Realities

Rethinking the US-Mexico Border Region from a Faith Perspective

As people of faith, we view the reality and potential of the US-Mexico border region through the lens of our shared values and beliefs. Our faith impels us to envision a new reality rooted in the strength of our families, religious communities, civic associations, neighborhoods, colonias and cities. We believe that we must act as good stewards of the land we have inherited, must build on the traditions of hospitality that endure amidst the divisions in our region, and must cultivate the generosity of spirit that defines our communities at their best. We find these qualities in the day-to-day life of the border. We do not see them reflected in the reports of a violent, chaotic and lawless region.

Our values are expansive. We believe in the God-given dignity and equality of all human beings. We believe in solidarity with our brothers and sisters, particularly those in need. We identify with immigrants based on our own family histories and our religious convictions. We believe that our common humanity connects us far more deeply than immigration status. We think that laws should safeguard the well-being of all of our residents, and should not be used as a tool to deny core rights to any of us. We decry violence in its many forms as an affront to God and the human person. We support the need to secure our nation from attack and our communities from harm, but we believe that national security starts with human security.

We believe in a nation united not by race, religion or ethnicity, but by a shared commitment to values like justice, freedom, rights, equality and opportunity. We believe that sovereign states do not create rights, but exist to protect rights and to promote the common good. We respect state citizenship, but we believe more deeply in the Reign of God and citizenship in God’s kingdom. We believe that the border must serve the good of all of its residents, including new arrivals who have fled intense privation and persecution. We know that God crosses borders, accompanying us – particularly the poor and marginalized -- wherever we go.

The Border We See

The border region contains great political, demographic, religious and cultural diversity. Its residents hold sharply divergent opinions on many issues. These differences can be complicated by the international character of the region and the way in which national policies play out in its communities. Before speaking to these challenges, however, we would like to make an obvious point. Despite our differences, many million border residents live cooperatively and peacefully with each other. They attend school, raise children, care for the elderly, comfort the afflicted, work, worship, recreate, socialize, celebrate and mourn together. The border is not primarily a testing ground for national policies, but an extraordinarily rich community that people from countless backgrounds and walks of life call home. It is a region of stark, physical beauty where family and community values thrive amidst intense poverty and artificial barriers; where young people promote a culture of peace in the face of appalling violence; and to which its residents feel passionately attached.

We believe that the vitality of this region and the needs of its residents receive insufficient consideration in the debates and policies that influence its life. We would like to highlight four overarching characteristics of the border region as we know it.

First, the border is a community shared by the residents of Mexico, the United States, Native American nations, and persons of countless nationalities, races and religions. As a result, its deepest aspirations cannot be realized and its most pressing challenges cannot be met in isolation. The 1983 La Paz agreement officially defined the region as the area within 100 kilometers, north and south, of the international line between the United States and Mexico. The region joins two nations, four US states and six Mexican states, 44 counties (24 contiguous to the international boundary), and 14 pairs of sister cities where more than 90 percent of its residents live. Its bi-national cities share air sheds, drainage basins, aquifers and ecosystems. Its inter-dependence also manifests itself in less edifying ways, as illicit drugs cross the border heading north, and drug profits and guns head south, fueling the horrific violence in Mexico.

Second, the border is a case study in the anomalies and paradoxes of a globalized world. Goods, services, monies, and information flow with relative ease across the border. More than 40 ports-of-entry connect the two countries.  Several million Mexicans possess border crossing cards that allow them to enter the United States for short periods to visit family, conduct business, shop, attend school and receive health care. More people cross the US-Mexico border – more than 600,000 per day -- than any other border in the world.  According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), 125 million passengers in personal vehicles, 2.7 million bus passengers, 40 million pedestrians, and 4.7 million trucks crossed to the United States from Mexico in 2010. In 2011, Mexican exports to United States totaled $263 billion and US exports to Mexico $198 billion, with the great majority coming from the four contiguous US states.

