Protestants, Evangelicals and Catholics form atypical alliance on immigration reform
Episcopal News Service -- Washington, D.C.. June 16, 2010 [061610-02]
Lynette Wilson
The unusual alliance among Evangelicals, Catholics and Protestants pushing Congress and the Obama administration for comprehensive immigration reform has social science researchers scratching their heads.
"The cause of immigration reform has given rise to one of the broadest alliances of religious groups ever assembled in our history – it cuts across left and right, it cuts across denominations and traditions, it cuts across theological orientations, said E.J. Dionne Jr., a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit think tank.
As part of its attempt to understand the alliance and its potential political force, Brookings June 15 held a two-part panel event, "Religious Activism and the Debate over Immigration Reform," at its Dupont Circle headquarters.
Co-moderated by Dionne and William Galston, another Brookings senior fellow, with an introduction by Sojourners President and CEO Jim Wallis, the event addressed the questions: Why are religious groups so united on the question of immigration reform? How has their activism affected the debate on Capitol Hill? And what does this tell us about the role of faith in affecting debates over policy and building political coalitions?
Participants included Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori; the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, an Evangelical and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference; and Kevin Appleby, director of migration policy and public affairs for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Focused on reform
The interfaith Christian alliance, experts and panelists agree, has played an important role in keeping immigration reform on Congress's 2010 agenda in an increasingly polarized political environment and an important mid-term election year.
Based on his interfaith participation in meetings with elected leaders and administration officials, where leaders representing the National Association of Evangelicals and the National Council of Churches uncharacteristically have stood side-by-side, Wallis said, "If there is any constituency that can break this issue out of the fray, it would be bipartisan pressure on both sides from the faith community."
In his opening remarks, he described the nation's approach to immigration as a decades-long "bipartisan failure" in which two signs have hung at the border: "No Trespass" and "Help Wanted."
Those signs, he said, have placed a vulnerable population at risk. Because of them, the faith community has responded clearly by saying that "'enforcement without reform is cruel, enforcement without compassion is immoral, enforcement [that] breaks up families is unacceptable to us, enforcement that makes Christian ministry illegal' – and the Arizona law makes Christian ministry illegal – and pastors feel that and know that, and have said, 'We will disobey these laws.'
"And when that happens, you have a force to be reckoned with."
In April, Arizona passed the nation's toughest immigration law, aimed at identifying and deporting illegal immigrants. Scheduled to become effective July 29, the law mobilized the religious community, and some civil and human rights organizations organized a state boycott. Arizona is home to an estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants, ranking third in its population of undocumented immigrants behind California and Texas. (The Episcopal Church's House of Bishops has confirmed it will meet as scheduled in Phoenix Sept. 15-21 and had added a pre-meeting trip to the Arizona-Mexico border.)
Latinos represent the fastest-growing demographic for Episcopalians, Roman Catholics and Evangelicals. This fact was not lost on the first panel, which featured Jefferts Schori, Rodriguez and Appleby discussing how religious activism has shaped immigration reform.
"The faith community,” Rodriquez said, "really stands poised to increase what I call prophetic presence by leading a movement, a movement in favor of the church, a movement reminding Americans, particularly those of faith, that deportation of those who are Christian … may actually result in the deportation of the Christian faith."
'Political failure'
The presiding bishop called Arizona's immigration law "the most recent expression of our national political failure."
"The current crisis of immigration policy in these United States stems primarily from economic and resource imbalances and an exodus from poorer nations unable to sustain adequate opportunities for growing populations," Jefferts Schori said. "That imbalance is complicated by violence (both terrorism and the drug trade) as well as currently reduced employment opportunities within the United States."
"Most Americans recognize the failure of our current migration policies,” she said, "but there is a wide range of preferred solutions or appropriate political responses."
Jefferts Schori talked about the Episcopal Church's history of involvement with refugees and migrants, dating back to the 1940s advent of Episcopal Migration Ministries, and the church's repeated calls, rooted in theology, for comprehensive and fair immigration reform.
"That theology begins in the biblical charge to love God and to love one’s neighbor as oneself," she said. "The alien or foreigner is among the neighbors to be regarded with love and justice. Hebrew Scripture repeatedly directs the faithful to 'care for the alien and sojourner in your midst,'" she said. "'You shall love the stranger, for you were also a stranger in the land of Egypt' [Deuteronomy 10:19]. That sense of having the shared experience of migration and being a foreigner opens us up to the shared reality of all humanity and motivates us to find all sorts of partners who also understand that shared reality. It is a central way in which the religious motivation engages the political.
