Complexities Abound in Mass Immigration Issues

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Picture for a moment a farm family. Place that family in an idyllic setting on the banks of a river, with acres and acres of crops growing green and lush. A picture of life, bounty, care of creation.

Now consider the reality. Consider that the farming family lives in a rural village in Guatemala. The family grows enough to feed itself and a few neighbors but primarily plants coffee, a cash crop that provides a subsistence living in the best years. The family sells its raw materials – coffee beans – to a third party, who then sells the crop to major coffee producers.  The farm family used to receive about 30 cents of the $1.30 per pound the producer paid to the middle man. However, in recent years the price of raw beans has dropped to $.36 per pound, leaving the farmers with pennies per pound. Additionally, Guatemala is in its fifth consecutive year of drought, which has left coffee crops vulnerable to disease and far less abundant than needed to make a living.

Add to this mix the political and social upheaval of 40 years of civil war. Guatemala’s war ended in 1996, but the clandestine security and intelligence apparatus created during the war persists as a powerful, politically savvy and violent criminal enterprise. Any members of our struggling farm family who hope to find work in the city will have to navigate the extortion, violence and forced gang recruitment that has driven so many out of their homeland and made Guatemala one of the most violent countries in the world.

Thus, our farm family is unable to sustain life on its farm and faces a life of crime or a violent death in the city.  So our rural Guatemalan family heads out, as migrants have done since the Mayflower, to the promise of a better life in the United States.

To get to the U.S., however, our family, with few possessions and even less money, will have to navigate thousands of miles, several unfamiliar dialects and the new language of English.  

If they manage to make it to the U.S. border, our family is in for a nasty surprise. Not only is legal immigration complex, requiring a well-trained lawyer to navigate, but new U.S. policy requires that our family, which may have a very valid claim for asylum in the U.S., wait in Mexico for that claim to reach the courts. In the meantime, the family will have to find shelter with already overrun charities (there are 18 such shelters in El Paso-Juarez community alone, all of them full) or face separation and detention in jails designed for criminals, not desperate families seeking a safe haven. The wait for an asylum claim to be heard will be at least several months, and few jobs are available in border communities in Mexico. Of course, without a job, paying for legal counsel is impossible and charities can only provide so much free legal assistance when so many are seeking advice.

Building a wall and/or forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico will not end migration, but will exacerbate problems in Mexico, perhaps leading even more people to seek legal and illegal paths into the U.S.  A more effective option might involve the kind of long-term foreign assistance that addresses the impacts of climate change, poverty and violence in politically unstable countries, ensuring their security and ours.

There are multiple approaches to the complicated issues behind mass immigration. It shouldn’t be hard for us, as Catholics, to determine which practice we support by asking whether the solution promotes the dignity and sanctity of all life, or simply seeks to shut out the poor without regard for their ultimate fate.

Jean Hill is director of the diocesan Office of Life, Justice and Peace. She can be reached at jean.hill@dioslc.org.