Spirit in Action
Living Illegal - The Human Face of Unauthorized Immigration
Marie Friedmann Marquardt is co-author of Living Illegal - The Human Face of Unauthorized Immigration, a book that combines head & heart to look at the realities around this political whipping boy of an issue. Marie is currently scholar-in-residence at Emory University's Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia.
- Broadcast on:
- 13 Jan 2013
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(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Today for Spirit in Action, I'm pleased to welcome Marie Friedman-Marcourt, one of the co-authors of Living Illegal, the human face of unauthorized immigration. Living Illegal is a book combining both head and heart, working to dispel unfounded prejudice and inspire workable real solutions to the tensions and dilemmas around immigration and the fears surrounding it. Marie Friedman-Marcourt is currently scholar in residence at the Candler School of Theology of Emery University in Atlanta, Georgia, where she's seen the issues and tensions playing out on the ground. Marie joins us by phone from Atlanta, Georgia. Marie, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. - Thank you for having me. - Unfortunately, there's a lot of misinformation that's going around there, particularly on the campaign trail. Politicians seem to grab upon the whole feature of immigration and how important it truly is to us, but they give it a real negative slant. So as opposed to the positive image that I think you're helping nurture through your book, could you give us the contrast that you're hearing about out in public now? - Yeah, I think a couple of the things that we're hearing over and over again that we really need to examine closely. The first one is this claim that we're hearing that our problem, our immigration problem, is a problem of border enforcement, particularly the border between the United States and Mexico. So we sort of get this image of boards of illegal immigrants crossing the border and coming into the United States. Currently, really what we have is a zero net inflow. That is, we have about the same number of people leaving across that border as coming in. So really, the issue of border security is not our primary problem with regard to unauthorized immigration. The problem is, how are we going to integrate? Or expel the almost 11 million unauthorized immigrants that are settled here in the United States. I think the other one that I keep hearing again and again that really we need to look at carefully and challenge, is this claim being made by all of the candidates that illegal or unauthorized immigrants should get in line. They should wait their turn in line. They shouldn't skip the line. And it's clear, even the Washington Post editorial board wrote about this recently. The overwhelming majority of unauthorized immigrants do not have a line to get into. That if there's no way for them to adjust their status to become legal here, if there were a way, there's no doubt. They will be clamoring to get into that line. But the line won't exist until we repair our federal immigration policy. I'm sure that there's some statements, perhaps, of politicians that are seared into your mind. Are there specific words that come up that people are going to recognize that have been so counter to the reality that you've seen? The one that's seared in my mind right now that it sounds actually quite simple, but it's deeply problematic, is something we're hearing that Romney talk about quite a bit and the others are picking up on it. And that is a strategy that they call self-deportation. And again, it seems quite benign, and that's why I'm so concerned about it. Self-deportation is a set of strategies. Sometimes it's also called attrition through enforcement that they're promoting. And that, in fact, several states and localities are experimenting with. And the basic idea is make life as miserable and difficult as possible for unauthorized immigrants so that they will make the decision on their own to leave, either leave our state or leave our city or leave the United States. And what's happening on the ground in states and communities that are experimenting with these self-deportation policies is devastating the civil rights violations, the simple humanitarian consequences. And not only is it devastating for unauthorized immigrants, but is devastating for entire communities, for the economies of those communities, for the kind of civility in those communities. So this is a really problematic approach that is gaining more and more traction, particularly, and I'm hearing it a lot right now from Mitt Romney. - What's surprising to me is how much hay Republican candidates are attempting to make about unauthorized immigration. My impression is that President Obama, while he speaks fairly compassionately about immigration, has done more enforcement and done more of what I think the Republicans are advocating. Is that your experience too? - That's absolutely right. It's absolutely true that Obama has, in fact, stepped up immigration enforcement in many ways. He just hit the million person mark in terms of the deportations under his administration. That is twice as many as his predecessor undertook. That's George W. Bush. He also has increased the budget for an immigration enforcement from about 9 billion in 2004 under Bush to about 17.2 billion under Obama. So what Obama has tried to do, he's tried to prove to Republican lawmakers that he has passed on enforcement, that he's beefed up the border and that he's taking deportation seriously. His administration has sort of promoted this idea that if they can prove this, then Republicans will come around and that the administration will get the political capital they need to undertake real comprehensive immigration reform, which is the solution that we, in fact, need. But frankly, as the years go by, it becomes less and less likely that Republicans in the Senate and the House are going to stand behind the administration on this issue. So the fact that he continues to attempt this strategy, it's really a problem. It's moving us in the wrong direction. - It's pretty clear to me that you feel compassionate about the immigrants that have come in. Is that a place that you started from, or is that a place you got to after exposure and research and so on? Did you start from there? Was that your first impulse? - My first impulse was a scholar. I had a lot of theoretical questions. I wanted to ask about migration and globalization and other things. But the kind of research that I and my colleagues do is spending a lot of time with immigrants and their local communities and their families and their churches and their workplaces and getting to know them. And we've been doing this research collectively for several decades. And as we've gotten to know these families, they're just without any doubt that we feel both compassion and also a sense