You Were Once An Immigrant, Too

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our Friday night service on January 24th when Builder Kalman Resnick, an immigration lawyer and legal expert, gave a detailed breakdown of the impact that Trump’s executive orders will have on millions of our neighbors. As Jews, our scriptures demand that we treat immigrants and foreigners as equal citizens, for we “were once strangers in Egypt.” What can we do to fight mass deportation?

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

For reasons that will become clearer in a few moments, I want to dedicate my D'var Torah to my mother's first cousin, Fanny Finger, her husband, Albert Levy, and their son. In June 1940, the Nazis occupied Paris, the city where Fanny, Albert, and their son were born and were residing. In September 1940, Fanny and Albert complied with a Nazi edict requiring all Jews to register with the police. On October 6, 1942, Fanny, Albert, and their two-year-old son were arrested by the Nazi authorities and their French collaborators and detained at the Drancy Internment Camp just outside of Paris. On February 13, 1943, Fanny, Albert, and their son were transported on a French train to the Auschwitz Concentration camp where they were murdered after selection in its gas chambers. Attached to this copy of my D'var Torah is a wedding photography of Fanny and Albert and a letter, dated February 13, 1962, verifying the above information, Fanny is alive in me every time I see a client, every time I go to Immigration Court to defend a client, and tonight as I offer this D'var Torah.

The Book of Exodus which we continue reading this Shabbat instructs us regarding our obligations to the strangers among us. Chapter 22, Verse 20 of Exodus commands: "You shall not oppress the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Indeed, no less than 36 times our Torah mandates that we protect the strangers in our midst. Leviticus Chapter 19, Verse 34 gets right to the point:

"The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens...for you were strangers in the land of Egypt."

The story of our Exodus has resonated through my life.

As a young child, I saw the parallels between our Exodus from Egypt and the mass departure of Jews from Eastern Europe between the 1880s and World War I. During this period, millions of Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States, Canada and Latin America, seeking safety from the perils of anti- Semitism. The difficulties my own family faced in this journey highlight the fierce opposition to the immigration of Jews to the United States In 1911, my maternal grandmother, Mollie, a 17-year-old orphan, and her 12-year-old sister, Rose, were denied entry to the United States at Ellis Island because of their brother-in-law's leadership in the garment workers strike of 1910 in Chicago that led to the formation of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. In 1927, my 8-year- old mother and her parents and siblings, together with my Aunt Eileen, who was a US citizen because of her birth in Chicago, were deported back to Canada for having entered the United States illegally. Restrictive immigration quotas enacted by a Republican majority Congress after World War I barred them from immigrating lawfully to the United States. These same restrictive quotas prevented millions of Jews in Europe from finding safety in the United States before and during the Holocaust, condemning members of my family and many of yours to death in the ghettos and concentration camps of Europe.

https://youtu.be/JegEddNuTrI

As a student at Evanston Township High School in the mid-1960s, I saw the parallels between our Exodus from Egyptian slavery and the migration to Evanston of the families of my African American classmates, fleeing Jim Crow segregation in South Carolina. The stories which my classmates' parents shared with me of lynchings and brutal segregation in South Carolina motivated me to join the NAACP Youth Council in high school and fight for racial justice in Evanston, Chicago and the South.

In the 1970s, as a young legal services lawyer in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, I saw the parallels between our history and the mass exodus of Mexicans and Central Americans fleeing poverty, political oppression, and violence in the hope of finding safety and prosperity in the United States. For the past 51 years I have used my skills as a lawyer to defend the rights of immigrants and their communities. There have been significant victories, including the enactment in 1986 of a legalization program that put almost 3 million immigrants on a pathway to lawful permanent residence and U.S. citizenship and the creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program known by the acronym "DACA." There have also been many defeats. However, in all the years I have practiced immigration law there has been no time as frightening as this past week for immigrants and as challenging for those of us committed to defending immigration.

I am here tonight to sound the alarm about what is contained in the 11 Executive Orders Trump signed on Monday pertaining to immigrants and other actions taken by his Administration this week to advance his agenda of mass deportations and strict limitations on legal immigration. In view of the large number of Executive Orders and other actions taken by Trump in his first 5 days back in office, I only have time to reference the most distressing:

