Sanctuary

FORWARD:

Everything and everyone is connected. I know the hot topic right now is the war that has broken out in Ukraine, but we have seen how refugees are treated, that this is causing multiple refugee issues, and that black and brown people are being denied the same methods to get out of Ukraine that the blonde and blue eyed people are accessing. I am not a huge fan of Time, but this link is a quick and easy read to see the racism in Ukraine.

The article starts with a Black woman from Democratic Republic of Congo describing having lived in Ukraine for 7 years, learning to speak Russian and some Ukrainian, going to school there and staying in Kyiv to work. She reports that when she “reached Lviv in Ukraine’s west near Poland, joining the heaving crowds desperately trying to board trains for safety…she encountered hostility from the Ukrainian military, who were dividing people into two groups: those who were white, and those who were not.” She received less quality and less quantity of food during the travel than the white passengers.

Not sure that I really want to go slap up the Ukrainian flag on my social media profile right now.

What is happening there is bad, and Russia needs to stop the invasion and come to a diplomatic solution. The USA and all its inhabitants need to stop their Red Scare (Russia isn’t communist anymore FFS and communism isn’t coming back through this conflict). The USA and all its inhabitants also need to quit treating this as a proxy war with Russia, as well as a sporting event or entertainment. Ukraine also needs to stop allowing the literal Nazi (google Azov Battalion) factions of its government be racist pieces of shit and allow everyone to flee.

And we all need to acknowledge that war is one way we wind up with refugee crises.

One of the reasons I studied sociology and philosophy in college was so that I could better understand how communities of people make decisions about morality, sacrifice, and when they are willing to die for certain ideas.

I grew up in a religious family and in evangelical communities. It was always interesting when these groups decided to “help people” because there was always a varying level of self-interest. Rarely, were people fed simply because they were hungry. More often, these church groups fed people to bring them into the church and gain influence over them. Hunger was a tool to be used, to be quite frank.

So, when religious groups aid other people at the risk of imprisonment, and without the expectation that the person will join the church and come under their sphere of influence, I tend to listen more closely.

I was unaware of how the Sanctuary City movement started, where city personnel refused to work with Immigration Services to deport people. In reading People of God, Penny Lernoux describes it as having come from a church movement just called “Sanctuary” where individuals and congregations housed immigrants from Central America who were fleeing dictatorships that the US was propping up, as direct action against extremely harmful US foreign policy.

What some people don’t realize is that when there is war, when the US meddles in other countries and violence breaks out, this fuels the refugee crisis. It’s all connected. The US needs to take their hands off of these countries and stop sending arms all across the globe to bolster its own interest. Innocent people are the ones who are dying and fleeing.

Here is my disclaimer for this post: This has been particularly difficult for me to write because I’ve had such a strong emotional response to the subject matter. If the tone here is overly emotional, that’s because it is. I have cried more over this subject than I have over anything in months. I am a human, not a robot, and this subject hit a real nerve in the core of my being. Normally, I write each post in one sitting, with one final review. I am already at three sittings and nowhere near finished. With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get going.

As an aside before we get into the book, I wrote an earlier post about how social workers are the soft arm of the state. This topic offers another fine example of that. When I was investigating child abuse, I had a supervisor who was married to a state trooper and who always insisted I call immigration whenever I worked with a family who had undocumented members. There was no arguing this action with my supervisor at all. She insisted that telling Immigration about this undocumented person was the correct thing and lawful to do. So, in order to retain my job (which is how I had housing, healthcare, and ate food to survive) and leave a record so that I did not get fired (and lose my ability to exist in a capitalist society), I would dial Immigration so that it showed up on my phone records from my desk, and promptly hang up as soon as I was put on hold. I have to wonder how many social workers over the year have personally turned over people to ICE.

After reading the chapters on Sanctuary in People of God, I hit the internet and found this link pretty quickly: Jim Corbett, Smuggler for the Kingdom of Love. I can’t make it past the third paragraph without sobbing. At the end of the day, here was someone who was risking his neck for people who were suffering. “‘Smuggling’ them into the country to avoid arrest and deportation was against federal law. Anyone caught assisting an “illegal alien” could be fined and spend five years in prison. But Jim Corbett, a Quaker, was answerable to a higher law: helping a stranger in need as mandated by his faith and centuries of an ancient faith tradition of giving refuge to those avoiding persecution.” I’ve always said that it’s not what you say, it’s what you DO that shows who you are. This is truly an example of a person and a community taking action and doing the work.

I started researching Lernoux’s claims because the book, while fascinating, is definitely biased against socialism and Marxism. I am appreciative of the book and I now own a copy to lend out, but I just don’t take everything it says at face value. So, even though I am taking the time to blog about what she wrote, I will also encourage you do to your own research about it as well. I usually provide multiple links in every post, but this one will not contain many links other than the one above.