of really shared identity and shared struggles. And one of the things that we try to bring out in living a legal is that when native-born citizens like us, we being among them, have the opportunity to sit down at a table with and get to know unauthorized immigrants, our perspective on these issues changes really significantly. And we look for good information. We seek out good information. And once we seek out good information, we find that we need to seek much broader changes both in our local communities and in federal immigration policy. - So do you think that maybe that's what happened with Rick Perry? I mean, he was crucified, I think, amongst the Republican candidates, especially for the statement he made that if people opposed aid to help unauthorized immigrants, their children, you know, make it through college, that you didn't have a heart. He got lambasted for that one. - Yeah, and it's just so extraordinary to see how far political rhetoric has shifted on this particular issue. So this is a very specific set of between two and three million of our unauthorized immigrants were brought here as children every year, about 65,000 young adults graduate from high school unauthorized. And they don't have any way to adjust their status. And what Rick Perry was promoting was the DREAM Act, which is a piece of legislation that would give these kids a chance to adjust their status to become legal if they either serve in the military for two years or go to college for two years. And the thing about the DREAM Act was attempted to pass it for 10 years now, for more than a decade. It came up first in 2000. And it increasingly gained public support. So the last time it came up for a vote in 2010, it passed without any trouble in the House of Representatives. It got 54 votes in Senate, out of the 60 it would need. Polling showed that 70% of Americans, when they understood what the DREAM Act was about, supported it. Yet these candidates, in their kind of attempt to focus on the very, very right end of the political spectrum, these candidates have turned the DREAM Act into this hot button political issue, which is really striking to those of us who have followed this. Because if nothing else, the DREAM Act seems a very reasonable solution. We've got people who are American in every way, who've never been back to their police affordances. They were two or three or four years old, who've done very well in the schools and who are fully prepared and committed and ready to enter into the workforce or to serve in the military. And we're barring them from doing that. So what we're doing is we're not letting them reach their full potential. And we're also not letting them contribute to the nation's full potential. - On my understanding was that the DREAM Act had some significant bipartisan support. Was that the moderate Republicans or were there? I can fully imagine conservative Republicans supporting it, because it really has got a main line in its values. - The DREAM Act has in the past had great bipartisan support and in fact, comprehensive federal immigration reform that would create a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants who prove or demonstrate that they're prepared and ready to enter fully into the life of the nation. Moderate Republicans like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John McCain of Arizona, Martinez in Florida, they all were very vocal supporters and have in fact really changed their course. But significantly in the past year or two years, which again, is really troubling to see because it's much more political strategy I think than what they feel in their heart of hearts about this issue. - That is so sad that people for political expediency do things that don't match their values. And of course, we'd hope people match their values with full information connected with it. Of course, that's what you're doing through living illegal. You've got a lot of vignettes, personal and on the ground stuff. What's the background to producing the book? - We actually set out, as I mentioned, two of us are political scientists and two of us are sociologists who focus specifically on religion. We've been working together for many years now, doing research on Latino immigrants in particular. And we set out to look at Guatemalan, Brazilian and Mexican immigrants, both what we call their transnational connections, the connections that they maintain to their places of origin and also inter-ethnic relations, especially in new destinations in these areas that we sometimes call hyper-growth areas for immigration, areas like where I live in Georgia, Metro Atlanta, that have experienced this extraordinary growth in Latino immigrant population. Again, as we spent time in these communities doing research on the sorts of questions that we brought to the research, we found again and again that the issue that was so pressing, that immigrants face every single day, and not only immigrants, but the people who shared their local communities, their schools, their churches, was this problem of them not being able to be legally present in the US, and that every year it became more and more difficult for unauthorized immigrants. And we happened to choose a community called County, Georgia, that really was at the forefront of the new local enforcement efforts. The forefront of really strident anti-immigrant rhetoric. And we found that what we really needed to speak about was this issue. And particularly as we talked to groups in our local communities, we needed to provide good solid information that explains to people, why do people migrate without authorization? Why can't they adjust their status? And also that it reminded us that what we're talking about is human beings who share many of the same values, values of hard work and commitment to family, willingness to make great sacrifice, these sorts of values. So we found that we were writing a different book than we set out to, but it's been a good journey. - To a significant degree, I think that a lot of the unauthorized immigrants that we're talking about are relatively conservative in their values and therefore would naturally be supporters of the Republican end of the spectrum. And yet that's where the most opposition to them comes from. That is to say, I guess the conservatives in the USA don't like the conservatives from Mexico or Guatemala or wherever. - Yeah, I mean, clear on social issues, many unauthorized immigrants do share the values that conservatives talk about the most vocally and loudly. One of the real ironies, I think, for example, this discussion of family values and that conservative value, the family unit being able to hold together. Yet we have an immigration policy that makes a permanent legal resident who's here with full immigration status, wait 10 to 12 years for his spouse and his young children, minor children, to be able to reunite with him and live legally with him in the United States. And again, as you