Sanctuary for immigrants
Published: Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, March 19, 2010 at 5:58 p.m.
Sam is staying in the shadows.
He used to be the guy you'd say good morning to at the bank and the dad who came to school with his daughter, greeting everyone along the way.
After years of living in the bright light of hope, of building a life in America with a wife he met in Montgomery County, Md., and girls who were born and raised in a neighborhood between the Beltway and a shopping mall, the immigrant from Sierra Leone melted into the darkness because his very existence is this country suddenly became illegal.
His Temporary Protective Status was yanked in 2005 by the U.S. government after the war in his homeland ended. What also ended: Sam's American dream.
Never mind that he had a good job with D.C. prisons, a side job at a Wachovia Bank and was part of the fabric of his community.
And forget that his family's home in Sierra Leone was burned down and that forcing him to rebuild life in a war-ravaged country he's been away from for 18 years is inhumane.
“Now to me, it appears that I have no place here and no place to go back to. I cannot get a driver's license. I cannot work legally. I have to live in the shadows,” Sam said. “I am not asking our government for a hand out. I just want to be a law-abiding person.”
Gone are his tax dollars and his dignity. He went from being a tax-paying citizen to being relegated to the crowd of 11 million undocumented immigrants living a dodgy existence in this country.
These are the people President Barack Obama was speaking about when he vowed to take on immigration reform during his campaign. Sam told his story recently to more than 500 people crowded into the Bethel World Outreach Church outside of Washington. There were Catholics, Protestants, Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, Jews and many more — a new coalition of immigration reform supporters emerging from the region's houses of worship and their increasingly diverse services, church dinners and Bible studies.
These churches are where immigrants who need help and comfort are opening up, telling their stories, explaining the torn-apart lives that hide behind the smiling fronts of waitresses, nannies, landscapers, construction workers — the people who keep our everyday world running, but are scrambling to survive once the table is cleared and the azaleas have been planted.
I am the child of immigrants myself, so these are difficult stories to hear.
Not because I remember when my parents' village was burned down or because my family members were executed in the town square or because there was no food in the motherland.
My parents' emigration from the Soviet Eastern Bloc wasn't a matter of life or death, but rather oppression and fear versus opportunity and freedom.
Their struggle — language barriers, discrimination, the difficult process of becoming legal citizens, the constant fear that our family would be torn apart and years of backbreaking work — has brought them to a weird place.
They are among those who think America today shouldn't help undocumented immigrants. In fact, I am pretty sure my mom would join the Minutemen's patrol along the U.S. border if they asked.
But just as many Americans have quickly forgotten that they, too, are here because some great-grand a few generations ago was looking for a better life, people like my hard-working parents can often find it easy to let the door close behind them.
Providing spiritual sanctuary to this wave of immigrants isn't enough, argued Rev. Rebecca Brillhart of the Sligo Seventh Day Adventist Church, that night. They need legal sanctuary as well.
“This is morally right, and it is also economically smart,” Brillhart told members of Action in Montgomery, a Maryland faith-based advocacy group last week, during one of their “actions.”
They plan to bring about 700 marchers to a protest rally on the national mall today, part of an effort by faith communities across the country to push for immigration reform.
Once basic human compassion is dismissed as an argument for reform, AIM drops the morality speak and points to the economic benefit that bringing 11 million people into the legal economy could have.
Now that's a language even my mom can understand.
Petula Dvorak is a columnist for the Washington Post.
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