"Theological responses to issues of migration are also based in Jesus' mandate to care for the 'least of these' – the hungry, thirsty, homeless, sick, unemployed, oppressed and imprisoned,” she said. "Anyone experiencing those realities is alienated from the state of healed and whole reality that we speak of as the kingdom of God – that ancient prophetic vision of a world of justice and peace often called shalom. Those who experience such alienation are also migrants, sojourners in search of healing and wholeness."
(Most recently in July 2009, the Episcopal Church's General Convention passed Resolution B006, which called for an end to local enforcement of immigration law and a return of such enforcement to federal agencies. In 2006, the convention passed Resolution A017, committing the church to welcome strangers "as a matter of Christian responsibility, to advocate for their well-being and protection and to urge its members to resist legislation and actions which violate our fundamental beliefs as Christians.”)
Appleby spoke about the Roman Catholic Church’s long immigrant history. When explaining the church's involvement in immigration issues, he said, he often reminds church members that Jesus was both an immigrant and a migrant.
"[I]n Catholic teaching, in the face of the migrant, we see the face of Christ, and so we need to welcome him," Appleby said, adding that immigrants are inherent in the Catholic Church's identity in the United States.
"The Catholic Church has grown, pretty much parallel with the country, in terms of immigration over the last 200 years,” he said. "We have welcomed waves of immigrants who have been Catholic, Irish, Italian, those from Eastern Europe, and now those from Latin America."
Latino immigrants can be found in every facet of Catholic life: in churches, schools, hospitals and asking for help from social-service agencies, he said, noting that the church is responding to their needs and, in doing so, working to change the "broken” immigration system.
"We've been criticized, of course, for being in this because we want more Catholics in the pews," Appleby said. "Well, the reality is, they're already here. They are already there, and we are trying to respond to their needs within the confines of the law … it’s not lost on us that they are Catholic; 60 percent of migrants coming are Catholic."
"Of course we have always followed the theme of 'need not creed,' and would continue to do that even if the migrants weren't predominantly Catholic," he added.
Pew-leadership divide
During the question-and-answer times following this panel and a second one exploring the connection among ethnicity, religiosity and partisanship, the fact that popular sentiment in America favors the Arizona law by 60 percent and the "view from the pew" diverges somewhat from that of religious leadership, across denominations, was discussed.
The answers, the panelists agreed, lie somewhere within lack of education, fear and message delivery.
Appleby said he viewed Americans' support for the Arizona law as showing their frustration with the nation's immigration policy. The Catholic Church's own polls show that church members favor a legal path to immigration, he said.
"Congress has not stepped up to the plate on the issue and needs to do so, and people are frustrated," Appleby said. The church must do a better job of educating people, especially those in the middle who may be ambivalent, on the issue, he added.
People often retreat to their worst sensibilities when they feel threatened, and this debate has evoked threat, said Jefferts Schori. "The reality, however, is that as much as the United States thinks it's a Christian nation, there is a large segment of the population who are not affiliated with any religious tradition, particularly in the West."
Rodriguez asked: "How can a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values support slavery, and how did we tolerate segregation for so long?"
"There is this threat imbedded in our DNA that really prompts and provokes those committed to faith to push back," he continued. "There is a disconnect between the pulpit and the pew. I believe the majority of faith leaders in this nation are in support of immigration reform … but the pew is completely disconnected. The pew is still listening to the demagoguery from political pundits, certain cable-news networks … and in light of our current economy … it's looking at the immigrant and the 'other.'"
It took years, Rodriguez said, to convince Evangelicals to support immigration reform. Arizona, Wallis said, is now to Hispanic clergy what Selma, Alabama, was to African-American clergy in the 1960s.
Should the Christian coalition hold strong, Rodriguez said, he expects to see its focus disseminate to the grassroots.
And evidence indicates that may already be happening.
During the second panel discussion, Robert P. Jones, CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, presented data from a national survey showing 2-to-1 support for a comprehensive approach to immigration reform from across the religious landscape, including among white evangelical Protestants.
"This of course doesn't mean there is unanimity, and there is certainly a vocal minority of opposition, but it is clear that there is strong majority support for comprehensive immigration reform," said Jones, in a follow-up e-mail. "We also found strong support for a common set of values that Americans across the board say should serve as moral guides for reform, such as respecting the dignity of each person and keeping families together."
The second panel, which looked at the connection among ethnicity, religiosity and partisanship, also included David Leal, associate professor of government at the University of Texas, and Mark Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center.
Listen to the full audio of the event here.