point out, many of the immigrants that we've gotten to know really do share these social values. And another thing that I think it's really important to note along these lines is if we look at our candidates, particularly our Republican candidates, two of them, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, are very outspokenly devout Catholics and of course the majority of the authorized Latino immigrants in the US and many unauthorized immigrants from other parts of the world share that their Catholics face. And then of course, Mitt Romney is Mormon and Mormonism is growing rapidly among Latinos and the woman churches working hard to do outreach to Latinos. And both the Catholic and the Mormon churches have really spoken very loudly and clearly on the need for immigration policies that are quite contradictory to the policies that Santoram and Romney and Gingrich are promoting. So again, while these candidates are sort of counting their own religious conservatism and they're linked to these traditions, they're also at the same time really disregarding their own churches, teachings and perspectives on immigration. - I had a guest on previously this year who talked about the fact that numbers in the Catholic church as percentage of the population have held relatively steady for some decades, but the Anglo percentage has precipitously declined. If it wasn't for all the Latino immigration, the Catholic church would have shrunk drastically over the past decades. - That's right, not only Latino immigration, but you know, immigration from places like Indonesia, Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines, even India. We have the Catholic church and we, again, in the region of the country where I am, these new destinations, we're seeing this explosion in Catholic churches. The Catholic churches are bursting at the seams. You know, this huge growth of this kind of vibrancy and that they're tensions because there's not enough space for all the groups that wanna meet and all the activities that they wanna undertake. But this growth has also, it has led to some tensions inside the churches as well because, you know, with growth come growing pains. And the growth has been accompanied by real significant diversification. One of the things that's interesting though that we've seen is that inside some of the churches that have had the most rapid growth, they of course are also in communities that have had the most rapid growth and diversification of their populations. And some of these churches, not all of them, certainly not all of them, but some of them are coming up with really innovative strategies for finding good solutions. Again, to the real problems they face, problems about, you know, limited resources and different cultural traditions and ecclesial traditions, but they're coming up with good solutions. And in a sense, I think in that way, they provide a model for the broader community, how to do it well. - Well, I do hope to get to a few of those shortly. First of all, I thought we should maybe address one thing that you addressed early in the book. You'd use the term unauthorized immigrant instead of the more common illegal immigrant. Could you explain for folks why you choose that term? - Yeah, this is important. Using this term, illegal really keeps us from seeing the issue clearly. Unauthorized immigrants committed an offense that's equivalent to a misdemeanor when they came into the United States without authorization or overstayed their visas. About half of our unauthorized immigrants are here because they came here with permission and they overstayed. So this is an offense that's akin to speeding. And, you know, if you, I don't know about you, at high speed, does that make me an illegal driver or an illegal driver? - Oh my goodness, you speed, Marie, I didn't know. - Every once in a while, only when I'm trying to get to an interview with you, right? - Oh, okay. - So, you know, another thing that we know, we have good data to show, is that unauthorized immigrants, in fact, are less likely to commit crimes than the native foreign and citizens. And they're more often victims of crimes and perpetrators. So to call them illegal, suggest that they have a sort of criminal nature. And, you know, simply the data doesn't hold that up. And then it also, again, allows for the sort of distancing. And again, you asked me at the beginning about the things that we're kind of hearing circulate. And one is that illegal immigrants live in blatant disregard of the law. And I mean, I could tell you stories for hours about the links to which unauthorized immigrants go to try to abide by the laws of their local communities or of the country. For example, they would love to be licensed drivers, but they don't have the capacity to in any but three states. Many of the unauthorized immigrants I know actually have applied for and been given tax ID numbers, which are numbers that allow them to pay federal income taxes, even though, of course, when they pay into things like Social Security and Medicare, they'll never receive those benefits. They want to do the right thing. They do, and they want to be legally here. And they would be willing to accept penalties. They'd be willing to accept a fine or something along those lines in order to be given the opportunity to be legally present in the US. - You make this clear, of course, in the book, Marie, but why do they come to the USA? Why don't they just stay home and make their country good? I sure that's a question that surfaces frequently. - It is, and the way the question is usually asked, and it's a tough question. It's one that I really understand people want to get this. The way that it's usually asked is, is it our responsibility that is the responsibility of the United States to fix the problems of other countries? And I think that this is a very important question, because what we know about migration, and this is not just migration to the United States, it's really if we look at global patterns of migration, we often hear about migration talked about in the language of push and pull. So there's extreme poverty in one place, and there's wealth in another place. So the poverty, the push, and the wealth is a pull. It's not nearly that simple. What we know is that people migrate across bridges that have been created or built by the relationships that the United States creates with other nation states, particularly in the past 20 years, economic relationships. So when we encourage countries like Mexico or the Central American countries, and now further into South America to enter into free trade agreements and free trade relationships with the United States, that significantly changes local economies in ways that really require that at least some members of local communities migrate to find work and earn wages that will support those local communities. Basically, the local economic base dissolves, goes away. So it's no longer possible to earn