With a record 72 million people designated as refugees world-wide, our charity fatigue seems pushed to its limit. With 26 acknowledged wars raging, causing much of the migration, it seems that the social distancing of coronavirus would separate more combatants. But oddly, the labor shortage of our country and its economy need more people to fill the job openings causing so much economic worry about how we are going to provide enough workers to produce what the nation needs. Unemployment has been at record lows, at least up until the COVID-19 plague. So the Creator to whom we direct fervent prayer for contagion relief presents us with a challenge: either let down our border walls or else suffer the pains of self-induced isolationism.
What irony. Either we as one of the world’s least densely populated countries open our borders to refugees desperate to flee murderous regimes like those in central America, or we invite our economy to falter because we choose to bar people willing to take the least desirable jobs. Such people are proven to be much more law-abiding than native born citizens. And why not? They know that crime would see to their being returned to the cauldrons of fear they fled because of gang violence, failed police forces, theft, stagnant economies and little job opportunity. The win-win solution is too incomprehensible to too many.
Every nation has a right to secure borders. Every person fleeing injustice at great risk to his/her life has a right to that life. Blindfolded Lady Justice holds weight scales to measure impartially which of two competing rights is heavier. That is the whole point of civil justice. Nothing is gained by denying either of two rival claims. But the trick is to determine which has precedence. Pro-life followers of Jesus admit that economic considerations are highly important. They deny neither secure borders nor the fear that immigrants will take jobs from the native born. They do see the need for a fairer balance.
A few years ago the agri-giants of Alabama lobbied their representatives to outlaw the hiring of undocumented workers. It backfired. There were not enough documented job seekers to pick the crops, which then rotted in the fields. They quickly reversed themselves and had the law repealed because not enough native born job seekers came to be hired, mostly because the work was too hard. Such applicants lasted on average one day picking crops. Stoop labor in the noonday heat among crops sprayed with pesticides does not qualify as a Sunday picnic. What would you do if you were a grower needing seasonal help, willing to pay a fair wage with humane working conditions? What if you wanted to work?
What about the nativist fear that newcomers would have a second loyalty to the land from which they came? My ancestors from Italy faced this charge and had to prove they were just as loyal as the native born. This they did, volunteering for service in America’s military beyond their proportion of the population, even when the enemy was Italy in World War II. In that war the internment of Japanese citizens of the U.S. had their civil rights violated because bureaucrats in Washington arbitrarily decided that such “foreigners” could not be trusted. Tax-paid reparations were given to them for this slander.
Undocumented children are still kept in cages apart from their families, more as a warning to others considering the same illegal border crossing than as a punishment for breaking immigration law. These children are being used as pawns in a way that shames us, COVID-19 or no COVID-19. We imagine how we would react if separated from our children for five minutes, let alone for months on end by the law.
The Lord Jesus was a child refugee with his parents, fleeing to Egypt when the Roman law in Israel in the person of Herod sought to take his life and the lives of all the male children of two years or less. I have yet to hear a Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal argue that the Holy Family should have been prosecuted for violating secure borders. We need to remember that Jesus was an Asian, in the southwest corner of that continent, subject to the same unfair vagaries of law as today’s refugees.
Pope Francis said those who build walls will become prisoners of the walls they build.
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