I came to interfaith organizing 18 years ago through my peripheral work in the Latino immigrant community on issues like health care access, housing and citizenship. My congregation was active in the San Francisco Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s, a truly interfaith effort in which refugees fleeing war in Central America were housed by Christian and Jewish congregations. Twenty-five years later, the interfaith New Sanctuary Movement is working in many states to protect immigrant families who are facing workplace discrimination, hatred and unjust deportation. I’ve worked with members of my faith community on immigration reform, helped develop liturgies and passed out cards at BART stations outlining immigrants’ rights.
Migration has always been inextricably entangled with faith. Migration changes communities, and as communities change, faiths and cultures clash. Yet at the same time, it has been religious communities heeding the call for hospitality that have often led efforts to provide for and integrate newcomers.
And so it is not surprising that the subject of immigration has been so important to URI and the rest of the interfaith movement. The same principles of respect, inclusion and hospitality that drive us to build bridges across faiths drive those working to build bridges within diversifying communities. This June, for example, our Middle East and North Africa Cooperation Circles are responding to the tremendous growth of immigration from war and conflicts in the region by focusing their annual assembly on the integration of immigrants, an issue that has taken on additional significance with the recent push for human rights and democracy in the region.
Here in North America, as rising Islamophobia coincides with a backlash against migrant workers, we have a timely and important opportunity for focused action and partnership with interfaith groups around the country to stand together for immigration reform and immigrant integration.
I had the great fortune this week to attend an uplifting and hopeful conference called Building Inclusive Communities: Racial Equity and Immigration, hosted by the San Francisco Foundation’s FAITHS initiative. This was the first conference I have attended that connects globalization with immigration and racial equity. Yes, racial equity. African Americans have long been profiled by law enforcement; now the accelerated profiling of Latinos and Muslims, either by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or by law enforcement agencies working with the Joint Terrorism Task Force is giving these communities a lot more in common than they thought—and they are joining forces.
What I witnessed at the conference was walls being broken down between Latinos, Asians, African Americans, whites, people of faith and of no faith—working together for a fair and just approach to what has become such a divisive topic. This coming together around a common issue is possible because of 15 years of cross-cultural community organizing led by faith communities in the Bay Area and across the country. I was inspired and moved and once again feeling that energy to act.
Three highly diverse panels drove home the need to look at immigration reform from a variety of levels. On a global level, panelists spoke about the growing numbers of war and ‘economic refugees’ around the world moving to nearby countries to escape poverty on just about every continent. Climate change, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, is forcing migration of people dependent on agriculture for a living. Detention centers are filled around the world and immigrants are subject to some of the worst human rights violations including rape, murder and human trafficking.
Locally, panelists included an undocumented Berkeley High School student educating and organizing students to work for the Dream Act; a Hindu attorney with the Asian Law Caucus who was politicized by 9/11 and is now working to end profiling of Muslims by the Joint Terrorism Task Force; and an African American leader of the Food and Commercial Workers union whose immigrant members have been targeted by ICE. Story after story was told of the abuses against immigrants from unlawful detainment to wage theft.
But it was Ilse, the high school student, who drove home why we should care with a story that brought the audience to their feet:
“I came here from Mexico with my mother and brother when I was five. We ended up in a refugee center where a man tried to buy me and my brother…I have an African American friend at Berkeley High who asked me why I wasn’t applying for financial aid for college. I told her that people like me can’t apply for financial aid or even for a job. My friend wanted to get involved. I think if I tell my story to someone else and they tell it to someone else who will tell it to someone else, then together we can change this. And if the Dream Act doesn’t pass, there will be something even better.”
If Ilse can organize her fellow high school students, many of whom are also undocumented from dozens of countries, to march on Washington, D.C. and to call their legislators, what can we do?
And if not us, then who?
