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the sanctuary movement

the sanctuary movement

The latest issue of The Christian Century magazine includes an interview with Alexia Salvatierra, a Lutheran pastor and leader in the sanctuary movement. This is a good starting point for understanding both the history and the present focus of the sanctuary movement. Salvatierra offers a measured, reasonable, nuanced, and faithful vision of a distinctively Christian response to the contemporary debate over immigration policies and practices. Here is an excerpt:

Most people know that our immigration system is ineffective. If you take a step closer to it, you find out that it is illogical, and if you take another step closer, you find out that it is inhumane. Many of us are not looking for open borders; we believe that a country has the right to an immigration system. But we want an immigration system that is effective, logical, fair, and humane, and ours is none of the above. It is a crazy patchwork of laws, many of which break apart families and penalize the kinds of people we want in our country.

For example, since 1995 the United States has allowed a total of 5,000 visas per year for unskilled workers. But for years this country has imported most of its agricultural workers. More than 80 percent of the agricultural workers are currently immigrants. But only 5,000 are allowed to come legally — plus there is a guest worker program that covers about 200,000 people. We need far more workers than that. As the Southern Baptist leader Richard Land has pointed out, we say, “Come, we need your labor” on the one hand, “but we are not going to give you any status” on the other.

As a result of these aspects of the system, about 12 million people are working in the shadows. Ninety percent of undocumented men are working. They are here because the country needs their labor. They’ve been here for decades and have kids who are citizens. In 1995, the United States decided that children could only petition for citizenship for their parents in extreme and unusual circumstances. So there are many families in which the parents are working but undocumented.

sharing the wealth?

sharing the wealth?

A good editorial in the latest issue of The Christian Century: American Pie

In the course of discussing tax policy with an unlicensed Ohio plumber, Barack Obama suggested that “spreading the wealth around” a bit more would be good for the country. Obama was trying to explain why he wants to impose a modest tax increase on people who make more than $250,000 a year while reducing taxes on those making less than that amount. John McCain and his supporters immediately seized on Obama’s remark as a sign that Obama favors a socialist form of income redistribution.

The notion that a progressive income tax is a form of socialism is ludicrous. Since the time of Teddy Roosevelt, Americans have recognized that those who are flourishing most in society should pay a proportionately higher share of tax. After all, they are the ones benefiting most from the social stability and infrastructure that government provides.

Talk of socialism would be laughable except that it is part of a larger, disturbing reality in American politics: it has become almost impossible to talk about the disparities in wealth that have arisen over the past three decades and about how this stratification undermines democracy and fosters unequal outcomes in other areas of life, including educational opportunity and access to health care.

Since the late 1970s the share of national income going to the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled and the share for the top 0.1 percent has tripled. More than 40 percent of total income goes to the wealthiest 10 percent—their biggest share of the nation’s pie in at least 65 years. The very wealthy have become enormously wealthy, while middle-class workers have seen their wages stagnate—barely keeping pace with inflation—and at the same time have had to deal with sharp increases in the costs of health care and education.

In light of this trend, the dispute between McCain and Obama on taxes is minor: Obama wants to return the top marginal tax rate to 39 percent, where it was under Clinton, while McCain wants to keep it at 35 percent. Both men, in other words, would maintain the mildly progressive tax system that currently exists. The current system is actually much less progressive than it was in earlier decades—under Eisenhower the top tax rate was 91 percent, and under Nixon it was 70 percent. Those were hardly socialist administrations.

Though tax rates are not the only factor shaping economic conditions, they are an important measure of how the burdens of common life are being distributed. The warnings about socialism should be seen for what they are: a blunt effort to block any discussion of the ominous fact that the U.S. has become a nation of increasing inequality and, for many, of declining opportunity.

“Socialism” is meant to conjure visions of our adversaries, of systems of government that undermine the freedoms and personal opportunities democracies are supposed to guarantee. Its use, as the editorial suggests, serves to stifle, not encourage, debate. The focus of the debate should be fairness. Any enacted tax policy redistributes wealth; the Bush administration tax cuts redistributed wealth to the wealthiest of Americans. Is tax relief for the wealthy “capitalism” as opposed to tax relief for the middle class which is “socialism?” So the foundation of our democracy is subsidies for the upper class? I don’t think that was the vision of our nation’s founders. Fairness and justice are closer to that vision, I think, and closer to the vision of the world God calls us to bring into being.