From CMSM...

Migrants: illegals or God's ambassadors? (excerpts)

By Dean Brackley, SJ

[Dean Brackley, SJ, is a New York Province Jesuit, teaches theology at the Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas" (UCA) in San Salvador. He has just finished a term as holder of the Wade Chair at Marquette University. This article appeared in the National Catholic Reporter on May 14, 2010. You can read the entire article at ncronline.org/news/justice/migrants-illegals-or-gods-ambassadors.]

... Every day hundreds of poor Central Americans leave their countries and head north. They're not alone. The poor are in motion everywhere today. Worldwide, the number of immigrants has doubled in the last 30 years to almost 200 million people. Almost one in five lack proper documentation. This is a massive global phenomenon.

Consider what it means for a country like El Salvador. A few years ago the U.S. embassy estimated that an average of 740 Salvadorans were abandoning their country every day, mostly bound for the U.S. Today's estimates run between 400 and 500 a day. If all were leaving for good, El Salvador, with a population of six million, would lose one percent of its population every five months and half the population in twenty years. But not all leave for good. Some of those who left yesterday were actually deported from the U.S., or from Mexico, a few weeks ago.

...
The scale of migration northward from Central America, and also from Mexico, and of deportation southward, is mind-boggling. What does it say about conditions in our neighbor-countries to the south? ... The majority of people there lack opportunities for a decent life. At least two-thirds of Salvadorans, Nicaraguans and Hondurans are poor, despite lower official figures. It's worse in Guatemala. The U.N. Development Program recently reported that only one in five economically active Salvadorans has a decent, stable job. Even before the recent crises –a great spike in fuel and grain prices, followed by the fallout from the financial crisis--, things were getting worse in Central America. For example, while chronic malnutrition declined from 13 percent to 10 percent from 1990 to 2003 in Latin America and the Caribbean overall, it increased in Central America from 17 to 20 percent.

...
Locally, we must welcome immigrants to our local schools and congregations. In those settings, we can let them tell their stories. Putting a human face on “the immigration problem”in this way softens hearts and dissolves prejudice. Thinking more globally, we will have to work toward the long-term goal of an adequate juridical framework for international trade and finance. In the meantime, we must also globalize solidarity in favor of the sustainable development that reduces the need to migrate. The churches, especially the Catholic Church, with people on the ground in poor countries, have no rivals in their potential to globalize the practice of love.

...
In Leviticus we read, “the foreigner who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the foreigner as yourself”(Lev 19:34). No ethical precept is repeated more frequently than this in the Old Testament. (45) The letter to the Hebrews tells us: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to foreigners, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it”(Heb 13:2). Dorothy Day called the destitute poor God's ambassadors. “I was a foreigner,”said Jesus, “and you welcomed me”(Matt 25:35).

Like God's Suffering Servant, today's immigrants are “despised and rejected”as sinful lawbreakers. With deeper insight, Isaiah sees that the Servant “was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities”(Isa 53:3,5). In the present case, not strictly for your transgressions and mine, but insofar as they are the fruits of past U.S. foreign policy. The Servant is a “light to the nations”(Isa 42:6), and “by his bruises we are healed”(Isa 53:5).

The desperate poor who migrate north are representatives of the poor billions to our South, from whom we are estranged, to our loss and theirs. Perhaps God is sending them to revitalize our churches, our nation and our broken world.