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STRANGERS NO LONGER: THE PLIGHT OF UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS IN THE U.S.

Provoke radio
September 25, 2005

STEVE: Good morning. I'm Father Steve Spahn and this is Provoke.

MUSIC UP AND UNDER

ISABEL: Life in Mexico like in other Latino or Hispanic countries is very difficult. You live day by day.

SANTERRO: Every, everything is expensive. You need to have a good job, really good job.

ISABEL: Some of it might not have water. Or they have to walk to get the water.
Some of them may not even have electricity.

SANTERRO: Everything is expensive. Education. Food. The bus. Transportation. Clothes. Shoes. Medicine.
Doctors. Everything.

ISABEL: A lot of kids can't go to school because they have to help in the house and they have to babysit their
little brother and sisters so that their mother can go to work.

Yeah I know people who don't have any documents and they work here, and you meeting them here and
there. Sometimes they don't tell you. But you get an idea.

It's not easy. It's hard to live in another country and then when you don't have the documents, it's very very
difficult.

SANTERRO: Yes, my family is still over there. Every week I send money for my family.

ISABEL: You don't realize how much you're going to miss your family and your cousins and everythings. That
makes it very, very difficult for everybody. And everybody keeps saying I'm leaving next year. I'm leaving next
year. But they don't do it.

Because…where they live is worse than this.

MUSIC CONT.

STEVE: Every year, hundreds of thousands of immigrants pour into the United States in search of a better life
for themselves and their families. Many of those who come come illegally at great risk to their personal safety
and their freedom. Why are so many willing to risk so much? And at what cost? And what should the faithful
response be to these illegal immigrants, these undocumented visitors? With us today to shed some light on
these and other questions is Donald Kerwin, executive director of CLINIC, the Catholic Legal Immigration
Network, headquartered in Washington DC. Don, thanks so much for joining us.

DON: Thank you very much. I appreciate your interest.

STEVE: Well, let's just begin by looking at the state of affairs in the United States today, vis a vis undocumented
workers. What facts can you give us about the current situation?

DON: What you have in the United States now is the third great wave of immigration in the nation's history.
There's about 35 or 36 million foreign born people in the country. And so of those 36 million you have maybe 12
million who have become U.S. citizens, another 13 million who are lawful permanent residents or otherwise
here legally. Then you have 11 million who are undocumented. Those people are either people that cross the
border illegally or who have overstayed their temporary visas.

STEVE: Ok. Now, is that unprecedented to have so many undocumented folks? I'm thinking of the early 20th
century immigration flows where many of our grandparents and others came…

DON: Yeah, in total numbers this is unprecedented. It is. In terms of a percentage of the population, it's not
unprecedented. I think they're about 11-12% of the population in total. This is all foreign born people, not just
undocumented people. And of course undocumented people are very fluid. A lot of them are on their way to
legal status. Some are more entrenched and fixed in their status than others. But it is unprecedented in terms
of absolute numbers. Yeah.

STEVE: And why are there so many specifically undocumented immigrants? I mean, do today's immigrants face
greater challenges than, say our grandparents faced?

DON: Well, I think there's a lot more similarities that they faced than differences. Let's take 1890 to 1920. There
are so many similarities between that group and the current group. In other words, it was a new group of
immigrants. They were coming from Eastern Europe and southern Europe mostly. Just like people today are
coming from Latin America and Asia. They faced exploitation in the work force. There was a lot of division of
families. There was a huge political movement and opposition to them. So, all of these things were faced by
these earlier groups. And they're even finding jobs in the same types of industries that those earlier immigrants
did. But I think it's more difficult for them to become lawful in this country.

STEVE: Why is that?

DON: Because of laws that were passed in 1996. It makes it very, very difficult for people that have been in
undocumented status in the US to legalize their status. There are income requirements. There are backlogs and
delays in that process. A number of them are beneficiaries of family based immigration visas, but they're stuck
in multi year backlogs. In other words, they're married to a U.S. citizen or to a lawful permanent resident, that
person has petitioned for them, the petition has been approved, but because of our quota system and the
various backlogs and delays in that system, those people are waiting for their visa. And they're faced with the
choice: do they wait here, in undocumented status? Or do they go home at that point and, and wait there? And
they generally choose to stay with their families, here, of course.

STEVE: I see.