a living the way that these communities traditionally have done so. So I've done research in a community in Mexico and my colleagues in Guatemala and Brazil, communities that now rely for their existence on migrants in the United States, the money that migrants are sending home and also the jobs that migrants are creating by, for example, building a retirement home or a vacation home in their home community or sending money for local projects to create a better water system or to build a soccer field or to build a church in their hometown. So they're not only sending money, but they're also creating jobs. At the same time that they are investing in communities in the United States, I think there's a misconception that unauthorized immigrants send all their money back to their place of origin. We know that they're also investing here. In fact, 47% of unauthorized immigrants who lived in the U.S. for more than 10 years own a home. - I saw that figure and I was thinking, yeah, but it's 100% if you're from here, you're not sending any of your money overseas. So it's still a cot, I guess. At least that's fair to recognize, right? - Yeah, I think one another thing is, that I found just in my kind of everyday experience with the families and the immigrants that we've worked with is that most unauthorized immigrants that I know and that we've gone to now in the work are not interested in becoming deeply in consumer debt, right? So they're very careful about their expenditures and they save enough money to send home. They live on what they earn, certainly not living frivolously, but they also are really creating one of the things that we see in these communities, like the communities where we've been doing research, all sorts of businesses have been generated by their presence and other businesses have been really strengthened by their presence. So businesses that cater toward Latino immigrants, whether it be a shop that sells soccer, everything soccer or whether it be a restaurant. And now in these same communities where we're seeing these enforcement policies really take effect and scare immigrants either out of their communities or on a Saturday, they don't go shopping any longer because they're afraid that they'll get pulled over while driving and end up in deportation. These businesses are suffering, closing their doors. And even those of us who are citizens who have been enjoying the Peruvian restaurant and the next neighborhood over no longer can do that. We too are seeing the effects of that. - I think there's a suspicion that the immigrants that we've had from Mexico, anywhere from South Central America, that a difference between them and the Irish immigrants that came in one wave or this Norwegian or all of those immigrants, those immigrants came with the intent to settle. Is that a valid difference between this current wave of unauthorized immigration and what we had previously? Is this a different character that we're dealing with? - Yeah, it's interesting. If you look back at history, so about a hundred years ago, the United States experienced the largest wave of immigration that the nation has had. And in fact, there were more immigrants living in the US, proportionally than currently. And there were immigrants from, you know, particularly from Southern and Eastern Europe. And when you look back at the historical record and how particularly as we started to experience economic decline as we are now, how people were responding and the worries that people had, they were so similar. You can almost transpose Italian for Mexican or Polish for Guatemalan. And really, so many of the same concerns existed. At that time, our concerns were proven wrong. We know, you know, I always sort of laugh, but now when I do an interview with Catholics in church here in Atlanta and the descendants of Polish and Italian immigrants call themselves the Anglos in the church, right? When it was the Anglos who were so concerned they would never incorporate into the life of the nation well enough to be assimilated, right? The United States has this remarkable capacity to integrate immigrants into this kind of richness of our cultural traditions really emerge from that. And, you know, our political tradition and other things. So we don't really see any evidence that that will be different for this group of immigrants. Historically, of course, migration between Mexico and the United States has existed for as long as Mexico and the United States have existed. When two nations are side by side, particularly when there's significant income disparity between those two nations, you're gonna see back and forth patterns of migration. And really historically, those patterns were circular. Generally Mexican men would migrate into the United States for a period of time when there was work available, when they needed the work, they would earn money, they would return, they would come back when work was available. The United States really instituted these circular patterns with migration ourselves in 1942. When we had a shortage of native-born male farm workers because of the war, we had men going off to war. We began to fight in a program called the Bracero Program, Mexican men to come and work as farm laborers, and they would work for periods of time and then return. That pattern actually worked fairly well until the mid-1990s, when we began to place a lot of emphasis on border enforcement. The unintended consequence of heightened border enforcement has been an authorized immigrant, rather than moving back and forth, have really settled in the United States and also brought their families to live with them because it's so risky and costly to go back and forth now. There's a sociologist, Douglas Massey, who's been doing work on this longitudinally now over the course of 30 years. That really shows this is the case. The border enforcement is in fact, one of the reasons our unauthorized immigrant population has swelled because that circular pattern has changed. But these immigrants, and particularly their children, have really embraced living in the United States and being a part of their local communities. And yet all these myths are propagated about them. Hardworking, I think that there is the idea of someone from Central South America, they all say manana, right? They sit under their sombrero and are lazy. I can't imagine a harder working people. Are the statistics bearing this out that they in fact work much harder than us? - Well, certainly, we did a lot of research on perceptions of Euro-Americans, white Americans and African-Americans of Latino immigrants. And interestingly, because they have the opportunity to work with them, this is in communities that have experienced a significant population growth. The overwhelming majority of white Americans and African-Americans recognize and affirm that Latino immigrants in particular are very, very hardworking. And again, this is linked to this value of making great sacrifices