Kinship Across Borders

A Christian Ethic of Immigration

Kristin E. Heyer

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781589019317
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

The failure of current immigration policies in the United States has resulted in dire consequences: a significant increase in border deaths, a proliferation of smuggling networks, prolonged family separation, inhumane raids, a patchwork of local ordinances criminalizing activities of immigrants and those who harbor them, and the creation of an underclass—none of which are appropriate or just outcomes for those holding Christian commitments.

Kinship Across Borders analyzes contemporary US immigration in the context of fundamental Christian beliefs about the human person, sin, family life, and global solidarity. Kristin Heyer expertly demonstrates how current US immigration policies reflect harmful neoliberal economic priorities, and why immigration cannot be reduced to security or legal issues alone. Rather, she explains that immigration involves a broad array of economic issues, trade policies, concerns of cultural tolerance and criminal justice, and, at root, an understanding of the human person.

In Kinship Across Borders, Heyer has developed a Christian immigration ethic—grounded in scriptural, anthropological, and social teachings and rooted in the experiences of undocumented migrants—that calls society to promote concrete practices and policies reflecting justice and solidarity.

CHAPTER ONE
Christian Anthropology and the De-humanization of Immigrants

This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;

—MARTÍN ESPADA, “Imagine the Angels of Bread”

SINCE FORTIFICATION escalated along the United States–Mexico border in the mid-1990s, deaths of border crossers have occurred at a rate of at least one every twenty-four hours, amounting to a humanitarian crisis that shows little sign of receding.¹ In spite of the economic downturn and drops in both migrant crossers and apprehensions toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, deaths increased. In 2010 the Arizona desert claimed a record 252 lives; due to similar death rates across the southern Mexican border, Chiapas has been described as a “cemetery without a cross.”² Since the early 1990s, an estimated 5,000 have perished crossing the US–Mexico border. It is increasingly palpable why the US–Mexican border has been described by Gloria Anzaldúa as “una herida abierta [an open wound] where the third world grates against the first and bleeds.”³ Amid concerns about the cultural and economic impact of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants residing in the United States, the centrality of human dignity and agency in Christian ethics challenges death-dealing policies and practices driven by a market logic, xenophobic fears, and indifference to vulnerable populations.⁴

The nearly 2,000-mile US–Mexico border, spanning six Mexican and four US states, bisects the sharpest divide in average income on the planet and constitutes its busiest frontier, with an estimated one million crossings daily.⁵ As migrants traverse its yet unfortified stretches, their treacherous journeys frequently entail the following hazards: drowning, suffocation in overcrowded and perilous cargo transport, mutilations from accidental or coerced train injuries, fatal dehydration, high rates of physical violence, detention under inhuman conditions, and precious little recourse to protection or legal representation.⁶ Almost half of total unauthorized migrants to the United States are female, and women are nearly three times more likely to die from exposure than men, with the vast majority falling victim to sexual assault.⁷ For those who survive the passage north, life in the shadows dehumanizes in a host of ways, from precarious working conditions and wages to prolonged family separation to routine denigration.

Behind the brute facts of suffering and death lies a strategy that threatens lives, yet ultimately fails to deter crossings. The death risk “coincides with the unprecedented buildup of agents, fences, roads and technology along the US–Mexico border, casting doubt on a mantra often used by the Border Patrol that a ‘secure border is a safe border.’”⁸ In 2003 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that the deaths of nearly two thousand migrants from Mexico and Central America offer the strongest evidence that the United States “has violated and continues to violate human rights by maintaining Operation Gatekeeper.” Other international human rights organizations, including the United Nations Human Rights Commission and Amnesty International, have reached the same conclusion in subsequent determinations.⁹ As Gioachhino Campese puts it, despite Border Patrol search-and-rescue operations, “deaths continue to rise because it is the strategy itself—the rerouting of the immigrants toward the most dangerous terrains—that is causing the deaths. The US government refuses to take any responsibility for all of these casualties, which are considered one of the ‘unintended’ consequences of the nation’s effort to protect its sovereignty.”¹⁰ Human rights abuses evident in a strategy that maximizes rather than minimizes death call into question the legitimacy of absolute claims to sovereignty and accompanying border control mechanisms.¹¹

This litany of abuses and “unintended consequences” born of present US border policies makes apparent Gustavo Gutiérrez’s assertion that “the central theological problem of our day is not the problem of the nonbeliever but the problem of those thought to be nonpersons by the reigning elites.”¹² From the perspective of moral anthropology, respect for all persons as ends and as inherently relational poses considerable challenges to the ongoing dehumanization of migrant women and men. Examining matters of undocumented immigration through a lens of dehumanization does not resolve the complexities of law and policy, but it does bring patterns of objectification into relief and help reframe the debate. The title and subheadings hyphenate “dehumanization” to highlight the fact that whereas prevailing attitudes and practices strike at the core of what it means to be human and obscure immigrants’ humanity, their resilience and courage make clear that victimization is not the complete story nor the final word.

