegally because the legal system is broken. If you can’t feed your family, if you don’t have reliable drinking water, if you live under the constant threat of violence, can you really be expected to wait three, four or five years to make your way through the process legally?
This is not the fault of the people wanting to emigrate. It is our fault for not demanding a system that works. I remember being sent as a young reporter to the Texas border to write about immigration reform. That was in 1986. Little has improved since then.
I write this as the proud granddaughter of immigrants. My grandfathers came here from Italy and worked hard. Their children and grandchildren continued to contribute to our family’s adopted country. One became an environmentalist, another a homeland security specialist, another a visual artist, another a teacher, and I became a national journalist. Four are Army veterans. One was a Marine.
There is no reason to believe new immigrants won’t work just as hard, particularly at this time when so many U.S. employers are scrambling to find workers.
A column this week in National Catholic Reporter also caught my attention. In it, spirituality author and Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister asks, will religious life as we’ve known it rise again — and should it? There are many signs that traditional religious life might be coming to its natural end. What will not end, Sister Joan rightly points out, is the obligation of all of us who call ourselves Christian to serve others, to care as Jesus teaches us to care.
In that sense, we all must enter “religious life.”
Sister Joan quotes St. Paul, who says, “To each one, the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.” For the common good. She goes on to say that these gifts of the Spirit “are not for our private, personal spiritual deserts alone. Together we are meant to be messengers, models and makers of a whole new world of justice and love wherever we are.”
In shipping off migrants to other states simply to get them out of the way, the governors of Florida and Texas are following a page from a sad chapter in U.S. history from the 1960s. Back then, members of the Ku Klux Klan and White People’s Council — masquerading as civil rights advocates — would offer African Americans bus tickets to relocate to northern cities, similarly enticing them with lies about waiting jobs.
It was a shameful act then and it is doubly shameful now when we should know better.
If cities near the southern border are overwhelmed with migrants, then the solution is to work with other cities — mercifully and collaboratively — to solve the problem. Using human beings as props in political theater is not only offensive, it goes against every gospel value.
Pope Francis has repeatedly said our Christian witness is measured by our behavior to the least powerful and most vulnerable in society. It is up to us to demand better from our leaders and better from ourselves. To do less is to act in opposition to the gospel. It is to surrender our sense of common decency.
