March 28, 2009
Diocese network providing immigrants with information
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
Adela Avila, an immigration specialist for more than 20 years at Centro Guadalupe in Sacramento, discusses the hardships facing immigrants to the United States. Luis Gris Elizarrarás/Herald photo
About 11 million undocumented immigrants reside in the United States according
to the Pew Hispanic Center, and 70 percent have lived in the country for
five years or more. Two to three million of the undocumented immigrants
are children. And every single immigrant is part of a family.
“People often think that there are two groups of immigrants — legal and illegal — and that the two groups are entirely separate,” said Bishop Jaime Soto in an interview with The Herald. “But actually we are dealing with families, and with family members having different legal statuses. Within families, (the topic of immigration) gets complex.”
The bishop has followed issues facing immigrants since 1987 when he helped immigrants in Southern California apply for the legalization program approved by the Immigration Reform and Control Act, signed by President Ronald Reagan. He said he shares the concern of many Americans that the current immigration system is not working and supports a reasonable approach to comprehensive immigration reform.
To help immigrant families in Northern California handle some of the complexities they face, the Diocese of Sacramento created the Diocesan Immigrant Support Network, an expanding network of well-informed parish communities that began reaching out to immigrants last September with accurate information about current and pending immigration laws.
With undocumented immigrants estimated at more than a quarter of California’s population, the parish-based network has also begun reaching out to the citizen community in the diocese, to inform them about the conditions endured by so many of the immigrants around them.
Adela Avila, an immigration specialist at Centro Guadalupe, a program of Catholic Charities in Sacramento that provides services to low-income families, said that immigration laws have become increasingly complex over the 20 years that she has been advising immigrants.
The laws became very restrictive after the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, she noted, creating a backlog of cases for review. Currently the spouses and children of permanent legal residents of the United States must wait nine years before their cases come up for review, she said.
If the spouse or children can’t wait that long and come to live with the legal resident while their case makes its way to the top of the queue, Avila said, they risk deportation and permanent denial of residency if they are discovered.
Laws intended to keep out terrorists divide normal families for unreasonable stretches of time, and enforcement of various immigration laws has become increasingly harsh, Avila contended. Many family members must break the law to be reunited, and those immigrant families live in constant daily fear, she said.
Undocumented immigrants whose children were born in the United States can be separated from their children and deported, she said. Undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as infants can be deported at any time, even after living in the U.S. almost their entire lives. To become citizens after they become adults, she noted, they must return to their birth country in order to start the long process of legal immigration.
For the past several years, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has called for comprehensive immigration law reform. In 2005 the bishops launched a national Catholic campaign for reform called “Justice for Immigrants: A Journey of Hope.”
The program is intended to educate the public, and Catholics in particular, about how immigration and immigrants benefit the nation; to improve public opinion about the contributions of immigrants; to advocate for changes in immigration laws and policies; and to organize networks that assist immigrants with legal problems.
As dioceses across the nation implement the U.S. bishops’ campaign, the Immigration Support Network helps carry forward the campaign’s goals in the Sacramento Diocese, according to Beth White, associate director of the diocese’s social service ministry and diocesan coordinator of the network.
“Our task is mainly education, of both immigrants and citizens,” she explained.
When the initial 16 parish communities from across the diocese came forward to create the Immigration Support Network, White and a diocesan committee prepared workshops to orient the parish volunteers to issues confronting immigrants and to instruct them on immigrants’ rights and responsibilities in the United States.
It’s important for undocumented immigrants to know that they have responsibilities to the greater community, such as the responsibility to pay taxes and be involved in their communities, White noted, as well as the right to be treated with dignity and respect and the right to advocate for change.
The Immigration Support Network “does not give legal advice — none of us are immigration attorneys,” White said. “But the church, through the ISN, can be the place where immigrants can go to be directed to resources and get accurate information, instead of the rumors they hear or the wrong information that somebody tells them is true.”
Immigrants desperately need accurate information according to Gloria Wong, a volunteer for the network at St. Maria Goretti Parish in Elk Grove. She told The Herald “the whole purpose of the network is to protect immigrants.”
Unscrupulous people offer to help immigrants become citizens, Wong said, and charge them thousands of dollars to put their paperwork in order. The immigrants often believe them, give them what documents they have and all of their money, and the people vanish.
“It’s happening more that you can imagine and undocumented people are afraid to go to the police,” Wong said. But they will trust the church, she noted.
There have been two Immigration Support Network information meetings at St. Maria Goretti Parish since the fall, Wong said. At the first one, volunteer members of the ISN explained to immigrants how to keep records to support their petitions to become citizens and what to do if arrested.
“If they are arrested, we tell them that they have a right to remain silent and to talk with an attorney,” Wong said. “We also tell them never, never to lie — never give a false name or false Social Security number. We try to get them legalized. We never try to hide them.”
At the second meeting, seven immigration attorneys working with Catholic Charities spent all day giving legal advice to about 150 individual immigrants.
“The ISN tells people the consequences if they do something wrong, and then we put them in contact with people who can help them,” Wong said. “They are already here and they are people, they are human beings, so we help them. In God’s eyes, we are all citizens.”
At a Feb. 10 gathering of parish leaders representing parishes preparing to join the network, several spoke about the resistance to immigrants voiced by citizen members of their parish communities. One parish leader, who requested anonymity, reported that some of his fellow parishioners declare that their families came to the United States legally several generations ago, and they consider undocumented immigrants to be criminals.