DON: Or let's say that you married somebody who's a lawful permanent resident and that person petitions for
you. Well, that person is going to have to be able to prove that he can support you and the whole family at
125% of the poverty line. What we find in our offices is that about 20% of the people that come in can't meet
that income requirement. So, even though they might qualify for a visa under the law, they can't get one. The
other piece is that people that are here in undocumented status are subject to bars on admission. If you're here
for more than 6 months, you're barred for three years. If you're here for more than a year in undocumented
status, you're barred for 10 years. It's a problem because, of course, when the visa becomes available then
you have to go home at that point to pick it up, and you're subject to the bar when you try and re-enter. All of
these various legal provisions conspire together to make it extraordinarily difficult for people that want to play
by the rules, that want to be legal, to get legal status. And I think that's a difference.

STEVE: OK. And, what is it like from your vantage, in your work, for someone to be in that circumstance, sort
of in limbo, without the documentation that would make them legal?

DON: It's brutally difficult for these folks. A lot of them are working, and it is necessary work. It's important
work that they do in this country. The undocumented are about 5% of the U.S. work force. And they're in jobs
that a lot of Americans won't do and in sectors that are growing. The need for their work is growing greater
and greater. However, they don't have any particular rights. They don't have any rights in the workplace.
They're oftentimes victimized in the work place because their employers know that they're undocumented and
there's this great psychological uncertainty. At any point they can be sent back and basically lose what they
have here. So, it's a very tough road for a lot of these people.

STEVE: And most of them from this category of undocumented would come from Latin America? Or…

DON: Yeah, about 55% of the undocumented come from Mexico. Another 20-25 perhaps come from Latin
America…

STEVE: …OK

DON: … And then from Asia, Europe, Africa…

STEVE: OK, so about 80%…

DON: A little over 80%

STEVE: Will be Mexican or Latin American?

DON: That's right.

STEVE: Now, we've been referring to these folks as "the undocumented". Many Americans, more bluntly, refer
to them as "illegals" and "illegal aliens". Say something about the nomenclature. It sounds like political
correctness. I mean, isn't someone who breaks the law an illegal?

DON: The language is crucially important actually in immigration because you have to focus on the fact that
these people are human beings. They're our brothers and our sisters. A person can't be illegal. They can enter
illegally, or whatever, but they can't BE illegal and they're not aliens. They're members of our community.
They're members of our church. They're members of our workforce. That's just the wrong thing to call them.
It's inaccurate.

STEVE: Hmm. So, while their entrance to this country might have contravened an American law, your point is
that deep down, that, that violation hasn't made them somehow illegal…

DON: They're not illegal. What they've done might have been illegal. And I think that what you have to do is you
have to say, well, what kind of illegality is it? You know, is it illegality like the kind that I committed when I
jaywalked to get to this interview? Or is it illegality like a murder or a rape or a bank robbery? What exactly is
it? And what we find, of course, is that a lot of these people, in our perspective anyway, they're exercising
their God given rights. In other words, they're trying to support themselves. They're trying to support their
families. And that's a right of theirs, and in our tradition, a responsibility as well something that they ought to be
allowed to do and it's something that they're required to do if they're able to.

STEVE: And what is driving them away from Mexico to begin with? From Latin America? Away from their own
home and country to the United States?

DON: Well, the main thing, of course, would be economic opportunity. That's a huge issue -- people that just
can't make a go of it at home. And, you know, we talk a lot about globalization and NAFTA and those
agreements. They allow for goods and services to cross borders, but they don't allow for people to cross
borders. And these are people that are doing that and finding jobs here.

STEVE: Well, let's be more specific about what they are leaving behind. I mean, you say 55% of the
undocumented come from Mexico. So, let's take that country for example.
What are people facing there that would promote or encourage what can't be an easy process, namely
crossing the border illegally and then finding work in this country. What is their circumstance at home?