for your own children's well-being and for their own advancement. That's certainly a value that we see across the board. But another place where this is really playing out is in states like Georgia and Alabama that recently have passed this very stringent anti-immigrant legislation. Legislation that has had the impact, the precise of the impact that was intended and that is to make immigrants too afraid to live and work in Georgia and Alabama. Right after that legislation was passed, for example, in Georgia, Georgia passed the statewide legislation in April. And by early June, the growers associations, the farmers in Georgia were claiming they had a shortage of 11,800 workers. And despite the fact that Georgia was at about 10% unemployment at this point, those farmers could not find native-born workers to fill the jobs. And this was also happening in Alabama. And so the fruits riding on the vines, the growers are saying they're not going to be able to plant as much this year. So basically shrinking economies, right? Because, first of all, 'cause there's less demand because the populations are declining 'cause people are afraid to live and work in Georgia and Alabama. But also they don't have the workers to pick. The fruit ones, the vegetables ones, they've come to harvesting time. And so again, this really shows two things. One, it shows that there are segments of the economy in which it's clear that immigrants are not stealing jobs from the native born. And second, it shows that immigrant workers, I was on a panel recently, with someone from the Georgia Growers Association. And he said that the unauthorized immigrant farm workers, they were making upwards of $20 an hour because they worked very, very efficiently and effectively. Their wages were based on how much they harvested. This was a skill that they developed over time. And they were finding that native-born workers simply couldn't do anywhere near that level of productivity. - At least we saw that Stephen Colbert couldn't do it. - That's right, that was a great campaign. But you know, when they said that UFW, the United Farm Workers had this "Take Our Jobs" campaign, they basically said, "Yeah, come on and give it a try." If you want to. And Stephen Colbert, I think, was one of three or four people. (laughs) You know, willing to give it a try. And he clearly didn't last very long. - You know, I had the thought, and this maybe runs counter to a narrative that would be beneficial to your side of the argument or the concern that you've raised. And that is that one of the reasons that unauthorized immigrants work as hard as they do. And for as little as they do is because they don't have legal authorization to be here. And so therefore they can be exploited. If their status was resolved, then that would go away. And then, oh no, we'd have to pay them more. So I imagine that the industries that exploit them like us to have this nether region that they live in right now, it works to their advantage. - Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's one of the reasons that a good strategy of immigration enforcement that is not actually being done as well as it ought to be is to focus on employers. Because there are many industries in which the employers are the ones benefiting significantly from having an authorized immigrant workers. And many of them behind the scenes, and now in Alabama, they've come out very clearly on this. And in Alabama, both the construction industries and farm girls associations are coming out and saying, you've got to change this law, or else the economy is gonna take a nose dive because we cannot find workers to fill the work. And because you've made it so difficult for us to find employees. And I think without any doubt, the situation of unauthorized workers would be better if they had legal status. They would be able to address any kind of abuses. They have in the workplace better. They would be able to demand if they're working conditions in wages. But I should also say that a week or two though, I was at an event where two economists from the Federal Reserve reported on some work that they've been doing recently, looking at the impact on wages for native farm workers of working in companies that also employ unauthorized workers. And again, most of our general perception is that native farm workers' wages will decline because of having unauthorized workers, right? But in fact, what they found was that was not the case. They looked across several industries and found average across those industries, minimal decline of about $56 a year for the native farm worker who's working in a company that also employs unauthorized workers. But in some industries, they actually found an increase in wages for native farm workers, particularly the service industry that require communication skills. They found that in those cases, native farm workers were in fact, increasing their wages relative to the unauthorized workers. They were working alongside. - If you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit In Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet. This is a Northern Spirit Radio Production website, nordanspirradio.org. On the site, find all of our archives of over six and a half years. You'll find links to our guests like to Marie Friedman-Marcourt, who is co-author of Living Illegal, the human face of unauthorized immigration. There's also a place on our site where you can leave us a comment. We love seeing who's visited and what you liked and what you don't like. It helps guide us for the future. Again, we're speaking with Marie Friedman-Marcourt, co-author of Living Illegal. Well, you mentioned Marie, the timeline of immigration. I wonder if you could revisit some of that. It wasn't always necessary to even be authorized to immigrate to the United States in the past, right? - That's right. It wasn't until 1924 that the United States had a comprehensive immigration policy and that was when we sort of created the category of the illegal or unauthorized immigrant. And that Immigration Act in 1924, it's really important for us to kind of look back at and see how and why it came about. As I've mentioned, 1924 was really the end of a very significant way of immigration. The largest proportionally that we've had in the United States. And much like our current wave of immigration, which really picked up steam in the 1980s, immigration was not only more in terms of numbers, but there was a great diversity of immigrants brought into the nation relative to prior eras. So particularly Southern and Eastern European immigrants were perceived to be really so different that they were threatening the core of the nation. And what happened in the time leading up to 1924, I should note actually that in the 1880s, and then again in 1907, the United States did set out very specific policies that barred Chinese and Japanese immigrants from entering the United States. So those policies were already in existence. And