Chapter 1 elaborates the ways in which a Christian anthropology critiques patterns of dehumanization vis-à-vis undocumented immigration to the United States. Pervasive frameworks that reduce migrants to their economic function or cast them as threats to national security and cultural cohesion make it easier to lose sight of our common humanity. I draw upon Catholic social encyclicals’ principles of economic ethics, Reinhold Niebuhr’s notion of collective egotism, and Margaret Farley’s obligating features of personhood to ground an anthropological critique of pervasive practices and inform a Christian immigration ethic. These emphases indicate that deep Christian commitments regarding what it means to be human—not simply rights to migrate or duties of hospitality—radically critique pervasive exploitation and prevailing immigration paradigms. The chapter concludes by considering ways in which migrants’ agency gets expressed amid such daunting constraints.

Economy and the Dehumanization of Immigrants

The brutal border realities outlined above beg the question of why families and individuals risk crossing. The fact that the majority of those deported make plans to reattempt the journey suggests that beyond deep familial ties in the United States, it is dire economic need with no viable prospects that compels most irregular migrants crossing the US–Mexico border. Following the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, millions of Mexicans lost their jobs in agriculture and many have been forced to abandon their land and join irregular migrant streams to the United States, most without legal protection.¹³ In the face of insurmountable competition from US-subsidized, imported agricultural goods, real income has dropped 25 percent in purchasing power and the poverty rate for female-headed households increased by 50 percent. Catholic Relief Service’s (CRS) Mexico Country Manager Erica Dahl-Bredine laments that CRS efforts to improve family farmers’ living conditions have been severely limited by the impact of such trade policies: “The price of corn in Mexico has been driven below the cost of production, leaving farmers with a crop literally not worth harvesting. The Mexican government’s cuts to vital support and subsidy programs for farmers has [sic] only made matters worse. After generations of farming corn, families are giving up, abandoning their farms, and heading north.”¹⁴

Free-trade policies like NAFTA facilitate the cross-border movement of capital, goods, and services, yet inhibit the movement of people. In the words of a 2004 document issued by the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People, globalization has “flung markets wide open but not frontiers, has demolished boundaries for the free circulation of information and capital, but not to the same extent for the free circulation of people.”¹⁵ In recent decades these priorities have become enshrined in neoliberal economic policies that have failed to improve the living conditions or prospects for a large percentage of the population living not only in Latin America but also in other developing regions.¹⁶

Hence, this tendency to prioritize capital to persons and reduce laborers to “factors of production” fosters dehumanizing conditions that generate economic refugees in the first place, and then exploit undocumented workers who remain precariously vulnerable once hired.¹⁷ The Christian tradition’s priority of the human person, by contrast, grounds an economic ethic that profoundly critiques these sources and conditions of undocumented labor. The tradition grounds its essential commitment to human life and dignity in a vision of the human person as created in God’s image, social and political by nature, and endowed with inviolable dignity and human rights independent of citizenship status.¹⁸ This vision undergirds its staunch subordination of capital to labor, a priority pointedly reversed in neoliberal trade polices and undocumented labor abuses.

Border deaths and policies that compel and then punish irregular migration are profoundly challenged by a Catholic defense of rights to emigrate and immigrate rooted in the tradition’s understanding of human rights, the political community, and the universal destination of created goods.¹⁹ In an interdependent context, human rights are not absolute claims made by radically autonomous individuals, but rather claims to goods necessary for each person to participate with dignity in society’s communal life.²⁰ Catholic principles of economic ethics therefore protect not only civil and political rights, but also more robust social and economic rights and responsibilities.

From Pope Leo XIII’s warnings that neither human nor divine laws permit employers to exploit another’s need for profit in 1891, to Pope Benedict XVI’s recent condemnations of global economic practices that hinder authentic development, the protection of human dignity remains the central criterion of economic justice. The encyclical tradition makes clear that “every economic decision and institution must be judged in light of whether it protects or undermines the dignity of the human person … realized in community with others.”²¹ In Laborem exercens, for example, John Paul II roots his condemnation of the social and financial exploitation of migrant workers in the principle that “the hierarchy of values and the profound meaning of work itself require that capital should be at the service of labor and not labor at the service of capital.”²²

Hence the Catholic social tradition explicitly protects the basic human rights of undocumented migrants in host countries in light of longstanding teachings on human and workers’ rights, which do not depend on citizenship status.²³ The tradition promotes rights to just wages, benefits, safe working conditions, and health care assistance, especially in the case of on-the-job injuries, and rights to association.²⁴ Within the US labor market, the pervasive exploitation of undocumented immigrants in terms of substandard wages and protection...