White referred the speaker to the U.S. bishops’ Web site for accurate information to inform his community. From the Web site, www.justiceforimmigrants.org (see information box this page), parishioners can learn that there were no laws restricting immigration until the 1920s, and that the nation’s current immigration codes began in 1965. The Web site also provides many facts and figures about U.S. immigrants.
Immigration specialist Avila told The Herald that undocumented immigrants are often treated like criminals and perhaps worse, when their only desire is to work and create a better life for their families.
The undocumented immigrants Avila sees have very little money. A 2006 study by the Pew Hispanic Center reports that 45 percent of undocumented immigrants are educated, somewhat affluent people who entered the United States legally — to work, to study, to visit family — and then stayed after their visas expired. But the rest are people who immigrated illegally because they could not earn a living in their country of origin.
One permanent legal resident, a parishioner in the diocese who sought immigration help from Catholic Charities of Sacramento, is currently enduring the nine-year wait to bring his wife into the country. He explained that the poverty in his native Mexico “presses you down.”
“For the poor, there is nothing,” he said. “People eat only beans, morning and night, or nothing. Celebrations have no presents. There is no money to take the bus to school. There are no jobs. There is no future. There is no life there.”
Another woman immigrant who is Catholic and sought help from Catholic Charities of Sacramento explained that she would never have left her home and family in Mexico if there had been any jobs for her and her husband.
“It caused us enormous pain to leave our families,” she said. “When you are illegal, you cannot visit your family again — not even if people get sick or die.”
Anna — not her real name — spoke to The Herald on condition of anonymity because now she has relatives in California who are illegal immigrants. She is a naturalized citizen who entered the country illegally in the 1970s. Her husband had been crossing the border for two years to earn money following the crops in California, she said, before he saved enough money to pay $500 for her to be brought across the border. Now the cost is thousands, she said.
They had both lived all of their lives in a small farming town in central Mexico that had been hit by a drought. There were no crops possible and no jobs in any of the surrounding towns.
Anna explained that it cost a lot of money just to apply for a visa, which was only given to people with property in Mexico, who therefore had a reason to return. The only hope for Anna and her husband was to start a life in the United States. They were 20 years old.
“I can explain it like this,” she said. “If there were no jobs in Sacramento, and the businesses were boarded up and the schools were empty and the people were leaving, and you found out that in Los Angeles, life is normal — who wouldn’t move to Los Angeles?”
Anna and her husband did find work in California. They were farm laborers at first, until they found better employment in Sacramento. They became citizens in 1986. Their children have gone to college. Anna is proud of her American success story, but fears for others in her family.
Anna’s family situation is typical of many immigrant families in the Diocese of Sacramento. Bishop Soto told The Herald he views the expanding Diocesan Immigrant Support Network as one way for the local church to keep reaching out to them.
“The reality we’re talking about is that there are families,” the bishop said. “There’s someone who is a citizen and someone who has a temporary visa and someone whose application is in process and someone who is illegally here.
“There are very complex family situations affected by the different statuses. People want to simplify the picture, but it is not simple. Life is complex.
“As a church, we’re not advocating that people break the law — not in the least,” Bishop Soto said. “We are advocating for better laws that will serve American society as well as the immigrant community.”
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
Justice for Immigrants Campaign
OBJECTIVES
• To educate the public, especially the Catholic community, about church teaching on migration and immigrants;
• To create political will for positive immigration reform;
• To enact legislative and administrative reforms based on the principles articulated by the bishops;
• To organize Catholic networks to assist qualified immigrants to obtain the benefits of the reforms.
SUGGESTED REFORMS
• Reform measures of the U.S. immigration system:
• Reform of the family-based immigration system to allow family members to reunite with loved ones in the U.S.;
• Reform of the employment-based immigration system to provide legal pathways for migrants to come and work in a safe, humane and orderly manner;
• Restoration of due process protections for immigrants;
• “Earned” legal residency for undocumented immigrants who can demonstrate good moral character.
MYTHS AND FACTS ABOUT IMMIGRANTS
Immigrants increase the crime rate
Recent research has shown that immigrant communities do not increase the crime rate and that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. While the undocumented immigrant population doubled from 1994 to 2005, violent crime dropped by 34% and property crimes decreased by 32%. Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson has found that first generation immigrants are 45% less likely to commit violent crimes than Americanized, third generation immigrants.
Immigrants don’t pay taxes
Undocumented immigrants pay taxes. Between 50 to 75% of undocumented immigrants pay federal, state, and local taxes, contribute to Medicare and provide as much as $7 billion a year to the Social Security Fund. They also pay sales taxes and property taxes as owners or renters (indirectly).
Immigrants are a drain on the U.S. economy
Immigrants make a net contribution to the economy. The average immigrant pays nearly $1,800 more per year than he or she consumes in benefits, such as health care or education.
Immigrants take jobs away from Americans
A recent study produced by the Pew Hispanic Center reveals that “Rapid increases in the foreign-born population at the state level are not associated with negative effects on the employment of native-born workers.” In fact, given that the number of native born low-wage earners is falling nationally, immigrants are playing an important role in offsetting that decline.
Undocumented immigrants are a burden on the health care system
Federal, state and local governments spend approximately $1.1 billion annually on health wcare costs for undocumented immigrants, ages 18-64, or approximately $11 in taxes for each U.S. household. This compares to $88 billion spent on all health care for non-elderly adults in the U.S. in 2000. Foreign-born individuals tend to use fewer health care services because they are relatively healthier than their native-born counterparts.
Information taken from the Justice for Immigrants Web site at www.justiceforimmigrants.org.