DON: We did a large report on the U.S, Mexico border and interviewed a number of people in Mexico, and in the
U.S. as well, and what they'll invariably say when you ask them why they came is that it's better to die trying
to cross the border than it is to die at home slowly. And so, it's the lack of economic opportunity. And that's
what they say uniformly. I'll give you an example, since NAFTA came into place, there have beem a lot of
exports of grain to Mexico and family farmers can't support themselves now. So what you find is the people
that used to be self sufficient, that used to run their own farms, have now come to the U.S. and are in our
migrant labor stream. Here. Trying to support themselves. And that's just one example. You know, there's a lot
of assembly factories called maquilas along the US Mexico border. Thousands of them. They assemble all
sorts of things there. Those people earn about $1 an hour and they don't come to the United States. In other
words, they stay in Mexico. I mean, what we find is it's a very wrenching and difficult thing for people to
leave. And if there's any way that they can possibly support themselves, in their home countries, they do.

MUSIC UP

SANTERRO: My name is Santerro. I am from El Salvador.

I been here 4 years.

I come because I don't have too many jobs in my country. I come from work. And save money.

I be here all these years. Myself.

I miss my family.

The way is difficult for everybody. Too many dangerous bad people.

Everybody look something good for his life. For his family. Sometimes you need make a difficult thing and this is
a difficult thing for me.

STEVE: You're listening to Provoke and a conversation on the faithful response to the plight of undocumented
workers in the United States. With us is Don Kerwin, executive director of CLINIC, the Catholic Legal
Immigration Network. Don, in much of what you've written on the subject, you refer to "Natural Law". I know
that this is very much a concept in keeping with Catholic Social Teaching and no doubt many other faith
traditions. Can you say something about that? Define Natural Law for us?

DON: Sure. The idea of subjective human rights didn't arise in the enlightenment. It arose within church jurists in
the 12th century. Those people recognized from the very start that there's a basic right to self-preservation.
This is a right that's been around for centuries within the church and in other traditions of course as well. In
terms of economic migrants, there are 2 flows of immigrants coming to the United States. There are the highly
skilled, high tech workers. We embrace those, and then there's what we call unskilled workers, but that's a
really fraught phrase and one that I don't agree with. Because they're certainly skilled and do work that people
like myself couldn't do physically. For unskilled workers, we have a category in our immigration law that allows
about 5000 to come into the country legally each year. And yet the undocumented flow is about 500,000 and
those people are all finding jobs in sectors that are exploding in the U.S. Nobody really who looks at this
seriously disagrees with the fact that if all these folks went home tomorrow, that all of these various industries
would collapse: the service sector jobs, the construction industry, the poultry processing plants, the meat
packing, the people that pick our crops. There's this gigantic disconnect…

STEVE: Right. It sounds like hypocrisy, right? We all profit from the work they do, then, in these service
industries and how that keeps prices low for all of us. Yet for us then to say, well, you're not welcome here…

DON: It's a great disconnect between our laws and the reality of our needs and the lives that we live.

STEVE: And their needs, the undocumented.

DON: Yeah. There's such a need at this point to expand the ability of people who need to come and whose
work that we need to come in a regulated and legal way.
STEVE: Mmm. We've talked about the reasons why people are leaving and the reasons why in natural law we
defend the right of folks to protect their lives, especially the lives of their children. We also talk about the Rule
of Law in this country.

DON: Uh huh.

STEVE: Is it terribly naïve to, to hold those 2 things up - the Rule of Law, which is a good…

DON: Right.

STEVE: …And the need for people to feed themselves which is a good, and say that somehow these can be
reconciled. Or are we talking about a contradiction that is never going to be resolved?

DON: No. It's not a contradiction. It's something that a lot of folks have focused on. A sovereign state has the
right to control its borders in furtherance of the common good. And so the key phrase there is in furtherance of
the common good. The Church has recognized there's such a thing as the universal common good -- in other
words, a shared good of people across borders. And that's how the 2 are reconciled.

STEVE: OK. And when you add to that what you've said earlier, that we actually need these unskilled workers
for all sorts of sectors of our economy…

DON: They absolutely contribute to the common good. They contribute to the common good through their labor,
through their taxes. They are younger workers so they're a major solution to the problems of social security
and the aging baby boomers. They contribute in a lot of ways to the common good and as we see of course
they contribute to our churches, immensely too.

STEVE: Alright. But let's get back to The Rule of Law. You've made a convincing argument for Natural law and
the Common Good, but this country's whole foundation really is The Law. What does it say to Americans, and
the world, and what does it do to our very foundation if we just wink at the law? Is that eroding something in
the basic fabric of our society?

