Xenophobia or Xenophilia: Towards a Theology of Migration
“I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.”
The Schooner ‘Flight’Derek Walcott
“To survive the Borderlands You must live sin fronteras Be a crossroads.”
Borderlands/l:a Frontera: The New Mestiza Gloria Anzaldua
A Homeless Migrant Aramean
The Bible’s first confession of faith begins with a story of pilgrimage and migration: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien … ” (Deuteronomy 26:5, NRSV), or, in another version, “my father was a homeless Aramean who went down to Egypt and lived there” (REB).
We might ask, did that “wandering and homeless Aramean” have the proper documents to reside in Egypt? Did he maybe overstay his visa granted time of residence? Was he maybe an “illegal alien”? Did he and his children have the proper Egyptian social security credentials? Did he and his children try to get free health care at the expense of the Egyptian citizens? Did they speak properly the Egyptian language?
We know at least that he and his children were strangers in the midst of a powerful empire, and that as such they were both exploited and feared. This is the fate of many immigrants. In their reduced circumstances they are usually compelled to perform the least prestigious and most strenuous kinds of menial work. But at the same time they awaken the schizophrenic paranoia typical of empires, powerful and yet fearful of the stranger, of the “other,” especially if that stranger resides within its frontiers and becomes populous. More than half a century ago, Franz Fanon brilliantly described the peculiar gaze of so many white French people at the growing presence of Black Africans and Caribbeans in their national midst.’ Scorn and fear were entwined in that stare.
The biblical creedal story continues: “When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the … God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction… and our oppression” (26: 6). This statement of faith was to be solemnly recited every year in the thanksgiving liturgy of the harvest festival. It reenacted the wounded memory of the afflictions and humiliations suffered by an immigrant people, strangers in the midst of an empire; the recollection of their hard and arduous labor, of the contempt and scorn that is frequently the fate of the stranger and foreigner who has a different skin pigmentation, language, religion, or culture. But it was also the memory of the events of liberation, when God heard the dolorous cries of the suffering immigrants. It was also the remembrance of another kind of migration, in search of a land where they might live in freedom, peace, and righteousness.
We might ask: who might be today the wandering Arameans and what nation might represent these days Egypt, a strong but fearful empire?
Dilemmas and challenges of migration
The United States undergoes a significant increase of its Latino/Hispanic population. In 1975, little more than 11 million Hispanics made up just over 5 percent of the US inhabitants. Today they number approximately nearly 47 million, around 15 percent of the nation, its largest minority group. Recent projections estimate that by 2050 the Latino/Hispanic share of the US population might be between 26 to 32 percent. This demographic growth has become a complex political and social debate for it highlights delicate issues, like national identity and compliance to the law. It also threatens to unleash a new phase in the sad and long history of American racism and xenophobia. Two concerns have become important topics of public discourse:
- What to do regarding the growth of unauthorized migration? The influx of Mexican illegal immigration, for example, grew from an estimated average of 260,000 per year in 1990-1994 to approximately 485,000 annually in 2000-2004. Probably about a quarter of the Hispanic/Latino adults are unauthorized immigrants.
- What does this dramatic increase in the Latino/Hispanic population might convey for the cultural and linguistic traditions of the United States, its mores and styles of collective self-identification?
Unfortunately, the conversation about these difficult issues takes place in an environment clouded by the gradual development of xenophobic attitudes. One can perceive signs of an increasing hostile reaction to what the Mexican American writer Richard Rodriguez has termed “the browning of America.” Let me briefly mention some key elements of this emerging xenophobia:
- There is what one might call the Lou Dobbs syndrome: The spread of fear regarding the so-called “broken borders,” the possible proliferation of Third World epidemic diseases, and the alleged increase of criminal activities by undocumented immigrants. A shadowy sinister specter is created in the minds of the public: the image of the intruder and threatening” other.”
- This xenophobic stance intensifies the post 9/11 attitudes of fear and phobia regarding the strangers, those people who are here but who do not seem to belong here. Surveillance of immigration is now located under the Department of Homeland Security. This administrative merger links two basically unrelated problems: threat of terrorist activities and unauthorized migration.
- One can clearly recognize this mind-set in the frequent use of the derogatory term “illegal alien” as if the illegal identity would define not a specific delinquency, but the entire being of the migrant. We know the dire and sinister connotations that “alien” has in popular American culture, thanks in part to the sequence of four “Alien” [1979, 1986, 1992, and 1997] films with Sigourney Weaver fighting back atrocious creatures.
- The White House, Congress, states, and counties have tended to be excessively punitive. Some examples are:
- a. A projected wall along part of the Mexican border (compare it to Ephesians 2: 14, “Christ … has broken down the dividing wall”).
- b. The criminalization as a felony not only of illegal immigration but also of any action by legal residents that might provide assistance to undocumented immigrants.
- c. Legislation prescribing mandatory detention and deportation of noncitizens, even for alleged minor violations of law.
- d. Legislation mandating an increase in punitive measures against employers. At the end of the day, the immigrants will endure the main sacrifice.
- e. Proposed legislation to curtail access to public services (health, education, police protection, legal services, drivers’ licenses) by undocumented migrants.