Lernoux talks about the “communitarian principle of the US bishops’ solidarity with their suffering brothers and sisters in Central America” (258). As I’ve stated in other posts, this is very close to my non-religious oriented belief that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” The pastor’s beliefs led them to the conclusion that “if they were sincere about helping the refugees, they had to meet their most critical need, to avoid capture and deportation to more suffering and possible death.” Multiple churches and religious organizations met to discuss their willingness to break American law and conduct illegal missions to smuggle immigrants across the border, to house them, feed them, employ them, and get them to a safe and permanent location. Many of these religious leaders and lay persons were investigated, arrested, detained, and sentenced.

Lernoux stated that once the church community realized what was happening from the first hand accounts of the refugees they were helping, they started distrusting what the US government was telling them. The movement spread to municipalities and universities, with the goal of actually changing US foreign policy regarding Central America and immigration policy as a whole (265). “Hundreds of Americans of all faiths traveled to the boarder regions of Nicaragua under the Witness for Peace program to protest the contra war” (265). Meanwhile, people like Tucker Carlson were traveling to Nicaragua to support the contras.

The US government used its rampant anticommunist and antiMarxist stance to investigate, harass, and detain the churches who were operating on moral grounds for the sanctity of human life, not on a Marxist principle. While it is true that many Marxists and communists come to organize and speak out due to their love for humanity and desire for people to have lives worth living, it is not true that religious people who feel that way overwhelmingly become Marxist. I am part of the Christian to Communist pipeline, and I talk with a lot of people who experience this transition, but it is not a given transition. Even so, “INS agents ransacked Nicgorski’s apartment while she was away on a religious retreat. They seized the Salvadorian woman who lived with her and confiscated all files and documents, including an article Nicogorski had written for a religious newsletter. Court evidence showed that an INS investigator had circled the words ‘poor and oppressed’ in the article, writing in the margin ‘Marxist ideology'” (269).

I constantly argue that everything is connected. And this particular chapter, purposefully or not, does a good job at illustrating how white supremacy informs decisions about immigration. Let me really quickly just say that immigrants are not “taking America’s jobs.” It is the choices of companies to pay slave wages that immigrants are forced to take. It is the companies who are fucking up the job market with this horrifically exploitive labor practices. Sadly, this book doesn’t even use the term “racism,” it only talks of “bias.” Lernoux discusses that one judge who oversaw the Sanctuary cases “revealed the cultural bias f the Southwest” in that he had “no patience with Hispanic witnesses, perhaps because he could not speak Spanish” (271). She then acknowledges that “Anglos had never had time for Hispanics… Mexicans were for a long time treated as animals, and indeed Anglos spoke of them as being not quite human” (271). For fuck’s sake, this is not simply bias. It goes on to say that “the general attitude of the police in the region that ‘bashing wets’ (for wetbacks – a derogatory term for illegal Mexican laborers) was the best way to uphold law and order” (217). “Law and order” is a constant phrase used today and was used in the 1960s and 1970s to squash civil rights movements. But okay. Page 272 describes “just how cruel and corrupt” immigration services was and that this is described in detail in a 5 part series by John Crewdson in 1980. I have not read this series, but maybe you will and then you’ll let me know what you find. It is on the internet. Additionally, on page 274, Lernoux describes the conditions in which refugees were kept. It’s not much different from what Obama, Trump, and Biden have all done (and are still doing).

Hilariously enough, Lernoux does point out that people “fleeing countries with leftist governments usually had no trouble gaining entry – for example, Poles, Nicaraguans, and Iranians. In 1984, when only 328 Salvadoran applications out of 5,455 were approved, one-quarter of all Nicaraguan requests went through. More than three-fifths of the Iranian and seven-eighths of the Polish applications were granted” (274).

Lernoux highlights that Sanctuary was not endorsed by the entire Catholic Church. I mean, some of the Church are clearly Nazis (actual Nazis, not an exaggeration here and that post may go up next week). Some parts of the US Catholic Church remained silent, and some were supporting the contras. Father Elizondo in Texas is reported to have said “We’re not questioning the legality but the morality” after INS agents pursued two refugees into the driveway of his Texas church. He pointed out that “something can be perfectly legal and totally immoral, but this country is not used to those distinctions” (279). In a country that devalues human life and stability of our entire planet for the accumulation of profit, I would have to agree with that statement.

Look, I am not a Quaker like Corbette or a Catholic like Elizondo. I don’t even consider myself to be religious or spiritual anymore. I joke that I am an “evangelical Marxist.” However, I think it’s extremely important to see what communities different than my own are doing, how they are standing up in the struggle, and where those communities draw their lines. As someone who believes real change that benefit all of us will only come when the majority of people come together and fight for it, I would highly encourage you look past the narrative that we are all divided and instead look to where we are connected.

You may be pleasantly surprised on occasion.

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