Southerners, evangelicals set course for immigration reform

ATLANTA -- Events in Atlanta on Monday and Washington on Tuesday reflected the latest push from advocates for comprehensive immigration reform, this time focused on making it an election issue.

Although legislation is unlikely to move in Congress this election year, participants in the Southeast Summit on Immigration in Atlanta and in a news conference the next day in Washington for evangelical leaders each focused on changing the political dynamic that makes members of Congress shy away from the issue.

Speaking at the summit Monday in Atlanta, Southern business and government leaders talked about how the region has been affected by Alabama and Georgia each passing immigration laws that criminalize actions by undocumented immigrants.

Jerry Gonzalez, director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, said that state's law, H.B. 87, "is an abomination to who we are as a people."

The 2011 law includes standards for employers to check workers' authorization to hold jobs and penalties of up to $250,000 for using a fake ID to get work. Other provisions requiring law enforcement officers to question people about their immigration status and punishing those who offer assistance to undocumented immigrants were struck down by a federal judge and are awaiting appeals.

"The 'rule of law' without values of justice or mercy is not the rule of law at all," Gonzalez said in a panel discussion. "We don't need a vigilante state government to fill in for a federal government that's not handling its job."

He said as a result, Georgia has become a hostile environment for Latinos, "or anyone who looks different." He told of a friend, a state judge, whose children were harassed on a park playground by other kids for speaking Spanish. The children, like their father, are U.S. citizens of Puerto Rican heritage, he said.

"This is where the politicians need to be making a statement, not looking for political gain," Gonzalez said.

Miami Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski said on the same panel that it's become a sort of a game in politics "to set poor people against each other." Anti-immigrant hostility grew in the United States immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he noted, and fears about the world historically are directed at immigrants.

"We're told people are afraid of change, that's why they resist change," Wenski said. "If that was true, we'd all still have 8-track players in our cars. People are not so much afraid of change as they are afraid of loss."

He said religious leaders and others who support immigration reforms "have to emphasize that immigrants do not represent a loss, they represent a gain for everyone."

In response to a question about whether today's immigrants face more hostility than their predecessors, panelists noted that unlike for past generations, today's immigrants face waits of many years, in some cases decades, before they stand a chance of getting legal status in the United States as unskilled workers or relatives of immigrants.

Others speaking at the summit included Alberto Gonzales, attorney general under President George W. Bush, who pushed for a comprehensive immigration law, and the president of the North Carolina Farm Bureau, Tennessee's deputy commissioner of the state Department of Safety and Homeland Security, the president of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce and others in business and politics in the south.

The Rev. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, participated in both the summit and the press conference in Washington.

He said at the Atlanta summit that among Southern Baptists, for example, "40 percent of Hispanic Southern Baptists are undocumented," so the issue is a very personal one for many members of the church.

At the news conference the next day, Rev. Land was among evangelical leaders announcing a set of principles for immigration reform that were delivered to members of Congress and the White House.

The principles briefly stated include that an immigration reform law should:

• Respect the God-given dignity of every person.
• Protect the unity of the immediate family.
• Respect the rule of law.
• Guarantee secure national borders.
• Ensure fairness to taxpayers.
• Establish a path toward legal status and/or citizenship for those who qualify and who wish to become permanent residents.

Dozens of evangelical leaders across the liberal-conservative spectrum signed onto the statement.