• No. 1. To accomplish mass deportations, the Protecting the American People from Invasion Executive Order requires the undocumented to register and be fingerprinted so that removal action can be initiated against them.
• No. 2. Issuance of a U.S. Department of Justice memorandum threatening to prosecute the elected leaders of sanctuary cities and states, including our Governor and our Mayor, if they fail to cooperate with Trump's plans for mass deportation.
• No. 3. Subjecting immigrants who cannot prove to an arresting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) officer that they have been in United States for at least two years to immediate deportation through a process known as expedited removal with no right to be released on bond or defend themselves before an immigration judge. The makes the arresting ICE officer the policeman, the prosecutor, and the judge.
• No. 4. Under the Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship Executive Order, ending birthright citizenship for children who do not have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident despite the guarantees of Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that all children born in the United States are citizens of the United States. Yesterday, a Reagan-appointed US District Court Judge in Seattle in a lawsuit brought by the State of Illinois and several other Blue States issued a Temporary Restraining Order barring implementation of the Order calling it "blatantly unconstitutional.” With a 6 to 3 right wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, there is no guarantee this ruling will survive.
• No. 5. Denying migrants at our southern border the right to apply for asylum based on their fear of persecution.
• No. 6. Suspending the admission of refugees to the United States while the Trump decides how refugee admissions can be limited to just those refugees who the Trump Administration determines will be able to assimilate well into the United States.
• No. 7. Denying employment authorization to immigrants while they have pending applications for asylum, lawful permanent residence or other immigration benefits.
• No, 8. Removing the bar to ICE officers conducting enforcement operations in schools, churches, mosques, health care institutions and courts.
• No. 9. Conducting an evaluation of the Temporary Protected Status ("TPS") designations of the 21 countries granted that designation by the Biden Administration due to violent conflict or climate-related or other catastrophes in those countries with the aim of deporting hundreds of thousands of those with TPS protection.
• No. 10. Ending the humanitarian parole status of hundreds of thousands of citizens of Venezuela, Ukraine, Haiti and Nicaragua who as a result of that action will be forced to leave our country.

If all these and other anti-immigrant measures Trump's announced this week were not enough, the Fifth Circuit Cout of Appeals this month ruled that the DACA program initially created by President Obama was illegal, setting the stage for a showdown at the U.S. Supreme Count on the right of over a half million DACA recipients to remain in the United States. Our good friend, Carlos Miyasato, who came to United Staes in fifth grade from Peru, is here tonight with us. Carlos has a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a master's degree from Arizona State University in special education with an emphasis on autism. He is a Board-certified Behavioral Analyst who treats autistic children. He is one of the DACAs who will have no way to remain in our country if DACA is ended

How has Trump and his xenophobic team of immigrant haters been able to create such an agenda for mass deportation? The answer lies in their success in villainizing immigrants through lies and falsehoods.

First, they have tried to convince us that the undocumented are here because they simply refused to follow legal pathways to immigration. The reality is that over the past 57 years Congress has changed our immigration laws to make it virtually impossible for undocumented people to legally immigrate. These changes in our immigration laws include the enactment of restrictive numerical limitations and punitive statutory bars that prevent the undocumented from becoming lawful permanent residents even when they are married to U;S. citizens or have U.S citizen children, parents or siblings. As a practical matter, you can say Congress created our undocumented population. To give you a sense of how challenging legal immigration is, preference immigrants from Mexico are subject to an annual limitation of 25,620 which makes the wait to immigrate for family-based immigrants from Mexico up to 25 years. These bars to legal immigration are the reason why most undocumented people cannot immigrate lawfully even though they live in mixed status families with US. citizen spouses, children, parents, grandparents, and siblings.

Second, they try to convince us that immigrants are criminals. However, crime statistics demonstrate that immigrants commit far few crimes that US citizens Moreover, our immigration laws already bar immigrants with significant criminal convictions from the United States.

Third, they try to convince us that immigrants are taking the jobs of U.S. citizens. However, most states have a significant shortage of workers, and most U.S. citizens do not want the jobs performed by immigrants. How many of us employ or have employed undocumented people to care for our children, our parents, or our homes or to work in our places of business?

Fourth, they try to convince us that immigrants are a burden on our social welfare system. That is false. Undocumented immigrants are barred from almost all government benefits.

In conclusion, I want to urge the Mishkan community to join the resistance to mass deportation. I offer my expertise to help Mishkan figure out how best it can participate in the defense of our immigrant neighbors. Through mass protest we can stop Trump from fully implementing his agenda for mass deportations. In 2018, through mass protest, the American people stopped Trump's child separation policy which was separating thousands of children from their parents and putting them in cages along the border. We need to convince our fellow Americans that mass deportations will destroy the mixed status families in which millions of U.S. citizens and legal immigrants live and be disastrous for our economy which depends on immigrant workers to plant and pick our crops, prepare our food, manufacture our products, and care for our homes, our children, our elderly, and our disabled.

Our religious foreparents who wrote the Torah wisely instructed us no less than 36 times to defend the strangers in our midst because they understood that one of the most important measures of justice in a society is how its immigrants are treated and that a society which mistreats its immigrants is ultimately a society in which the well-being of all, and especially that of Jews, is in danger.