Forgive my bad mood….I just read the Washington Post’s article published in the Press Register this morning concerning the new immigration law that has now gone into effect in Alabama. The law touted to be the “toughest in the country” is also proving to be the most hateful. The article focuses on a Baldwin County school that has a sizable contingent of Latino students….thirty percent of the entire student body, all Latino have as of the writing of this article withdrawn from school, their parents fearful of the punitive consequences promised by this oppressive new legislation. One teacher commented that she knows a family that had been at the school for longer than she had been a teacher there…she described them as a “strong Christian family” who have been very supportive of the mission of the school…participating in the PTO, donating money for school supplies, assimilating as model citizens. Now they are leaving. Latinos are leaving all over the state for fear. We now call them felons. Of course they are leaving. And all the dire consequences that opponents of this bill predicted are coming to pass…farmers are already desperate for a work force to harvest their crops (imagine what that will look like in the Spring)…nurseries and landscapers, construction companies are seeing a skilled workforce evaporating before their eyes. It is only going to get worse in Alabama in an already fragile economy.
A letter was written to me recently asking the question vis a vis undocumented residents, “what part of illegal don’t you understand.” I answered him that we did this as a legislature unilaterally…Latinos had no say in the matter. I informed him that he might think of them as working families who because of the bureaucratic mountain of red tape with which they must contend, are simply not yet able to obtain the proper documents to be U.S. citizens…They are trying(a point that has been lost), but acquiring proper documentation is for many reasons very difficult and in many cases prohibitively expensive…”improperly documented as yet”, that’s the appropriate term for this small segment of our population… not criminals, not felons…these are people, our brothers and sisters, looking for a life of well being and dignity, a better life for their children….an education, a living wage, the same things we want for our children…and it is for us as people of faith to do everything in our power to grant them that.
I often wonder what our legislators and citizens who support such a law are hearing and reading in our churches. When we denied basic rights to Black Americans; when we lynched them and burned crosses in their yards…what were our preachers saying to us; what passage of scripture would justify such hatred….We have a racist and obsolete constitution in which the word justice is buried in the verbiage of the longest state constitution in our country. We have a brutally regressive system of taxation, perhaps the most regressive tax system in the country…we for God’s sake tax groceries. And yet statistics show that we are a people who go to church more than most other areas of the nation. What is being taught in our churches? Where is the moral will of our citizenry to be the hope, to be the change God envisions for our world…a world in which there is unfettered egalitarianism, and room for all at God’s gracious table, a world in which we are our brother’s keeper, a world in which all, even the cast out, live as equals. This is what Jesus preached….Have our legislators not read that, ubiquitous in scripture?…or if they have are they choosing to ignore it…or is it an insidious matter of self interest? Our longstanding reputation as a backward state has yet again been confirmed …we’re yet again the talk of the nation as being ignorant and hateful….How long O Lord how long?…Let us dear people of God be the hope, for there are a lot of people in our midst without it…and let us be the change that has to take place, so we can call our part of God’s promised commonweal, this land upon which many of us grew up…. sweet home.
Recall that the co-sponsor of the immigration bill, Senator Scott Beason, was caught on an FBI wire referring to African Americans as “aborigines,” a statement for which he only recently apologized. You may have read in the paper over the weekend that groups opposed to the immigration law protested in front of Senator Beason’s church on Sunday morning. Christianity and racism are incompatible. A Beason divided against himself cannot stand.
Meanwhile, the bill’s sponsor in the House, Representative Micky Hammon, said that the law’s purpose was to reduce statewide unemployment by getting rid of undocumented workers. It seems, ironically and predictably, that unemployment may actually go up as a result of this law because of all the workers, documented and undocumented, who have fled or will flee the state, shutting down small businesses in the food service, agricultural, and construction industries. Brilliant.
Old times here are not forgotten. But enlightened public policy sure is.
Where have all the flowers gone? O Fortuna!