This week's Thursday Immigration Blog Round-Up is more of an immigration blog reflection. It's in no way because of a shortage of news around the pro-immigrant movement: talk of declining support of leading anti-immigrant on-line voices; talk show radio hosts blasting away at one woman who showed compassion toward immigrants, seeing the value in human dignity rise above her own experience of being victimized by one individual; more reports of government forces flexing its muscle in factories around the country. Rather, brought on by an overdose of C-SPAN the past week, there's been a real call in America this week for real solutions that hopefully can fix the real problems that many in our country face.
Those in the trenches of the pro-imigrant movement know first hand that real solutions are needed to overcome the gross disregard of human life and dignity. Throughout American history, there have been those who take advantage of people newly arrived from foreign lands, struggling to make a new life with dreams of hope and opportunity, only to be greeted with false promises and desception. I saw it years ago while a seminarian for the Diocese of Savannah, where immigrants would labor in the hot onion fields of Georgia all day, only to find that their employer made arrangements to have INS waiting for them when they came to collect their payment for their work. I thought of those onion farmers this past week when reading about the recent raid of a sweat shop in Queens, New York, thinking of the abuses against those working in conditions that most Americans would think came out of a 19th century novel from industrial Britain.
In the growing need to find real solutions that can move our country forward, Gov. Chet Culver of Iowa sites the growing failure in current federal immigration policy in a guest column published this Sunday in the Des Moines Register. He sites the meat packing company involved in the northeast Iowa raids last May as taking advantage of employees' situations, treating them with great neglect, while harkening their actions to those Sinclair Lewis uncovered in The Jungle. You can dig it here.
Gov Culver's column was encouraging, in that it showed that there is leadership in America that still values the dignity of human life and believes that all people are equal, regardless of where they were born. For many, the fields of Iowa are seen as the place where the seeds of America's political future are planted, where the rich soil allows for change to take root.
In calling for real solutions that move us forward together as a nation, we become the wind that scatters the seeds of change throughout our country, from the dry red clay of Georgia, to the rain soaked slopes of the Cascades. Let, then, our action not be silence when we hear of the anti-immigrant movement argue where the hand of justice lay. Justice should always protect the value of life over the value of profit. It might sound idealistic. but, when posting comments on blogs, or writing a letter to our local paper, it's that seed of idealism in each of us where our values grow.
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