then we have this period of great diversification of the immigrant population. And you know, starting in the early to mid 1900s, this real wave of anti-immigrant sentiment took over the nation. And it happened along with a period of economic decline in the 1910s. And this really resulted in this 1924 policy. And the policy was explicitly aiming to return the United States in terms of its ethnic configuration to the pre 1880 ethnic configuration. So it created a quota system that would replicate the ethnic configuration of the nation prior to 1880. And what that would do was create radical boundaries around the number of Southern and Eastern Europeans, and also pretty much closed off immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere entirely. So we existed under that policy for a period of time from 1924 until 1965. In that period of time, it's interesting when you look at where we stand in history, sometimes we look simply at the era that came just prior to us. And the era that came just prior to our era, it's really anomalous. It's very much an aberration. It's very different from the history of the United States as a whole. So the United States has always been a nation that's experienced very significant migration, except for this period from 1924 to 1965, where this law really created a situation in which immigration flows declined rapidly, precipitously. And in 1965, and this was during the civil rights era, the federal government realized that we could no longer in good conscience as a nation have an immigration policy that was so explicitly linked to race and ethnicity. And so 1965 was the next kind of major piece of federal immigration legislation, the Immigration and Nationality Act, that created a much more fair and balanced system of quotas. And that in fact is the law that we still exist under. And while the intentions of that law were really quite good, the law has not kept up with the really significant changes, particularly in the global economy, that have shifted immigration once again, the law has remained static. And so it does, without any doubt, need revision. We really need a new immigration policy for this era. - Well, let's talk about another very important and interesting aspect of living illegal, of this book that you've compiled with your co-authors. You have an entire chapter, which is dedicated exclusively to how churches have worked with, become aware of, been influenced by these immigrants. And you talk about Catholic churches, you're talking about evangelical churches or charismatic churches, you're talking about Presbyterian church in another case. Give us some of the flavor of what it's done for the people involved. - Yeah, so really one of the most interesting areas of research for us, we originally were just seeking places in local communities, physical spaces, where immigrants and non-immigrants had the possibility of interacting with one another, kind of coming together. And so we started to look at churches as one of those places and we found that they really are particularly in these new destinations. They're among the most important places. In some cases, we mentioned before how immigrants are really increasing the vitality of churches. In some cases, particularly Catholic churches and other kind of gospel churches that actually have been brought from Latin American countries and kind of had missions in the United States. These churches are just really explaining what energy and vitality. And in other cases, you have, and this is the cases for the Presbyterian church that we looked at. And we know this is the case for many other churches, churches that were in decline, that the native born US, oftentimes white American population, was aging and the church was still declining in numbers and participation. They invited immigrant communities to worship in their spaces. This is a phenomenon that we call the nesting congregation phenomenon, basically to help pay the rent, but also to give them a place to worship. And another church has started to take it a step further and they said, so we don't just want you to exist side by side with us or to be our, you know, we're the landlord and you're the renter to the tenant. We really wanna build a relationship. So they started to do really innovative work to try and create multicultural worship services. We did research in a church that was Korean, Brazilian and Euro-American. And the Koreans were interesting because they were first generation Koreans who worshiped entirely in Korean language, very classic traditional high church worship service. And then 1.5 and second generation Koreans who were, have this very contemporary English language, pop music, great music, lots of uses media and technology. So all four of these congregations were trying to figure out a way to come together and really be one church. It was just really fun to watch. There's some extraordinary innovation around this and they would have these multicultural worship services where they simultaneously translated into three languages, every aspect of the worship service. And people who participated in these talked about it as a new Pentecost, a really memorable quote from one of these services was a young Korean American man who said, this is a picture of heaven. This is just, this is what I imagined heaven to be like. And then, you know, down the road, there were churches experiencing tensions as a result of extraordinary growth. Talk about the story of a Catholic parish that saw just a growth from, I believe, between 1999 and 2006, the parish went from having about 2,000 members to having almost 7,000 members. And at the same time that it was experiencing that extraordinary growth, it was going from being, I believe about 85% white American to being 39% white American and 43% Latino and then also had a pretty significant African and African American and Asian membership as well. And so this church just really experiences extraordinary growth and diversification. And this church, again, it was just really a pleasure to watch how initially when we started doing research there, they were very forthright about how much tension they were experiencing inside their church. In fact, there was a man who called the fire marshals to report overcrowding in his church at a bilingual Ash Wednesday service. There was that much tension, that much concern about this growth. After this kind of real crisis moment, some of the everyday members of the church, leaders of the different lay ministries, not the priests, but everyday members, they just said, hey, and that was enough, we've got to figure out a solution. So the first step that they took was they started to do programs where they gave good information, they gave education to all of the lay leaders in the church, about 200 members of the church were invited to come and hear these presentations about the realities of immigration and why so many of the immigrants that were worshiping