It wasn’t adultery. It wasn’t theft. It wasn’t even murder that infuriated Jesus, as the Gospels tell us. It was hypocrisy, and it came from Jerusalem society’s most respected people. Read in Matthew’s 23rd chapter how Jesus ripped into the scribes and Pharisees for their legal hair-splitting on small issues like hand washing while they ignored major ones like charity for aliens, orphans and widows. He said they gagged on legal gnats while swallowing whole camels in their religious game-playing. How about verse 15: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees! You travel over sea and land to make a single recruit, and when you have him you make him twice as fit for hell as you are!”
Aliens were non-Jewish residents in Israel who felt the alienation of unwanted minorities. Unlike the destitute orphans and widows, they were despised, not even allowed in the homes of Jews, let alone in their worship gatherings on Sabbath. They resemble our many immigrants who do not have legal clearance to be in the United States. They fled here because of the dire poverty south of our border to find work, not to sponge off the largess of the tax-paying public. They came here for most of the same reasons our ancestors came. They wanted to feed their families, which they could not do where they regretted leaving, their homelands where all spoke their language and all shared their culture.
Our “illegals” came without proper admission papers. So, many say they should go back and reenter legally, the way our grandparents did. But most do not know that the only legal requirement for immigrants to America right into the 1950s was that they be healthy. Ellis Island was a kind of medical dispensary with overnight facilities. If someone was disease-free, he/she could enter. Otherwise he/she was detained until recuperation or even returned overseas. Some of these latter, desperate after six weeks in the hold of a heaving ship, committed suicide rather than go back.
Columnist Harold Meyerson recently wrote about Josue Diaz, a day laborer hired to help reclaim post-hurricane Beaumont, Texas. He noted that American workers were given gloves, masks and boots to counter infection from contaminated water and dead animals. He and his kind were not. When they complained, the boss cut their salaries in half. They went on strike. The boss called the law. After four months in federal immigration jail, his union, the New Orleans Congress of Day Laborers, got them freed. Since then, three of Diaz’s group were deported, Diaz faces deportation, and one died.
But Diaz and his 12 friends were lucky. Farm workers lack on-the-job protection like that afforded belatedly by Diaz’s union. Since 1938, when Depression-era laws were enacted, they are pointedly excluded from minimum-wage coverage till the present day, the kind that other workers take for granted. To get the votes of Southern senators, President Roosevelt agreed to exclude occupations held largely by African-Americans. See anything unfair here?
Hypocritical bosses, when workers complain, arbitrarily cut wages, fire and inform immigration police, who nearly always deport undocumented workers. Hypocritical Americans call for ever higher walls along our 2,400 mile Southern border, yet enjoy strawberries and blueberries at low cost for which they would have to pay quadruple if legal Americans opted to do stoop labor – which they don’t. Hypocritical office seekers inflame unaware voters with half-truths and lies to vilify innocent third parties who differ little from the voters’ ancestors.
Yet all the hypocrites parade into church and synagogue each Sabbath and piously pray that the sermon will not touch their systemic violence to defenseless aliens. Their champions, like Glenn Beck, tell listeners to protest if their preachers preach social justice, the kind that counters hypocrisy the way Jesus did. How do they imagine God will hear their prayer when they block their ears to the poor? Do they make God out in their image and likeness, as though God uses power to crush people in the name of profit?
Even economics testifies that the work done by undocumented aliens benefits us, the documented, enormously. If we were to stop absolutely all illegal immigration and deport the 12 million illegals already here, our economy would collapse because blood money from the slavery in place would dry up. As it is, money sent back to Latin American relatives provides buyers of our exports. If aliens were paid even minimum wages, they would finally be getting justice and thus would pay taxes and buy products.
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