DON: Well, it's serious issue, I think. I think that we shouldn't just dismiss rule of law concerns. I think that we
ought to honor them and think about them a lot. But, in our tradition anyway, the fact that these folks might be in
the country in an undocumented status, doesn't forever bar them from regularizing their status. OK. So they
violated the law. We know that. What are you going to do to them? Are you going to prevent them from ever
regularizing their status? Or maybe what you do is you fine them. You allow them to regularize their status.
And you fine them. Again, we believe in a higher law. We call it human rights. Natural rights. Human dignity.
These people, in our view are exercising their human rights in coming.

STEVE: So, what does this say about our immigration system as it stands now? Broken? Outdated? How
would you categorize it?

DON: I think it's a system that hasn't really benefited from a, a coherent broad, multi-national type of approach. I
mean, immigration is never about the movement of people. It's about economics, it's about labor, it's about
diplomacy. It's about international relations. And what you have is kind of a piecemeal system that's kind of
grown up and responded to different political movements, different compromises over the years. And you
really need to rethink the thing entirely.

STEVE: OK.

DON: About 10% of the families in the United States are mixed status families. In other words, families where
you might have a U.S. citizen kid and an undocumented parent or a lawful permanent resident parent. You
can't have a system that attacks a part of that family without hurting the rest of them. And we see that all the
time. People that might be deported while their kids are still at school. Their U.S. citizen kids are still at school.
It's not serving our labor needs right now. It's not serving the rights of immigrants. It's not serving our
fundamental values to treat people equally under the law. It's not serving our families. It certainly is atrocious
that people are dying in the desert every single day. For all of these reasons, it's not a system that works right
now.

STEVE: Hmm. It occurs to me that many of these immigrants, they didn't leave happily, they left under some
duress, or great need. They find themselves here in compromised circumstances of not having the same legal
rights that we do and and yet, you know, they're coming. Is it your sense that they want to stay? Or are these
folks who, once they can make some money and address the needs of their families, would be just as happy
to leave?

DON: Yeah. I think that some of them would and some of them wouldn't. One thing that's absolutely happened
though is when there was less border enforcement there was a lot more circular migration. In other words, a
lot of people would go home a lot more frequently. What you have now is you have such a guarded border,
militarized border, that people are locked out, but they're locked in too. They won't go home to risk not being
able to come back. And that's a fact. I mean, all the polls that have interviewed people have showed that
people are staying for much longer periods now. And that that circular migration that used to exist exists to a
much smaller degree at this point.

STEVE: OK. You know, you're a person of faith, I am as well, and, and we hope our listeners are all trying to
connect the dots between their own respective faith lives and these stories, this social need. Why should
people care? Reflect on in your own life perhaps, why you care and why you think others should, should
really be interested in this.

DON: Well, if they are people of faith they're obviously going to care about their fellow man. And what we ask
them to do is to try and identify with these people. One way to do that is to think about their own ancestors.
Just about everybody in this country anyway, ought to be able to think back not too many generations to the
kinds of struggles, the kinds of conditions that their own ancestors were facing here in the United States. And
it's quite similar to what this group of immigrants is facing at this point. If you're able to do that, if you're able to
really identify however you can, then that's a really important first step.

STEVE: Always putting the human face on an issue.

DON: When you think about Christ's ministry, it was a migrant ministry. He was constantly on the move. He had
nowhere to lay his head. You think about the early apostles, you think about St. Paul, the way that the church
spread, those were all migrant ministries. And there was a word, and I'm going to botch the pronunciation of it,
parokois, I think is how you pronounce it, was how believers were described in the early church. And what
that word meant was, temporary residents, visitors, people on the move. In other words, believers were
migrants. This is something that has a very old tradition in the church. It goes right back to the very founding of
the church if you want to look at the way the church in the United States is developed, you find that all of the
major defining institutions of the church were developed in response to and with the support and through the
work and the labor of immigrants to the United States. If you look at the period from 1890 to 1920, which is the
second great wave of migration in US history, you find that all of these institutions from parishes to schools to
hospitals, they either came into being or grew dramatically during those periods. So that it really is a church of
immigrants and if we forget that, we've really lost something.

STEVE: We talk about the legality and the illegality of their coming and their staying and their working. There are
American, U.S. employers who are writing their paychecks and engaging them in employment. And some of
them, no doubt know that these folks are not documented. And some of them as you suggest are exploiting
them quite deliberately knowing they don't have recourse. You don't hear a lot of consternation, anger about
those U.S. companies who are breaking the law, do you?

