From Jim Wallis via Sojourners.
For the first time, all law enforcement officers in the state will be enlisted to hunt down undocumented people, which will clearly distract them from going after truly violent criminals, and will focus them on mostly harmless families whose work supports the economy and who contribute to their communities. And do you think undocumented parents will now go to the police if their daughter is raped or their family becomes a victim of violent crime? Maybe that’s why the state association of police chiefs is against SB 1070.
This proposed law is not only mean-spirited —” it will be ineffective and will only serve to further divide communities in Arizona, making everyone more fearful and less safe. This radical new measure, which crosses many moral and legal lines, is a clear demonstration of the fundamental mistake of separating enforcement from comprehensive immigration reform. We all want to live in a nation of laws, and the immigration system in the U.S. is so broken that it is serving no one well. But enforcement without reform of the system is merely cruel. Enforcement without compassion is immoral. Enforcement that breaks up families is unacceptable. And enforcement of this law would force us to violate our Christian conscience, which we simply will not do. It makes it illegal to love your neighbor in Arizona.
Before the rally and press event, I visited some immigrant families who work at Neighborhood Ministries, an impressive community organization affiliated with Sojourners’ friends at the Christian Community Development Association. I met a group of women who were frightened by the raids that have been occurring, in which armed men invade their homes and neighborhoods with guns and helicopters. When the rumors of massive raids spread, many of these people flee both their homes and their workplaces, and head for The Church at The Neighborhood Center as the only place they feel safe and secure. But will police invade the churches if they are suspected of —harboring— undocumented people, because it is the law? Will the nurse practitioner I met at their medical clinic serving only uninsured people be arrested for being —with— the children of families who are here illegally as she treats them?
At the rally, I started with the words of Jesus (which drew cheers from the crowd gathered at the state Capitol), who instructed his disciples to —welcome the stranger,— and said that whatever we do to —the least of these, who are members of my family— we do to him. I think that means that to obey Jesus and his gospel will mean to disobey SB 1070 in Arizona. I looked at the governor’s Executive Tower and promised that many Christians in Arizona won’t comply with this law because the people they will target will be members of our —family— in the body of Christ. And any attack against them is an attack against us, and the One we follow.
Catholic Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles just called this Arizona measure —the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless immigration law.— On CNN, I defended the Cardinal’s comments, which likened the requirement of people always carrying their —papers— to the most oppressive regimes of Nazism and Communism. I wonder whether the tea party movement that rails against government intrusion will rail against this law, or whether those who resist the forced government registration of their guns will resist the forced government requirement that immigrants must always carry their documentation. Will the true conservatives please stand up here? We are all waiting.
Arizona’s SB 1070 must be named as a social and racial sin, and should be denounced as such by people of faith and conscience across the nation. This is not just about Arizona, but about all of us, and about what kind of country we want to be. It’s time to stand up to this new strategy of —deportation by attrition,— which I heard for the first time today in Arizona. It is a policy of deliberate political cruelty, and it should be remembered that —attrition— is a term of war. Arizona is deciding whether to wage war on the body of Christ. We should say that if you come after one part of the body, you come after all of us.
Jim Wallis is the author of Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street —” A Moral Compass for the New Economy, and is CEO of Sojourners.
I was also interested in the events over in Congress today. The people who run Facebook got a dressing down, with members of Congress telling them how they should run their company. You must use opt-in rather than opt-out or some such nonsense. The sorry truth is that government uses its legislative powers to do what appears to be good at the time (in their minds), and in the process wrecks everything. Facebook has a bad security/privacy model — the market will decide. I want to have a cervezas with José and Maria after church on Sunday, — do not associate with them or we will arrest you (Constitution, free association and free exercise be damned). Don’t pack 
your chips or pretzels with salt — because we assume Americans and the free market are too stupid, lazy, and overweight to know better. We need a nanny. Don’t eat Foie gras, don’t use trans fats, but go ahead corporate America, pour in as much high fructose corn syrup as possible… no problem there.
Actually, good on Arizona. When their restaurants have to pay fair, or at least minimum wages and overtime to white boys and girls for cutting vegetables and running the dishwasher, when uncle Henry and aunt Jane have to trim their own cactus, when Union carpenters move in to do the framing work on all those senior housing developments, then they’ll get it. Following laws will be a 100% full time job for Arizonans. Just follow the law, and your dinner out will double in price, and your buy-in for a place at Sun City (assessment fees, capital contribution costs, original housing cost) will double; all because José and Maria aren’t doing it for next to nothing anymore. You’ll be paying Brandy and Todd instead, and they won’t take your crap, they’ll walk out or strike. Oh, and don’t forget about the sales and property tax increases, because a big segment of your society isn’t earning or spending in Arizona anymore. At least you won’t have to look at those odd Catholic foreigners, those scary people and their scary brown children (they’re all the same aren’t they???).
But, you want it both ways don’t you?
Unfortunately, the worst laws are those quickly enacted to make a point. They create a country where we are free to be fat, lazy, cheap, and protected because someone had an idea and made a point. Whatever happened to building things with our ideas? Now we just write laws for the sake of laws. We use ideas as fodder for the word-processing programs that enshrine law over and above all else, and most particularly over the Law that tells us we are free.