with them were unauthorized and didn't have a chance to adjust their status to become legal residents. And after they did this education session, then they invited many of their immigrant members to come and just sit at a table with and talk to and share their stories with the citizen members of the church. And from that, really amazing things started to happen. This church now is a role leader, both in sharing with other churches how to do this work well, and then also in doing advocacy work and really promoting good, positive immigration reform and good positive relationships between immigrants and non-immigrant and local communities. - And what's your take on why this is churches doing this particular? Is there another venue in common society where this kind of work and encouragement and support and all this happening? I mean, I could imagine it could be the Democratic Party or it could be the Rotary Club or something. You know, I mean, why is it specifically in churches? - We certainly did find other places where there was an opportunity for people to develop relationships with unauthorized immigrants and then for minds to be changed. One of the cases that we talk about in the book is we talk about a barber shop, a barber who had been, you know, for decades and the same little barber shop in a strip mall in Cobb County, Georgia. And as all the shop is the neighborhood changed and all the shops changed and the barber kind of stayed put, experienced role decline in his business until he had this mobile reset. Well, they've got hair and I cut hair so we should be able to make this work. And he really reached out to the Latino community and he was sort of what you would think of as a classic, you know, in a South we call it an old boy in the community. He really, once he had a chance to get to know unauthorized immigrants while he and his employees were cutting their hair, he really had a change of perspective, maybe not to the extent that the people in the churches where we did research did, but he certainly did. I think so that the churches, well, first of all, talking about many of these new destinations and the places where you sing the strongest anti-immigrant climate are also in parts of the country that we sometimes call the Bible Belt, you know, places where religion is very, very important in the daily lives of the people where religious organizations have always taken the lead in civic lives. So what these churches really are doing is they're becoming civic spaces, they're becoming places where people can get together, get to know one another and kind of air their issues and concerns and talk to one another and come up with better solutions, right? So this can happen in all kinds of civic spaces, this could happen at a PTA, it could happen at the local Democratic Party, it could happen in a neighborhood association, but we find that one of the reasons it's probably more likely to happen in churches now is because, as I mentioned earlier, many of these churches, their leadership, not the local church's leadership, but really the leadership and the denominations and also other religious groups and religious traditions, their leadership is really making very strong public statements in supportive immigration reform and really asking for the members of their churches and for all citizens of the nation to think more carefully about this issue. So the churches are given resources by their denominations to do this work well. So for example, when this local church decided it wanted to have these information sessions, it went to the Archdiocese, which is kind of one step up and that Archdiocese went to an organization called Justice for Immigrants, which is a nationwide religious resource for churches to rethink immigration issues, providing them both with good, solid information and also, of course, there are also ethical principles that guide people and allow them to kind of have an alternative rhetoric, an alternative way of thinking about immigration from the really kind of harsh dehumanizing language that we hear in everyday life. And I should note, for example, that this Catholic Church isn't how County George, I think they're very politically conservative. Folks who otherwise would really be aligned, probably the way the political conservatives are talking about immigration and the national scene and the national media, but they're not. They're talking about it in very different ways. They're relying on both their own relationships they've built with immigrants that have changed their perspective and also on the kind of ethical principles that are being promoted in their churches. - Yeah, I'm gonna ask you a question now and it's gonna sound like I'm either a major curmudgeon or a total conservative or something like that. I'm just trying to narrow in on truth here. One of my thoughts is that, of course, these churches are supporting the immigration, that's where their bread is buttered. Those are the energetic participants of the future because the participation in the USA has been a declining participation in churches. Without these immigrants, churches, like I mentioned earlier, the Catholic Church could well implode. So I don't wanna say that their motivation is totally self-centered. There's certainly in Catholic theology and Jewish theology, all these places, you'll find tremendous support for the immigrant, for the homeless, for the other. So I'm not neglecting that, but certainly their bread has been buttered so that they've been motivated to get to know the people who are after all participating with their congregation. Am I being too demeaning of the organizations when I mention that? - I think, yeah, it's clear that the data exists particularly for the Catholic Church in the United States. The source of the vitality of the Catholic Church right now is immigrants, of course, not only unauthorized immigrants. And then other, as we mentioned, some of the mainline Protestant denominations also have seen really significant decline. I'm sure they see this as an opportunity for growth and for outreach. The Southern Baptist Convention, for example, has been very, very active in doing outreach to Latino immigrants. And then, of course, the Calvin Church is concerned. They wanna make sure that Latino immigrants stay Catholic and don't convert to Protestantism. So all that certainly is a factor. I mean, there's no doubt, but I think what sometimes is of concern for me is, does that override the legitimate moral and ethical and relational, that is the real relationships factors as well? And I would say it probably doesn't, largely, because while, if you think about the Calvin Church writ large, if you think about the US Conference of Calvin Bishops, for example, they have one set of interests, but Catholics and local communities, like Cobb County, the long time white American and African American Catholics in these communities, the growth in their churches has caused them nothing