Writing to my Local Paper About Proposed Anti-Immigration Legislation

To Whom it May Concern,

There is little doubt these are rough times.

And no doubt it is important to understand how we find ourselves in any situation. Sadly, one shadow of our human hearts is a desire less to know how something came about and how to deal with it, but rather to simply identify some other as the problem and to make them suffer for it. This impulse is as old as human history.

Today one of the easiest targets for our free ranging unease are undocumented immigrants.

There is a touchstone in fact. As a nation we share an enormous southern border with a poor country. People there yearn to better their lives and one decision is to cross that border and to try to make their lives and the lives of their children better. On this side of the border there are reasons to try and stop this, or at least control it. Most are defensible. Attempting to provide a reasonable channel of immigration is a good thing.

But also, there is that scapegoating impulse, and a cascade of cruelty that follows this impulse.

The new anti-immigrant law in Arizona is just such a case. It is shameful. And, hopefully, also unconstitutional as it seems inescapably racist. That it actually makes it a crime to be undocumented opens the doors for frightening people with power such as Maricopa county’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio to fill his tent jails with more orange clad prisoners to enjoy his green bologna sandwiches and chain gang work crews.

Here in Rhode Island undocumented immigrants occupy a real but relatively small part of the population. Possibly as many as forty thousand, mostly employed in jobs other Americans will not take, mostly, other than that one offense of being here without permit, law abiding. They pay taxes but rarely draw upon the resources those taxes pay for. Most wish there were a way to regularize their situation. Given this reality, frankly, the impulse to create anti-immigrant legislation here in this state seems to be boiled down to its purest form of seeking a scape goat for problems that have nothing to do with immigration.

It is instead putting all our anxieties and fears about these uncertain and rough times onto some other. And making them pay for it. At various times and places in our country that other has been Catholics, Jews, Chinese, the Irish. Today, here, Hispanics.

A couple of years ago State Representative Peter Palumbo of Cranston introduced legislation intended to make sure the undocumented didn’t get the services they were not using. Now Representative Palumbo is at it again. He has announced during a radio interview that he will introduce mirror legislation to Arizona’s anti-immigrant law in the next legislative session here in Rhode Island.

We need to stand up against this sort of hateful behavior, and oppose any such legislation with vigor. Right now, before this cancer of hatred spreads and poisons our hearts.

Fortunately while scapegoating may be a part of our heritage, standing up against it, standing for hope and possibility are also part of our heritage. And, I hope, the part that will win.

Writing as a person of faith, I hope we will all choose to stand on the side of love, stand with those who cannot defend themselves and against those who would bring more hurt and suffering to people trying to make their way in a rough world.

Sincerely,

(The Rev’d) James Ishmael Ford
Senior Minister
First Unitarian Church
1 Benevolent Street
Providence, Rhode Island