The Golden Door
Some Brief Remarks Delivered at a Forum on Immigration & Deportation at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Long Beach
8 January 2017
James Ishmael Ford
I am here to address the spirituality that informs our liberal religious community and why it calls us to engage and actively the immigration debate in this country.
First, a small prologue.
Back in 2010 I traveled from Rhode Island, where I was serving as minister of the First Unitarian Church of Providence, to Arizona. I was there to protest some noxious legislation under consideration, SB 1070, the so-called “show me your papers” law. I’d previously served there at the Valley UU Church in Chandler, and joined them in a mass demonstration witnessing against the many levels of violation of human dignity and human rights SB 1070 represented.
While severely modified both in process and later through court challenge, nonetheless it became law. The pursuit of undocumented immigrants continues unabated. In fact today the American people, well, the barely right number in a handful of the right states, along with a small assist from Vladimir Putin and his spy network, have elected someone to the American presidency who has made stopping the immigration of Mexicans and Muslims to this country his number one priority.
Of course Mr Trump was capitalizing on fear, the common denominator of the immigrant debate. The American-born are afraid of many things. Threats to jobs, real and mostly, imagined, the drain on social services, real and mostly imagined, national security focused on terrorism, again real but mostly imagined. And on the other side, for the immigrants, mostly those who have come without documentation, but also many who are documented, fear of deportation, or even worse, particularly having some members of their families deported while others remain haunts them day and night. Fear runs deep. Fear is the common currency of our immigration debate. Fear, the great divider.
But, let’s look at those immigrants, whether here legally or not.
Two anecdotes, one I read about, one I witnessed. Both point.
In November of 2007, Manuel Jesus Cordova Soberanes, crossed that most dangerous and unforgiving border in Arizona in search of work, the great motivator for almost all immigrants – for a chance to lift his family out of grinding poverty, poverty few on this side of the border can imagine. A bricklayer, he believed he could get work in Tucson. It was evening and the desert heat was turning bitter cold. He had been walking for two days and was some fifty miles from the city when he came across the van, crashed some three-hundred feet beneath a forest service road.
Dawn Tomko, the driver, was dead. However her nine-year old child Christopher was still alive, if in shock. Manuel pulled him out of the wreck, took the worn sweater off his back, covered the boy, and then built a fire. Something he had not dared to do before for fear of discovery, something he now desperately wanted. The man and the boy huddled through the night. The next day Manuel waved down some hunters who called for help. The day after that he was deported back to Mexico. You want the face of illegal immigration? It’s Manuel Soberanes.
And, second, even more briefly, back to my trip to Arizona. At the march I saw an elderly woman holding a handmade sign with the words “the face of an illegal immigrant” and the pictures below of her child, a young United States marine. Mother and son, they are the real and vastly more common faces of immigration, whether with documents or not.
I chose two examples drawing on immigration from south of our border. I could just as easily have drawn on Muslim immigrants to illustrate this larger point about who is coming here. Now, I am not pretending everyone crossing the border is an angel. The vast majority, however, are simply looking for something better. Freedom. Possibility. Here we call that the American dream. Too often betrayed in practice, but nonetheless, always, always the dream. I’m not even here to argue there should be no borders. That’s a messy and complicated issue. I am here to talk about the spirituality that informs our engagement with these questions.
I’m here to talk about the spirituality at the heart of why Unitarian Universalists in particular should be involved in this issue. Here’s the deal. Here’s the secret. Here is the truth at the heart of our mission as a spiritual community.
We find it within the first and seventh principles, the great discovery of contemporary Unitarian Universalism, and our gift to world spirituality. It’s nothing new, but held up in a particular and important way. The individual is precious beyond words, each of us unique, each of us passing, each of us precious. And. We are not merely connected to each other and the world in some abstract idea sort of way; we are bound up within a web of intimacy that is reality, nothing less.
And seeing it as our living truth sings hope and possibility, and most of all, of healing for all broken hearts. It’s that important. And, specifically as we see those yearning to come to this country flawed as it is, but also holding up a dream of human dignity that is too rare in this world, we see who it is we must stand with.
You know the words, engraved at the base of that statue. “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-tost to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
I stand here before you to bear witness to the truth of our radical interdependence, the wisdom of our hearts, the North Star guiding all our actions.
This is the secret that beats in every heart, the antidote to fear. This is the golden door opening to hope for all.
It is this: We are all of us, family. And we’re all called to action knowing that. We’re all family. No exceptions.
Amen.
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