Lots of people believe that the afterlife starts here. Perhaps feeling more sophisticated than Dante, whose elaborate visions of hell, purgatory and heaven still shape our notions of what comes after death, they say that heaven starts with our anticipating its total love here on earth while hell begins with earthly hatred and cold indifference. With either, we get what we choose. While the Divine Comedy is one of western literature’s greatest works, it is art and not Scripture. Because Dante populated hell with hierarchs and clergy of his time, like Pope Celestine V for resigning the papacy because he could not stand the curial intrigue, the church put it on the Index of Forbidden Books for a couple centuries. Today Celestine is a saint and the Index is history.
There is something to be said for this continuity between our lives on each side of the grave. It’s not just that we earn our just desserts, reward for doing good and punishment for evil. It’s that good begets good, like giving someone a cup of cold water in the Lord’s name. Or else the cruel exclusion of someone unfortunate, the way Lazarus in the Lord’s parable wasted away at the rich man’s gate, results in a like exclusion, with the rich man crying out for cold water. Indeed we get what we begin here.
Our American immigration system is broken. So said Bishop Dennis Sullivan in English and Spanish last year at a filled to overflowing Mass for migrants in Vineland. President Obama has forcibly returned south of the border over 2 million undocumented Latinos. The enormous majority of the 11 million such immigrants now in the U.S. is here seeking a better life. They are not trying to avoid prosecution at home nor do they seek to live off some dole that many legal citizens imagine to be available to them. They are not here to take jobs. Like most immigrants, including our European ancestors, the golden dream is usually to earn enough money to leave permanently the United States and return to the places dear to them, where everyone speaks their language and shares their culture, where they can live out their days in prosperity. Of the 4.5 million Italians who immigrated here between 1880 and 1924, more than half returned to Italy with their mission accomplished. Even more would have returned had it not been for their grown children refusing. Immigration opponents ignore this in their haste to expel unwanted foreigners.
At this point it would be useless to quote Vatican II or the United Nations’ Declaration on Human Rights about migrants seeking a better life take precedence over civil boundaries. These mean little to the sadly exclusivist mindset. So it would be more secular and capitalist to show that policies to exclude Latino immigrants legal and otherwise actually harm us – and justly so. These policies do not help us. They do not protect U.S. jobs for Americans even while unemployment is higher than 6 percent. They do not fairly save us money: the Social Security money that the undocumented have taken from their pay will never revert back to them. Instead, those policies cost us money since the produce they harvest in working conditions unacceptable to unemployed native-born Americans will otherwise rot in the fields with no one to do the badly undercompensated stoop labor. Last year Alabama righteously legislated the harassment of Latinos both with and without papers until farmers cried to the legislature that they could not find enough workers at harvest time. Jean Paul Sartre said that hell is other people. Hell began here for Alabama when it decided to exclude Latinos.
How would we like it if those grand Jersey tomatoes, blueberries, corn, strawberries and so much other produce skyrocketed in price because the perennially underpaid Latino workforce was barred from the rich soil of Jersey farms? Would you pay 50 dollars for a quart of berries or any crop that must be handpicked because machinery simply cannot do the job?
The U.S. bishops affirm that the nation has a right to secure its borders. Addressing this problem they called for a probationary period using work visas, leading to citizenship if the applicant stays crime-free. Xenophobia is the fear of foreign people, a hellish, Sartrian fear that is its own punishment, especially in a land like ours with so much space and opportunity.
Since these things are so, the Second Amendment must be repealed.
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