Hundreds of maquiladoras line the Mexican side of the border.  Most are owned and supplied by US corporations. They assemble products for sale in the United States and throughout the world, employing hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals and large numbers of workers in US border communities. Mexican workers regularly cross the border to purchase goods in US stores.

In the globalized world, people will move, must move, and have the right to move to sustain themselves. Yet hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and others who have been displaced by globalization cannot legally cross borders in order to work. This fact offends the very logic of globalization, as do the substantial government subsidies provided to the US agricultural industry that have made it impossible for small family farms in Mexico to survive. The region has seen significant lay-offs and displacement caused by the global economy, including the departure of the Levi Strauss plants in El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley in the late 1990s, and the closure of many maquiladoras in recent years.

Moreover, globalization – particularly in the form of free trade agreements – has not meaningfully reduced poverty or inequality in the border region. The region has grown significantly, but remains riven by stark socio-economic divisions. According to US Census Bureau statistics, the poverty rate in counties along border is twice the national average. Low-wage, dangerous jobs are endemic. If it were counted as a US state, the border region would rank last in access to health care; last in per capita income; first in the numbers of impoverished school children; and first in the number of children without health insurance. The region also contains thousands of unincorporated communities (colonias) that lack sufficient services and infrastructure.

Third, the border region has witnessed an unparalleled expansion in immigration enforcement over many years. Residents live in what has been characterized as a “de-constitutionalized” zone that permits a level of government intrusion in their lives that would be unthinkable elsewhere.  Federal officials can board and search the vehicles of residents and access their property with scant restrictions. The number of Border Patrol agents has doubled over the last decade and increased more than five-fold in 20 years. Persons who illegally enter the country now face criminal prosecution, not solely deportation. Over the last 15 years, large numbers of long-term residents have been detained and deported, countless families divided, and children separated from their parents. The Supreme Court has upheld, at least tentatively, a provision of Arizona’s SB 1070 that affords local police broad authority to enforce federal immigration law, thereby ensuring that many immigrants will not cooperate with the police.  Arizona-like laws seek to deny unauthorized persons the ability to subsist as part of a deportation-by-attrition strategy. The reach and influence of the US immigration enforcement system on border communities can be suggested by the fact that CBP’s budget alone rivals in size the “general fund” (local taxpayer-supported) budgets of all the counties that touch the international boundary.

While illegal migration to the United States has fallen dramatically in recent years, migrant crossing deaths remain extremely high. The Border Patrol reported roughly 360 migrant deaths in 2011, but these estimates count only known deaths and do not include those who perish in Mexico. Not only are border crossers dying at record rates, but many migrants suffer criminal predation – dozens have been murdered in recent months -- before they reach the border. Migrants who survive this gauntlet must negotiate a summary removal process, detention and possible criminal prosecution if they are apprehended.

The immigration enforcement build-up has been accompanied by a steady stream of rhetoric by nativist politicians and media figures on the violence and mayhem in the region. Religious communities know from painful experience the immense dangers that migrants face at the hands of smugglers and ordinary criminals on both sides of the border, and the way in which strict enforcement policies can exacerbate these threats. At the same time, the rates of violent crime in border communities have fallen precipitously over many years: border cities are far safer than similarly sized cities elsewhere in the country.

The Border We Imagine

Prophets denounce and announce. In the prophetic tradition, we denounce the stark inequalities in our communities, the high rates of poverty, the under-investment in children, the abuses against low-wage workers, the shortage of affordable health care, the polluted air and water, and the lack of basic infrastructure. We decry the attitudes of privilege, entitlement, selfishness and indifference that perpetuate these injustices. We denounce political and economic arrangements that uproot people and then prevent them from crossing the border legally in search of work. We denounce the horrific violence and the gross failure of the rule of law in Mexico. We denounce the illicit flow of firearms and drug profits from the United States that inflame this violence.