to trouble, right? I mean, they're having to compete for space if they wanna have an event. They're having to learn new traditions and learn another language. At least every once in a while have a bilingual mass. So, their perspective on this is quite different, and I shouldn't say nothing but trouble, but they certainly have experienced quite a bit of challenges with the expansion of their churches. - You did mention the one church where the old school, the previous occupants of the church, their meeting in the main sanctuary space, that can handle many hundreds of people, but they've got a dwindling congregation in there, and the others are kind of out in the hallway, if you will, meeting with 600 or something there versus 180 in the other space. It's quite remarkable how people can justify it to themselves. - Yeah, and I fan again, I think that's important to note, because I certainly don't wanna sugarcoat this. First of all, I wanna make clear that, although we're finding some really compelling cases in churches of innovative work around, in our ethnic relations and around working with and authorized immigrants to come up with better solutions, that does not mean that all churches are doing it, quite to the contrary. And it also doesn't get rid of these real tensions and problems and differences of power. But having said that, I think again if we look, one of the places that I enjoyed doing the research and really writing about most in the book was how native born US citizens, white and African Americans, were really transformed by the relationships that they were able to build with unauthorized immigrants in really complex and profound ways, and not only that they saw a chance for giving service and charity and welcoming outsiders, but also in these relationships, reinvestigate their own values and their own identity. So it was a real reciprocal relationship, and while I wanna affirm and acknowledge that this isn't always the case, I also wanna say, when there's the opportunity to enter into these reciprocal relationships, real change happens for all parties. - Well, then maybe I should ask how you've been transformed. Are you a religious person? Obviously you're a scholar in residence at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, and I still don't know what sociologist of religion really means, but are you a religious person? Were you, how does that interplay with what you saw? - Yes, I am, and I should speak only for myself here. My co-authors, we all came to this study as scholars who were again a sociologist. We wanted to sort of observe how religious people navigate their lives and not necessarily make religious claims, but I will say that these days, I also spend a lot of my weekends going to churches that invite me in talking to adult Sunday school classes and other groups about immigration, not only providing them with the sort of hard data that they need, but also helping them to think through some of the ethical and moral underpinnings of the approach that we currently have toward unauthorized immigration and the approach toward which I think we should be moving. So being a person to say the religious person myself certainly has shaped my desire to do work on this issue and to commit a lot of my otherwise free time to talking to people about the issue. - Well, to get just a little bit more specific, and this is important to me because this program is spirit in action, and I'm trying to find out what fuels people's good work for the world. So knowing the other, I'm sure it's part of it for you. What religious base did you come out of where you know? - I was practicing Catholic and have been for many, many years. For me, again, I take very seriously what it means to be Christian in the world. And I think that much of what we hear in terms of the Christian ethics around immigration, a lot of times we hear Christian stories of welcoming the stranger, but this is, of course, rooted in the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament and the story of Israel and Moses and the Exodus. And we as Christians always recall that we ourselves were strangers in an alien land. And because in through that recollection, we welcome the stranger. I think that, and I believe that many of the Christian episodes who are thinking about the one of them really wants to push beyond that idea of the stranger because I think that what I've experienced in my own relationships with an authorized immigrant, but it's someone who worships alongside them and also someone who researches alongside them, is that they are so very mature neighbors, right? That they are really so deeply embedded in the fabric of our everyday lives. And if we just take a moment to look, we see that. That we really are not strangers, but neighbors. I think I'm often called to the feeling compelled to show love toward my neighbor and not certainly not be guided by fear. And I think that many, many people on immigration don't have the information that they need. And so they're guided from fear and not from love. So I'm really drawn to groups and organizations and people that can model how to be guided by love. - Well, Marie Friedman, Mark Horritt, I'm so glad that you're choosing to be guided by love. And I can't help but believe that our world is better for it and for the work that you and your co-authors did on living illegal, the human face of unauthorized immigration. Thank you so much for your work. And thanks for joining me for spirit and action. - Yeah, thank you, Mark. - And before you go away listeners, I want you to know that there are some really choice portions of my interview with Marie that we just couldn't squeeze into 55 minutes. So I'll have them up on my website, northernspiritradio.org, where you can listen at your leisure. You'll have to look for this program on my site and check for excerpts. There's some choice reflection on the issue of language and immigrants, particularly whether or not the way we accommodate Spanish-speaking immigrants currently is situationally different from how English as the national language was handled for previous waves of immigrants. It's very eye-opening stuff. You'll also find in the program excerpts some vital information about the 287G programs for local enforcement. Programs that are, or at least were, the cutting edge for controlling unauthorized immigration, but with serious unintended consequences. And finally, you'll find another excerpt where Marie Friedman-Markert talks about her three co-authors and the other folks who've contributed valuably to living illegal. It goes without saying that there's a whole lot of great information and stories in the book that we just could not possibly cover in this one-hour program. So do look for the book, listen for the excerpts, and when you've properly digested all of that, please join us again next week for Spirit in Action. - The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our evening ♪ ♪ I'm feeling ♪