An inter-Mennonite newspaper, putting the Mennonite world together every week since 1923

EDITORIAL

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Mennonite Church USA took a bold stance on a vital issue last summer when delegates passed a Churchwide Statement on Immigration. The statement sought to draw much-needed attention to the issue of immigrants to the United States and the obstacles and challenges they face.

But do any of us really know any more about the lives of immigrants today than we did at the Atlanta 2003 convention?

Coming away from Atlanta, we had serious reservations about how deeply the church can be committed to immigration concerns if so few of us are informed about what these concerns really mean.

One of the main tenets of that statement calls our congregations to learn about issues affecting immigrants by such avenues as joining study tours to the U.S.-Mexico border, refugee camps or detention centers to learn what effects U.S. policies are having on those who wish to enter our country.

A recent Mennonite Central Committee learning tour, held in conjunction with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson, Ariz., took a group of Mennonites, as well as a large contingent of Catholics, Lutherans and members of other churches, to the town of Altar in Mexico’s Sonora state. Also joining the tour were members of the Arizona Jewish community, and a prominent Muslim imam, or spiritual teacher, from Phoenix. The journey was truly an ecumenical one, and very much akin to a pilgrimage.

In Altar, Mexican and Central American migrant workers, typically undocumented and with few concrete hopes beyond the frontier that lies ahead of them, often begin the final leg of their journeys into the United States. It is a journey made amid great uncertainty, and often on foot once the migrants reach the American side of the border, where the desolate Sonoran Desert has claimed more than 2,500 lives in recent years.

Just seeing the people of Altar, and learning where the hundreds of migrants who pass through there every day are headed, and what they are leaving behind, was enough to shatter any disconnections we might feel.

Being part of the world around the border, and witnessing what awaits even documented people when they approach from the south, also was illuminating.

At a U.S. border checkpoint near Nogales, Ariz., vehicles were being pulled over and searched, including the charter bus bearing the MCC tour on its way back to Tucson. It was quite a lesson to see how, among more than 50 people on the bus, the only person taken aside and questioned, photographed and fingerprinted was not one of the many whites or Latinos aboard, but the Muslim imam — a native of Jordan who was as much an American citizen as the rest. This alone says a great deal about the life of the migrant in this country, in this age of fear.

We also were reminded that with the changing economic climate in this country, many Americans, including a large number of Mennonites, are on the move to places where they, too, are strangers pursuing often elusive dreams. Increasingly, displacement and isolation are part of not only the migrant’s world, but the native’s, too.

It is easy to criticize American immigration policies, and economic initiatives such as NAFTA, and blame those for the many social despairs faced by people who seek to migrate. But as long as even the lawful are singled out and harassed, and our borders are increasingly militarized, and alienation blooms even among neighbors, something is wrong. What hope is there then for those who want to come here in search of a better life? It is no wonder that so many come across illegally, and that thousands pay with their lives in the Sonoran Desert.

We are called by Christ to embrace all strangers, those who come from afar and from close by, and offer solace to those who are lost and afraid. As a church, we must answer this call with open eyes and, most of all, with open hearts.

— Robert Rhodes