Aug 03, 2009

'Busted Borders': Videos tell immigrants' own stories


Health care, Sonia Sotomayor, and the Gates brouhaha have driven one of the hottest topics of the past year out of the headlines -- immigration. But while no one is hammering on cable news nightly about undocumented immigrants, their lives are still a struggle in the legal and social shadows.

What does that life look or sound like? Busted Halo, which calls itself a spiritual site for young adult seekers, based in "wisdom from the Catholic tradition," wanted to let people tell their own stories. It used grant funds to give video cameras to undocumented individuals and agencies nationwide and today launched a new video series: Busted Borders: undocumented unfiltered unwelcome? (Hat Tip to CathNews from Paulist Press)

The first video is a woman who was a young child when her parents fled here from Fiji to escape political turmoil. Now, she's been caught for 8 years in a Catch-22 of legal paperwork that fences her future in as tightly as if it were a barbed wire fence, the signature image of the overall series.

"Regardless of where you stand on the issue, we hope to give a personal glimpse into the humanity of these strangers in our midst," writes Busted Halo chieftain Bill McGarvey. He calls it "an attempt to use the web's unfiltered nature to move the immigration debate away from abstractions and statistics."

Busted Halo is an inventive multi-media site I last visited to tune in on their video series about the search for the perfect wedding-- a dialog between a priest and a wedding planner that dealt with real questions like why folks can't incorporate quotes from kid lit like the Velveteen Rabbit in their wedding ceremony.

The series will include new videos almost weekly and viewers are invited to submit their own stories. The idea is that everything human has a spiritual dimension. McGarvey told me today that they started from the Biblical injunction, repeated in Catholic social teaching -- "the need to "welcome the stranger."

DO YOU THINK ... a close personal look from the perspective of an undocumented immigrant could affect your views on immigration reform? Is your view on border issues shaped by your religious tradition?

Photo by Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images: A glove abandoned by someone attempting to cross into the USA hangs caught on a barbed wire fence along the US-Mexico border near El Paso, Texas.
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If you go to this link you can post a comment and/or click on the different vidieos to see them.

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