Concern for Desperate People

For quite some time I have been keeping an eye on the whole border-crossing issue at the Mexican/US border. I cringe when so-called unofficial groups decide to take the law into their own hands and try to keep potential immigrants out. I also know ministers who work throughout the area offering aid to those who get left stranded in the Sonoran desert trying to make the trek.

Mostly, the problems are political ones. I have heard it said that if the US immigration service really wanted that border sealed, it could do so without much effort. But the government understands how important those migrant workers are to the US economy. Those people coming here from Central America (like all of our own ancestors coming from Ireland, Germany, Poland, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere generations ago) are willing to do just about any kind of work just to have a chance for a better life than they have in their homeland. Thus, they take the lowest paying, most menial jobs that no US born citizen is willing to do. Without all those illegals, the bottom tier of our own economic system would crumble.

I have been in southern Arizona and New Mexico numerous times. It is truly a treacherous climate there. I would never want to be stranded there - day or night, summer or winter. Most of the people who try to get across the border have no idea what it is like when they start out. Then they get into the worst part after it becomes too late to turn back.

The Way of the Cross of the Immigrant Jesus (Liguori Publications) is a very provocative set of meditations on the plight of our sisters and brothers to the south. It challenges our complacency. It shows how Christ still suffers today in the sufferings of the poor. The Introduction to the booklet states:

"Today Jesus walks the sorrowful journey of the migrant...This Way of the Cross is intended for all those...who are living the difficult experience of migration, for those who work with migrants building a better world, a world without borders, and to those men and women who have opened their eyes to the harsh reality of this phenomenon and want to be challenged by it."

I guess the real questions are:

Are we willing to be our brother's/sister's keepers? (see Gen 4:9)

Do we recognize that our neighbors are like the Samaritan, the people we normally don't want to be around? (see Luke 10:29-37).