DON: You sure don't. Most of the companies are in a fix. They need the work and they've got to find it from
somewhere. It's not predatory behavior in most cases. But, I've always wondered about this. Why is there not
more talk about enforcing labor laws? We could show you industries that always pay sub-minimum wages.
You can go to migrant worker centers in different places around the country and you can look at their records.
And you can see that people have been paid sub-minimum wages. If you're so worried about immigrants
displacing low wage workers why not enforce the labor laws? Why not create jobs that pay what they're
supposed to pay? That are safe. That provide basic benefits. Why is there not an outcry about that? And I
always thought that we ought to be enforcing these laws. I don't think it would remove the need for immigrant
labor. I'm quite sure that it wouldn't. But nonetheless it would be a consistent approach and a humane
approach.

STEVE: So, where do we go from here? In terms of immigration reform? What's being discussed?

DON: The kinds of proposals out there deal with different things. One is the current undocumented population
here. Do you provide them a path to earn the right to remain here? Is that just a temporary visa that you're
giving them or is it actually a path to some kind of permanent status in the US? The second thing is future
migration needs beyond the current undocumented status. Do you create a system that's either temporary or
could lead to permanent status? For people that might come in the future and might do important work here. So
both of those are what are known as "earned legalization paths". In other words, people earn the right to
remain here by their labor. Then the third prong of this is enforcement. You have a reasonable system that is
responsive to the realities of our market, our families, the needs of immigrants, then there ought to be an ability
to enforce that system. What combination of enforcement activities do you support? So the bills deal with
those three types of issues. Enforcement, the current undocumented, and future flows.

STEVE: OK, so what can the individual person do? What can the person of faith do beyond just informing
oneself of the nature of the issue? Or maybe that is what they need to do. You answer. What, what can we
do as individuals?

DON: Well, right now there's an enormous campaign that's going on called the Justice for Immigrants campaign
that we kicked off in the spring in Washington DC. We're trying to set up local Justice for Immigrants campaigns
in every single diocese around the country. And they involve a whole range of people within the Catholic
Church in partnership with other people of faith in support of some basic principles on immigration reform. So
people can get involved in that, can join their local campaign, can participate in advocacy in that way. Then
there's an awful lot of work that's done within the church structure, in terms of English as a Second Language
class, legal assistance to people, various volunteering opportunities. There's an enormous network of
programs out there that assist immigrants. Right now we have 155 diocese that run legal programs for
immigrants out of 260 offices. And these types of programs provide a range of other services for people.
There are extraordinary volunteer opportunities too, if people want to get involved in that way.

STEVE: It seems like the plight of the undocumented asks us to remember that we belong to God's family as
well as belonging to a particular country or state or city or religion for that matter.

DON: That's a great way to put it.

STEVE: And knowing that we were all immigrants at some point in our history.

DON: That's right.

STEVE: OK. Well, I thank you Don for what you've shared. It's not an easy topic for many of us to work
through because there are competing goods and interests and really just trying to understand and have a road
map of what's at stake and you've helped us I think to see some of the human dimensions of the circumstance.
So I thank you…

DON: Thank you. I've enjoyed it. Thanks.

STEVE: You've been listening to Provoke and a conversation on the plight of undocumented immigrants in the
United States. As with all things on Provoke, the questions are always more obvious than the answers. As
citizens, we hear the word "illegal" and think, no-brainer. Send 'em home. But, then, as people of faith, it's
never quite that simple. We are a very wealthy country with much to share and we have always welcomed
the stranger, "the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses". After all, we are all the descendents of immigrants.

If you'd like to learn more about how you can help immigrants in your community, check out our website at
provokeradio.com. And, as always, you can also listen to this and all our shows archived there. Anytime. At
your convenience. If you've got comments about this show or ideas for future shows, call us at 410-244-0446
or e-mail us at producer@provokeradio.com. That's 410-244-0446 or producer@provokeradio.com.

Tune in again next week for an encore of this show. And then a new one the following week. Until then, have
a good week and remember: Yo era un extrano y me acogiste and blessed are the provoked.

Provoke is sponsored by Radio Mass of Baltimore.

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