Cardinal calls for broad-based legalization plan

Church activists at summit take aim at U.S. policies

By ALLAN TURNER

Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Nov. 17, 2008, 10:38PM

In arguments rich in biblical allusion, church and social activists Monday took aim at the nation's immigration policies — laws they contended split families, criminalize undocumented workers and undercut America's reverential self-image as a land of opportunity.

"There are 200 million migrants," Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of the Catholic Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston told those gathered for The Metropolitan Organization's Clergy Summit: Welcoming the Stranger and Immigration Reform. "War, famine, economic collapse drive them, and it's unstoppable. In our own country, 12 million undocumented people work and live in the shadows."

Borrowing language from a 2002 Catholic Conference of Bishops policy statement, DiNardo called for legalization of undocumented workers already in the country.

"Without some form of broad-based legalization," DiNardo said, "the problems will just fester and fester."

Janice Huie, resident bishop for the United Methodist Church's Texas Annual Conference, joined the call for granting legal status to undocumented workers. In May, she said, Texas Methodist leadership formally opposed job-site raids and criminalization of undocumented workers and their indefinite detention.

"We would support policies that point to the best of who we are," she said.

Huie and others reported an intensification of anti-immigrant feeling in the U.S. fueled by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"I am encountering hateful, stereotyped and racist anti-immigrant language that is almost acceptable in the mainstream," Huie said.

'RED MEAT ISSUE'
Rhetoric surrounding immigration issues has heated as talk radio programs exploit the issue, suggested Houston immigration lawyer, Charles Foster, chairman for Americans for Immigration Reform.

"They found this red meat issue bashing immigrants," he said.

Foster's group has launched a $20 million campaign to back immigration reform. Current immigration policies, whether they regard building border fences or regulating the number of legal entrants, often prove unworkable, he said.

"The annual quota for semi-skilled workers, as opposed to families or professionals is 5,000," he said. The nonprofit Pew Hispanic Center estimates 500,000 undocumented workers entered the U.S. annually from 2005-08.

Government efforts to dislodge undocumented workers also are ineffective, Foster said.

"If these workers risk their lives coming here," he said, "they're not going home. They're going further down the economic scale."

A warning on complacency
Although President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to speedily address immigration concerns, Foster warned those at Monday's conference not to become complacent. President George W. Bush, he noted, was a staunch supporter of failed efforts to reform immigration laws in 2006 and 2007.

"The problem was in the House," Ernesto Cortes Jr. said, alluding to the U.S. House of Representatives. "The mail they were getting was 100-1 against, and that's not going to go away."

Cortes, southwest regional director of Industrial Areas Foundation, a nonprofit group founded by the late Chicago activist Saul Alinksy, was the only non-church affiliated speaker.

Cortes urged his audience to "go boldly, move forward, but lovingly and attentively."

The key to building support for immigration reform, he said, is building "relationships of trust, to bond together."

"We need to create social learning networks ... not to persuade so much as understand," he said. "To do that, we need to learn the language of concern."

allan.turner@chron.com

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