10/08/07: Activists Here Split On Sanctuary For Immigrants - with Patrick Hickey of the Workers rights Center - Madison
The Capital Times :: FRONT :: A1
Monday, October 8, 2007
By PAT SCHNEIDER The Capital Times
Immigrant workers' rights is a moral issue that spiritual leaders must confront head-on, with no soft-pedaling to the self-interests of business, government or anyone else, a high-profile Chicago pastor told would-be founders of a new local movement to shelter undocumented workers."We didn't go to the lunch counters and tell businesses that it was in their best interest to desegregate," the Rev. Walter Coleman said at a recent organizing session, invoking the moral authority of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when a broad coalition of blacks and their allies, led by communities of faith, won equal legal footing for African-Americans.
But there appears to be no consensus yet among civil rights activists here about whether openly sheltering undocumented workers sought by immigration authorities is a good idea.
Some at Thursday's session agreed with Coleman, but others said that undocumented immigrants are safer keeping a low profile and that the general public is more likely to rally around people identified primarily as workers rather than as immigrants.
In the 1980s, Madison was one of many cities around the country where refugees from war-torn Central America found shelter through faith-based efforts. The new sanctuary movement takes its name from the earlier campaign, and just six months after its formal founding, the new movement claims active groups in 10 states, according to information compiled by Voces de la Frontera, a Milwaukee workers' rights center. Six cities - Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Phoenix and San Diego - have groups providing sanctuary to Mexican or Haitian families.
Coleman is pastor of Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago, which gave sanctuary to Elvira Arellano, a Mexican undocumented worker, for a year before her deportation in August.
In California, where Arellano was arrested after leaving her Chicago sanctuary for a national tour advocating immigration reform, Simi Valley Mayor Paul Miller last month warned members of a church now giving sanctuary to a woman known only as "Liliana" that they are liable for the $40,000 cost of law enforcement to keep the peace during a rally that drew 100 counterprotesters.
"Because the church willfully decided to harbor an illegal alien and made a public announcement of that fact, it was responsible for provoking the demonstration," Miller said last week in the Simi Valley Acorn newspaper.
The incident prompted a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to caution the Simi Valley church members in the local press that harboring an illegal alien is a federal crime. Coleman said in an interview Thursday in Madison that federal officials so far have not wanted to risk the political fallout of entering a church.
EDUCATIONAL GOAL
The emerging movement is an opportunity to educate and mobilize people of faith to immigration issues, said Cindy Breunig, newly hired New Sanctuary Movement coordinator for the nonprofit Voces de la Frontera. "People are hungry to know what they can do," she said. "The goal is to work for comprehensive immigration law reform."
Involvement in the movement is a natural outgrowth of Madison-area Urban Ministry's work with returning prisoners because the detention centers where arrested undocumented immigrants are held are "nothing more than prisons," Executive Director Linda Ketcham said. Madison-area Urban Ministry convened Thursday's meeting of local activists at its South Park Street offices. It was one in a series of meetings to talk about how to grow a sanctuary movement in Dane County.
Local activists are not yet of one mind, however.
Salvador Carranza, president of Latinos United for Change and Advancement, said Thursday that framing immigrant rights as a moral issue would be most effective. "We have to move people through common moral values," he said. "Jesus said: 'Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.' "
But Patrick Hickey, executive director of the Workers' Rights Center in Madison, maintained that it is as a workers' issue that immigrant rights can draw the broadest base of support. "Race is used as a pretext to divide workers. If we cast it as an 'immigrant' rights issue, we lose," Hickey said.
Others argued that avoiding the race elements of the issue panders to politicians' agendas to retain votes tinged with racist aims.
Lilliam Post, a native of Nicaragua, spoke to the need for support for immigrants. "We feel like ants, and there's a lot of rain coming. We're swimming, but sometimes people cannot swim," she said.
There has been no need in Madison to give sanctuary to anyone yet, Hickey said later, adding that he's not sure the time is ripe for the movement here. "It's a political statement," he said in an interview. "I'm not sure it's something Madison needs to do now." Any undocumented worker being sought by immigration officials is safer in hiding, he said.
The Rev. Curt Anderson of First Congregational Church of Madison said he will take the issue back to his congregation for further discussion.
"People of faith have an interest in seeing that there is fair and humane policy toward everybody in the country," Anderson said.
WAYS TO HELP
Involvement in the movement could range from actually sheltering immigrants sought by the federal government to providing money, assistance or advocacy.
In the mid-1980s, about 10 Dane County faith congregations were involved in the sanctuary movement, recalled Corky Custer, who remains a member of one of them, Community of Hope United Church of Christ in Madison.
At least four times, families or individuals were harbored by the Madison movement, Custer said Friday. He recalled that a group of six churches sheltering one family had to keep someone with them 24 hours a day, because they were being watched by government agents. "We wanted to be ready to get support going if they were taken," he said.
The decision to become involved was difficult and painful.
"We spent a year deciding to make the commitment," Custer recalled Friday. "There was little debate about the need, but we were probably breaking the law, and that's something done with trepidation."
Some members left the congregation over the issue, he said.
The issue is less clear-cut today than during the war in El Salvador, when people were being slaughtered, Custer said. "With the hysteria being generated about immigration, for some people the moral imperative is less clear."
Yet the treatment today of undocumented workers - who are seized, disappear and are denied due process - has parallels to the treatments of other workers by repressive regimes two decades ago, he said.
"Cynical politicians demonize helpless people to distract Americans from the fact that the system is broken," he said.
pschneider@madison.com