Beyond the Border, Santa Barbara

Make me an instrument of your peace (St. Fransis of Assisi)

Santa Barbara CA is 17th highest on a list of 100s of municipalities across the country in the deportation rate of non criminals. Why would this be the case for a picturesque tourist town on the California coast? One reason is most certainly because Santa Barbara is participating in the federal Secure Communities program administered by and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) .


ICE requires the state and local law enforcement agencies of participating communities to automatically forward the fingerprints of all people arrested to them, whether or not the people arrested are guilty, or even in the country legally.


I joined 10 others from West Coast MCC staff in a workshop coordinated by Borderlinks to specifically look at how these national policies are affecting one community. The group included educators and students, social service agencies, law enforcement officials and others from the community.


We are spending billions of dollars as a nation targeting people who are not guilty of serious crimes and often not guilty at all, one presenter told us. Another presented suggested that the Secure Communities program does exactly the opposite of what it is intended to do - it allows crimes to go unreported because people are afraid to do so.


Another presenter suggested the real end game of the program is to have the capacity of deporting all "removeable aliens," about 12 million people, from the country by 2012.


Now why would we want to do that when the facts, rather than the myths, show that immigrants pay teaxes, provide needed services in the work force and add about $10 billion annually to the economy.


Seems to be the challenge is more than about the economy or taking jobs. The challenge is about whether we are willing to accept people who are different than we are, welcoming strangers into our communities.


All the while, during the workshop in Santa Barbara, St. Francis peers in at me and I find myself wondering, what would St. Francis think? Lord, make an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love..." Maybe we can get St. Francis to join the line up of speakers.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

They welcomed us

Image
One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see. (John 9:25) She was addicted to drugs for 20 years. She was in prison and her family broke apart. Her child was in an orphanage and her husband died. Because of her substance abuse, she eventually lost her one arm below her elbow. She saw no way out. She had hit the very bottom. When she came to know God, Natalia says everything changed. She found she had a deep desire to help people like herself and she discovered that her life experiences helped her understand others. “I remember what God did in my life and I have hope that God can touch other peoples’ lives and give them new life, too,” Natalia tells me. In Nikopol, Ukraine, she and Olga and Valodya, both of whom have similar stories to tell of their own, began New Life Charitable Fund a half dozen years ago to help people in prison, or who have drug or alcohol addictions, are HIV positive, homeless or for some other reason need a helping hand. Ukraine has
Read more

God multiplies our efforts

Image
Sister Zita at the La Posada shelter with baby Emmanuel and members of our border learning tour. Photo courtesy of Janae Rempel The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail. – I Kings 17:14 Ana Hinojosa remembers growing up on the Texas-Mexico border near Brownsville in the late 80s. Her family’s house was a mile from the border wall and she remembers the extended family gatherings in her back yard. Ana, an MCC immigration staff person, says border patrol agents would rest in the shade of the trees near the front of her house and, in the same day, it would be possible for a family from Mexico to knock on her front door to ask for food or directions. Her family turned no one away. Life on the border can look quite different today. When we enter the Catholic Charities respite center in McAllen, Texas, it is startling to see the contrast from the serenity of the neighborhood outside to the chaos inside. Cesar Matta tells us that, today, the cente
Read more

A river of love

Image
For it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks. – Matthew 25:40 “We are happy you are here to see this with your own eyes,” the leader of the Islamic Charities organization in Deir Attieh, Syria tells us, a group of MCC people visiting partner organizations in Syria. “We can’t express enough our heartfelt thanks to you.” Islamic Charities works with 3,000 at risk families affected by the war in the region and relies heavily on the work of volunteers. MCC provides food boxes to Islamic Charities as part of our humanitarian assistance in Syria. When I visit five families who received these food boxes, I recall the heartfelt thanks but feel mostly heart broken.    We visit two families living in a partially constructed apartment complex that stalled when the war began. The first family lives in a small two-room apartment, the mother and her five children and the woman’s father. Her husband is serving in the army. The second family includes seven
Read more