Writing in The Nation, Sasha Abramsky reports on The New Sanctuary Movement:
While many admire the sense of moral purpose demonstrated by New Sanctuary Movement leaders, some progressive immigration reformers are skeptical of their modus operandi.
“It’s a highly laudable cause in many ways, and you can appreciate why they’re doing what they’re doing,” says Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute at New York University’s School of Law. “But it touches such an incredibly minuscule part of the population. It’s more symbolic than meaningful in the lives of immigrants.”
Chishti believes, moreover, that it’s problematic that New Sanctuary advocates fail to distinguish between civil and criminal immigration cases, embracing individuals who have willfully ignored final deportation orders and who have ended up with criminal cases against them. “There are people who have final notices, know they have final notices, and then they’re taking refuge. It gets you in the harboring problem.”
It also gets into what is in many ways an even thornier issue: progressives don’t like faith-based infringements on the secular political and legal system when conducted by conservatives. How, therefore, does it make sense to claim sacred privilege from the left? “Our legal system,” Chishti notes, “does not recognize a church-based sanctuary. We have a separation of church and state.”
Yet for all the flaws in New Sanctuary philosophy, its practitioners are highlighting something important: America is a country of immigrants, but in recent years more and more of those immigrants have entered illegally. They have done so not out of a desire to live on the margins and at perpetual risk of deportation but because the current immigration process makes it extremely hard for large numbers of people to migrate legally from countries like Mexico and Guatemala–or, for that matter, from countries such as the one the San Diego sisters came from–while at the same time economic and political factors, such as the way NAFTA has played out, make it extremely hard not to embark on a migration journey.
Read it all. Hat Tip: The Revealer
And check out this essay on immigration reform at Episcopal Life Online.