TESTIMONY OF FATHER JOHN STOWE
El Paso Inter-Religious Sponsoring Organization

Mayor's Congreso on Immigration Reform
El Paso City Hall, 2nd Floor
El Paso, Texas
August 16, 2006

At the outset, I think it is critical to gratefully acknowledge that many of our local government leaders in the city and county, and those who represent our population at the state level, recognize the importance and significance of our location in the largest urban center along the border.

It is fitting that this hearing take place in council chambers where our own city government has pronounced the Minutemen and their vigilantism along the border unwelcome in El Paso and where a city resolution denounced the un-American, one-sided, purely punitive anti-immigration bill HR 4437.

It is also fitting that this truly be a hearing, unlike the House Judiciary Committee’s “Hearing” scheduled for tomorrow. Of all the issues related to comprehensive reform of immigration law, they have chosen as their focus not only a rhetorical, but an absurd question, “Should Mexico hold veto power over US border security decisions?” In contrast, the mayor of El Paso has chosen to hold a hearing to discuss some of the real issues facing our community, for whom immigration and border issues are part of everyday life.

Fortunately we have leaders here on the border who celebrate the bi-cultural, bi-lingual, bi-national history and heritage that is ours and who know that El Paso’s story, like America’s story, is one of immigration.

We shudder to imagine what the inscription on the Statue of Liberty might read if it had been erected by the current U.S. Congress; but here in the Ellis Island of the Southwest, we still believe in America as the land of opportunity and the land of dreams.

We mourn the shattered dreams of families separated by deportations and a broken immigration system that takes years to reunite them, the unfulfilled dreams of laborers who work long hours in unsafe conditions and pay taxes contributing to this society but are denied a legal status, the scary dreams of those living among us who are afraid to go to work or school or seek help in an emergency because of illegal checkpoints and most regretfully we mourn the nightmares of those who literally wither under the desert sun because some believe that “fences make good neighbors.”

The “enemy” that we are trying to keep out for reasons of national security too often has left behind tiny tennies and a mochila along with her dehydrated flesh in the sand.

What has become of us as a nation that such ugly legislation as 4437 has been not only envisioned, not only proposed or argued, but actually passed by the House of Representatives of the US Congress?

How could the euphoria of tearing down the Berlin Wall be replaced by the hysteria calling for the construction of a wall on our border in such a short span of history? How can the daughters and sons, granddaughters and grandsons of immigrants forget so quickly the opportunities afforded their parents and grandparents and within a generation or two forget where they came from?

How can a nation that was built on immigrant labor and depends today on immigrants to build its homes, nurse its sick, clean its streets, fight its wars, care for its children, and put food on its table—want to bite the hands that feed it?

How can we think that it is somehow in the interests of national security to let millions of undocumented people live in the shadows with no rights or protection from the law, even as they contribute to the national economy, national treasury and national wellbeing?

Thank God that Oscar Gonzalez, a student at Ysleta High School a few blocks from my parish, realized that his grandmother was being disrespected when Congress was going to call her a “felon”—and he led other students to the streets to remind the nation that we live in a democracy.

He knew that his own story, which began with his grandmother’s sacrifices, was being disrespected. I had a grandmother that came from Italy, and in her first week of school in Ohio she had a cough; the teacher told her to “go, get a drink of water” and the only word she understood was “go”, so she went home.

That is a humorous story in our family, but it is not so humorous that those grandparents who were called “WOPS” a derogatory name that stands for “with out papers”. And here I had been taught that only dogs came with papers.

I am pleased to be part of a series of Immigration Academies organized by EPiSO, various offices of the Diocese of El Paso, Annunciation House, Centro Mujeres de Esperanza and other agencies that have helped the young and the old to tell their own stories of immigration, to deflate many exaggerated myths about immigrants, to learn the rights that all enjoy regardless of one’s immigration status, and to understand the teachings of the Abrahamic faiths about how to treat the foreigner among us.

Tomorrow, Representative James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, who is not ashamed to have his name attached to the ugliest and most un-American bill to come through the House in decades, will be holding a “hearing” in our border community. What he should be hearing, instead of a reinforcement of paranoid and racist ideas about the southern border, is the need for comprehensive immigration reform.

Immigration is rarely anyone’s first choice, but when one cannot provide for one’s own and one’s family’s basic needs, people leave their homelands out of necessity. Comprehensive immigration reform starts with global anti-poverty efforts.

The current backlog of available visas for family members of citizens and legal residents can be more than fifteen years long. Comprehensive immigration reform would expand opportunities to reunify families.

The U.S. economy undeniably depends on immigrant labor; comprehensive immigration reform would acknowledge that fact and create a more rational and humane system to legally fill available jobs without abusing immigrant laborers.

Comprehensive immigration reform would include a pathway to permanent residency for immigrant workers with wages and benefits which do not undercut domestic workers.

Comprehensive immigration reform would provide a process for legalization for those who came to work without documents but have demonstrated their moral character and built up equities in this country.

Comprehensive immigration reform would recognize that human rights are not bestowed with a visa, work-permit, legal residency or citizenship; they are constitutive of human nature and inalienable. This is what Representative Sensenbrenner should be hearing tomorrow.

Instead of decrying “illegal” immigration, it is time to create a just policy for legal immigration. And let’s not forget our roots.

Nobody has ever suggested that Mexico has any veto power over any U.S. decisions, but here on the border we know how vital and how fruitful good relations with our neighbor to the south are.

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The full El Paso hearing on immigration reform can be viewed via streaming video at www.elpasotexas.gov/realplayer.asp