WHEN TOM BUECHELE, vicar of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Bisbee, Ariz., and my church home, asked me to accompany a group of 48 clergy and laity headed for Altar in Mexico’s Sonora state to witness migrants preparing to enter the United States, my first instinct was to say “no.”
As the mayor of Bisbee, just five miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, I had seen too much of the economic and social damage caused by swelling immigration from across the border.
Still, my deepest concern was for the migrants themselves. I wanted to see firsthand the faces of the migrants that I so far only had seen waiting for the Border Patrol vans to arrive and take them back to Mexico.
So I said “yes.”
Altar is another dusty, hot, raw-looking northern Sonoran town, a traditional jumping off point for those coming north. When my group met with about 30 migrants in their small hotel, we discovered that most were country people, unschooled and unskilled, from small rural places in Guatemala.
Incredibly, they had walked to Altar, a distance of more than 2,000 miles. They planned to walk into the United States, 60 miles to the north. To see this kind of courage and hope in the open and honest faces of simple country people was moving beyond words. I knew I was in the presence of God’s grace.
Whatever else the gospels are about, they are about solidarity with the poor, the isolated and the rejected. They are a confessional ethic and witness for the priority of the powerless and the dispossessed, the triumph of the Word of God in the midst of the reign of death.
What does this mean in the current crisis of migration?
As a retired professor of public health and a former health official, my first instinct was to look for reforms that would remedy the deadly policy of forcing migrants out into the desert to discourage their journey northward.
But after seeing the faces of the migrants up close and hearing their stories, I knew my response and the church’s response must be even more. It must flow from the gospel’s petition, “Thy Kingdom come.”
The former mayor of Altar, Francisco Javier Garcia, spoke to our group. He mentioned the hopeless inability of many parts of the world to “keep up” and compete with the globalization of the world’s economy, a process that is devouring the poor of the world.
The infrastructure along our common border is decaying and neglected. This looming disaster could be a glorious opportunity for major public investments, for work and training for our poorest workers on both sides of the border.
It could be an opportunity to start ending the cycle of poverty and start normalizing immigration and to make our borders more humane. Our town of Bisbee is undertaking a $30 million wastewater overhaul project with the help of the North American Development Bank, an institution created by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Undertaking a major new public works initiative could be the cornerstone of the church’s gospel witness for the poor and the rejected.
Toward that end, I would suggest that we demand that the United States enter into a new NAFTA, a new North American Fair Trade Agreement that protects and strengthens the poor and the undefended. It should do more than foster trade; it should strengthen the rights of working people and discourage the heedless exportation of work between the two nations. A new NAFTA could also establish a regulated and humane migration policy between our nations and the other countries in this region.
This new direction can come only if the church continues its witness against placing our deepest faith in military prowess and redemptive violence as the cornerstone of our national security.
Ours is an ethic and a gospel of the possibility of the impossible. We in the church must witness that the final word is life and the triumphant presence of the Word of God in all of creation.
