While the immigration debate in this country has continued for years, Congress has failed to pass adequate reform legislation. Our national immigration policy now includes enforcement raids, such as the December one in Greeley, which fail to address the complicated economic and social forces driving immigration.
Unfortunately, these actions can often result in the separation of children who are U.S. citizens from their parents and the alienation of immigrant communities. They are symptoms of a greater illness: a seriously flawed immigration system which needs major repair.
In this country, we employ a permanent underclass of human beings who build our roads, pick our fruit, clean our hotel rooms, and landscape our lawns. Most of these men and women, like millions of immigrants before them, want a better life for their children. They pay billions into our tax and Social Security systems. But even as we benefit from their labor, we too often do not offer them the basic protection of law. When convenient, we blame them for our social ills and, yes, conduct enforcement raids that intimidate them and their families.
Our immigration policies undergird this troubling status quo. Despite billions spent on enforcement each year, as many as 90 percent of unauthorized migrants find jobs once they arrive, or, in the case of visa overstays, remain in the United States. While as many as 500,000 of these workers are added to our economy each year, only 5,000 immigrant visas become available for them to enter legally.
Congress can end these current policy and humanitarian failures by adopting a comprehensive immigration reform package. Any serious reform should provide a path to permanent residency for the undocumented already here, and create avenues for future workers and their families to enter the country legally. Such reforms could end the perceived need for raids by bringing the undocumented out of the shadows to join their local communities.
Maintaining the rule of law is a vital aspect of reform. But we should remember that while we are a nation of laws, we also are a nation founded on the principle of justice. Accomplishing immigration reform would restore justice to our immigration system and strengthen, not undermine, the rule of law.
By providing the undocumented population an opportunity to work toward permanent residency through earned legalization, we would encourage them to identify themselves to the government. By creating avenues for migrant workers and their families to cross the border safely, we would better enable the government to monitor who enters the country and for what purpose. Law enforcement officials would then be able to focus on apprehending real criminals: drug smugglers, human traffickers and potential terrorists.
It does not take political courage to authorize immigration raids. It does take political courage to seek and achieve real change in immigration policies sustained on the weakness of those without rights or a voice.
It is my hope, and that of many other people of faith, that our elected federal officials will find the courage in the months ahead to pass immigration reform and rethink enforcement tactics that tear families apart. In the end, the ultimate question for Congress – and for all Americans – is whether we want to live in a society that accepts the toil of migrants with one hand, and then treats them like criminals with the other. For our own sake, I want to believe the answer is “no.”
Charles Chaput is the Roman Catholic archbishop of Denver.