We denounce the obscenity of border crossing deaths, and the disappearance of this ongoing tragedy from the US immigration debate and (even worse) from our national consciousness. We denounce the continued undercounting of deaths and the government’s failure to report on them consistently and accurately. We denounce abuses against migrants on both sides of the border. We stand with virtually all US faith communities in denouncing immigration policies that separate families and that treat hard-working, self-sacrificing people like criminals and security threats. We believe that the border, as currently structured, does not express God’s will for us as children of God. We reject state laws that would deny fundamental human rights as a means to a dubious end. We decry the historical amnesia and false sense of entitlement that separates natives from newcomers, and that underlies the hostility and derision of recently arrived (US citizen) border residents towards long-settled “unauthorized” residents. We denounce the failures and shortcomings of government policies on both sides of the border.

Building on the best traditions in our communities, we also wish to announce a new vision for the border region. We imagine a region that celebrates the shared values embedded in the different cultures and traditions of its residents.  We see a place of hospitality, empathy and solidarity with newcomers, particularly those fleeing privation and persecution. We envision a region in which laws and policies reflect the needs, priorities and decisions of community residents. We imagine immigration policies that serve the needs of immigrants, their families, and sending and receiving communities, and that support local, regional, national and bi-national development and anti-poverty strategies. We see a region in which a misguided sense of patriotism does not separate residents from their neighbors.

We picture a border where virtually all migration is legal, not because the United States and Mexico cede their authority to regulate admissions, but because immigration laws align with the labor, family, development and protection needs of residents, visitors and passers-through. We see a region in which laws safeguard God-given rights and promote the common good. We envision a region in which constitutional rights and protections fully apply to its residents.

We see a region that has maximized its potential as a conduit for tourism, economic development, job creation and trade relations. We hope for a region that has made meaningful progress in addressing its shared environmental, public health, education, and economic challenges. We picture a place in which the benefits of economic globalization are broadly and equitably shared through robust enforcement of environmental and labor standards, living wage laws, and fair trade rules. We envision trade agreements that provide meaningful support to the human beings that they displace, and that allow them to travel legally across borders in pursuit of employment. We see a region where globalization has been infused with an ethic of solidarity and a commitment to the well-being of its residents.

We imagine a border that is no longer characterized by walls, migrant deaths, illegality, human and drug trafficking, and violence in all of its forms. We see a place of opportunity and encounter.  We see a place of pilgrimage where – like Ellis Island -- residents and visitors can remember their family histories of crossing over, living as “strangers,” and struggling for a foot-hold in their new country. We imagine a region which, 50 years from today, serves as a symbol of hope for border communities throughout the world. We picture a border that crosses, but does not divide families and communities. We see a border of faith communities converted by their own core values and beliefs. We envision a gathering place for God’s scattered children, where residents and visitors in all their diversity can work together to build the human family. We hope,  pray, and vow to work for such a border.

Authors:

• Don Kerwin, Center for Migration Studies, New York,  dkerwin@cmsny.org, 212-337-3080
• Joanne Welter, Catholic Diocese of Tucson, AZ, JoanneW@diocesetucson.org, 520-792-3410
• Michael Seiffert, Equal Voice Network, Rio Grande Valley, SeifertJamesMichael@gmail.com, 956-507-0595. 
• Rev. John Fife, Presbyterian, Tucson, AZ,  jfife666@aol.com
• Hector Rodriguez, Social & Economic Justice Office of the Episcopal Church, hectorraul@verizon.net
• Luzdy Stuckey,  Mennonite Central Committee, luzdystucky@mcc.org, 520-891-8404
• Mike Wilson, Tohono O’dham Nation, Border Action Network
• Rabbi Larry Bach, Temple Mt. Sinai, El Paso,  lbach@templemountsinai.com, 915-532-5959
• Annie Wilson, Lutheran  Immigrant Refugee Services, AWilson@lirs.org, 410-230-2700
• West Cosgrove, Border Network for Human Rights, wcosgrove@bnhr.org, 915-577-0724

To download a printed version of this narritive, click HERE.