Once again our Legislature is considering bills designed at punishing immigrants, as well as the people who stand in solidarity with them. Unfortunately, the Arizona Legislature is more interested in reacting to fear instead of doing something positive in the face of the tragedies at our border.
Pope Francis correctly spoke this week from that U.S.-Mexico border, “We have already lost many decades thinking and believing that everything will be resolved by isolating, separating, incarcerating, and ridding ourselves of problems, believing that these policies really solve problems.”
Our Bible instead calls us to care about the plight of those who are screaming out to us in their struggle, and to reach out a welcoming and supportive hand to them — “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matthew 25:35).”
It’s shameful to see our Legislature turning their backs on those in need, standing in self-righteous indignation, as if God wants us to protect ourselves at the expense of others. The Arizona tradition of scapegoating immigrants, with laws such as SB 1070, has tarnished our name throughout the country and brought a boycott that has cost our economy millions of dollars.
Now the Arizona Legislature is proposing SB 1377, which criminalizes all undocumented immigrants and mandates strict sentencing, not only for them, but also for any humanitarian aid workers or congregations that assist them, subverting the spiritual ethic that has built America.
HB 2223 and SB 1378, which attack Sanctuary cities, compromises public safety for all by eroding community policing practices that make victims of crimes more willing to go to the police. These proposed bills are not only un-American, but un-Christian as well.
Have we forgotten what we all learned in Sunday School and Bible classes — that we should act out of an ethic of love instead of retribution? The pope continued, “We have forgotten to focus on what must truly be our concern: people’s lives; their lives, those of their families, and those who have suffered.”
Bills like those the Arizona Legislature is considering do nothing to improve our safety; they only increase the fear that separates us even more from each other.
Those who entered Sanctuary from deportation orders, living at Southside Presbyterian Church and St. Francis in the Foothills United Methodist here in Tucson, including Rosa Robles Loreto, Francisco Perez Cordoba and Daniel Neyoy-Ruiz, taught us a very different story. In them we discovered ways to bridge the differences between us in order to glimpse the possibilities before us.
Thank you to all who cared enough to reach out and be changed by “the least of these!”
As Pope Francis said, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel.”
Father Javier Calvillo Salazar made an unusual offering to Pope Francis this week: a boxful of migrants’ old shoes, worn and dirty. Those shoes challenge us, to decide if the miles that have worn them down will become our journey as well; if the dirt that covers them will become part of our own story; and if the lives that survived in those old shoes, will also live in us, and in our state.
