Our human condition makes us equal
By Miryam Wiley
The MetroWest Daily News
Please don't stop thinking of the children of New Bedford, the ones whose parents were caught in the immigration raid. Many are still separated. And please don't forget the parents where are they, really?
As many mobilize to demand respect for human rights and others collect funds to support the families now without a bread winner, I find myself trying to understand what none of us ever will: Why are their conditions not ours?
Why did I get to choose to emigrate after deciding to marry a foreign man and get all of my documentation, and they had to mix their decision with their need to make a living? Sheer luck.
It is clear to me that until we all make an effort to understand the undocumented immigrants' reality, we are not going to be fully aware of what their lives have brought to them and how they are simply making the best of the situation.
The sense that the immigrants' plight is at the base of many other problems in this country (poverty, racism, basic civil liberties, human rights) moved a seminarian I know to visit Mexico through a program called Borderlinks.
"Before I went down there, I heard these migrants are people who decided that life in the U.S. is better," said Jay Libby, a Unitarian Universalist seminarian from the Andover Newton Theological School. "After the trip I realized that these people have no choice because they are running for their lives from the worst poverty. I could not have appreciated how unjustly we treat migrants who come here without the proper papers. Now I realize the injustice of this (raid in New Bedford)."
While many people I have talked to put emphasis on the characteristics of the "sweatshop" and how we certainly shouldn't allow anyone to endure such working conditions, we would be lying to ourselves if we didn't feel for these immigrants and their reality of need. No matter how poor their working conditions, they were glad to have work.
"What I realized is that what I was seeing in Mexico was the same thing that happened to my Irish forbears in the 1800s," said Libby. "People who were literally starving because they had nothing to live off and the government didn't care. So the only thing they could do to save their lives was to immigrate to the United States."
Let's not forget, however, that while many immigrants often endure very difficult lives, their contributions are crucial for the economies of both the United States and their country of origin. The April issue of The Atlantic magazine puts the yearly remittance to Mexico at $20 billion ("evidence of a robust labor flow that seems to benefit both economies," wrote Matthew Quirk)
MIRA Coalition's Web site (www.miracoalition.org) has a video that puts a face on the immigrant worker from New Bedford and the child of the immigrant worker, a link right on the front page. Please watch it and circulate it.
Ana Velasco, a psychologist with the Framingham schools, is concerned about the trauma lived by the children left behind, who, she says, are forgotten throughout the whole immigration story. "They lose their (extended) families, friends, house, routines, the temperature they were used to and now, with what happened, we have one more source of trauma for them."
MIRA and several of its member organizations have started collecting money to support these families.
"We sent out alerts asking people to donate funds," said Irit Tamir, director of government affairs at the Jewish Community Relations Council. "We were shocked and dismayed at the heavy hand with which the government committed these acts. Our organization works for comprehensive immigration reform. For us it means dealing with borders and security, but also recognizing that there are 12 million people here who need to be dealt with in a humane way. Many Jews have been immigrants themselves."
Horace Small, an African-American and the leader of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods in Boston said: "We hope to raise $5,000 for the fund to support the families of New Bedford to show solidarity to these immigrants. We should be so horrified by this that we should be on the streets."
Libby, the UU seminarian, will never again live without the memory of poverty and need in Mexico, but there is more in his mind. "The question I'm still left with is: "What has changed that we are now so un-welcoming of people who are just trying to save their lives?"
Indeed. These stories must be reminders of how we are interdependent and able to support each other.
"The incidents in New Bedford force us to realize that all immigrants are human beings," said Ali Noorani, MIRA's executive director. "So, either we treat everybody as human beings or we spiral into a society that literally does not care about an entire class of people."
