Tuesday, September 8, 2015

On the border

Did you see the story? Probably not, I'm guessing.

While Donald Trump is proposing building fences, Pope Francis is building bridges. The Pope called on every European parish and religious community to take in one migrant family each in a gesture of solidarity he said would start in the tiny Vatican state where he lives.

The pope's call goes out to tens of thousands of Catholic parishes in Europe as the number of refugees arriving over land through the Balkans and across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and Greece hits record numbers.

There are 25,000 parishes in Italy alone, and more than 12,000 in Germany, where many of the Syrians fleeing civil war and people trying to escape poverty and hardship in other countries say that want to end up.

In Holy Scripture, God says to the Israelites, "Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt."

I'm not smart enough to come up with the answer to immigration in this country, but I can't believe deportation is the answer any more now than it was then.

My understanding is more than 40 million people currently living in this nation were not born in our country.

Jessie Hernandez is a young woman who knows the issue from the other side.

She says: "I don’t remember Mexico well because I left when I was young. My mom says that we left because it’s hard to find work there. She brought me to the U.S. so I could go to a great school and get an excellent job someday.
"But not being able to speak English well in elementary school made it hard to make friends and understand my teachers. Besides, I have dark skin, dark hair, and dark eyes, but in America, there are so many white people with different-colored eyes. I didn’t just sound different -- I looked different. I cried every day. I felt like such a loner, like I didn’t belong or deserve anything. Nobody would talk to me, and even though I’m an outgoing person by nature, I kept everything bottled up inside because I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say. It was so frustrating. It was difficult getting used to the little things too. I remember seeing a sloppy joe in the cafeteria for the first time and thinking: “What is that? It looks nasty!”
"During elementary school, my family’s immigration status was illegal, so things weren’t easy. It was hard for my mom to find a job. She eventually found work as a hotel maid, but she wasn’t getting paid well. She couldn’t speak up about it, because she didn’t want to cause a stir and risk getting fired or deported. Since we didn’t have a lot of money, my mom and I had to live in a small apartment that we split with another family that we didn’t know. It was crowded, and I hated having to share a kitchen and bathroom with strangers. The other people were nice, but we didn’t know if we could trust them. At that point, if anyone told the police about us, we might get deported. So most nights, my mom and I holed up in our room and watched TV."
Here's the idea, folks. Your ideas about immigration probably come from whatever side you've lived in. The border is like a division point. If you're trying to get in, you think one thing. If you're here, you think another.
But Jesus clearly taught: Blessed are those who are merciful because they will receive mercy."
Seems a fairly good notion, to me.

1 comment:

kevin h said...

Well said.