- f. A significant intensification of raids, detentions, and deportations. This is transforming several migrant communities into a clandestine underclass of fear and dissimulation.
Let us not forget at what moment in President Obama’s recent address to a joint session of Congress, did a congressman from South Carolina shout, “You lie!” That outrageous lack of decorum occurred just when the President mentioned the issue of whether undocumented immigrants would be able to benefit of the proposed universal health care. Health care for undocumented immigrants seems’ to be competing with the so-called “death panels” for the weapon of choice of those who oppose health care reform, or at least of it most diehard and belligerent sectors.
From a clash of civilizations to a clash of cultures
In this social context tending towards xenophobia and racism, the late Professor Samuel P. Huntington wrote some important texts about what he perceived as a Hispanic/Latino threat to the cultural and political integrity of the United States. Huntington was a prominent Ivy League professor of politics and government, founding director of Harvard’s John M. Olin Institute of Strategic Studies, chairman of Harvard’s Academy for International and Area Studies, and cofounder of the journal Foreign Policy. He was also the intellectual father of the theory of the “clash of civilizations,”? with notorious consequences for the disastrous foreign policies of the Bush White House.
In 2004, Huntington published an extended article in Foreign Policy, titled “The Hispanic Challenge,” followed by a lengthy book, Who are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity» The former prophet of an unavoidable civilizational abyss and conflict between the West and the Rest (specially the Islamic peoples) now became the proclaiming apostle of an emerging nefarious cultural conflict inside the United States. Immersed in a dangerous clash of civilizations ad extra, this messenger of doom prognosticated that the United States is also entering into a grievous clash of cultures ad intra.
The We of the first part of the title of Huntington’s book Who are We?) refers to the “We” of “We the People of the United States,” the first sentence of the 1789 US Constitution and also to the previous “We” of the last paragraph of the 1776 declaration of independence [“We … the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress … solemnly publish and declare … “] The myth of the Republic’s “Founding Fathers” is central to Huntington’s thesis. They founded and defined the perennial essence of the American nation.
American national identity seems a very complex issue for it deals with an extremely intricate and highly diverse history. But Huntington has, surprisingly, a simple answer: The US is mainly identified by its” Anglo-Protestant culture” and not only by its liberal republican democratic political creed. The United States has been a nation of settlers rather than immigrants, according to this eminent Harvard professor. The first British pioneers transported not only their bodies, but also their fundamental cultural and religious viewpoints, what Huntington designates as “Anglo-Protestant” culture.” In the formation of this collective identity Christian devotion – the Congregational pilgrims, the Protestantism of dissent, the Evangelical Awakenings has been meaningful and crucial. This national identity has also been forged by a long history of war against a succession of enemies (from the Indians to the Islamic jihadists).
Christianity and war have thus been the historical sources for the social construction of American national identity, according to this reading. They have provided the rituals, symbols, and ceremonies (flag, declaration of independence, pledge of allegiance, national hymn, patriotic military parades) crucial for the forging of a collective sense of communal loyalty. There is a certain romantic nostalgia in Huntington’s thesis, an emphasis on the foundations of American culture and identity, in their continuities rather than its evolutions.
But the main objective of Huntington is to underline the uncertainties of the present trends regarding this nation’s collective self-understanding. After the dissolution of the Soviet threat, he perceives a significant neglect of the American national identity. If the whole world is transformed at the image of US popular culture and conceptions of free market and democratic politics, there is no “other” against which to forge the uniqueness of American identity, the notorious” American exceptionalism.” National identity seems to require the image of a dangerous adversary, what Huntington terms the “perfect enemy.” The prevailing trend is supposedly one of a notable decline and loss of intensity and salience of US awareness of national identity and loyalty.
But then emerges the sinister challenge of the Latin American migratory invasion. It is not similar to previous migratory waves. Its contiguity, intensity, lack of education, territorial memory, constant return to the homeland, preservation of language, dual citizenship, retention of homeland culture and national allegiance, its distance to AngloProtestant culture;. its alleged absence of a Puritan work ethic, makes it unique and unprecedented. This immigration constitutes, according to Huntington, “a major potential threat to the cultural and political integrity of the United States” (FP, 33; WAW, 243). This Harvard professor has discovered and named America’s newest “perfect enemy” … the Latin American migrant!
A critique to Huntington
This is a romantic, nostalgic, and somewhat melancholic outlook of American national identity, badly suited for the cosmopolitan perspective needed today to solve international conflicts peacefully. It represents, to begin with, a rather careless way of thinking about war that disregards the exceptional destructiveness of the new military technologies and the devastation that they inflict upon the so-called” perfect enemies,” who, after all, happen also to be human beings.
What exactly is here meant by “Anglo-Protestant culture”? According to Huntington, Italian, Irish, and Polish Catholics became American Catholics and somehow assimilated to “Anglo-Protestant culture.” A similar process of integration underwent Eastern Orthodox immigrants from Russia, Greece, Bulgaria, or Ukraine [remember the film “Deer Hunter”;’], and the Ashkenazi Yiddish-speaking Jewish diaspora. But if they all became” Anglo-Protestant” while keeping their own religious traditions and memories, even engaging into their “fat Greek wedding,” what then is the specific semantic meaning of “Anglo-Protestant,” apart from the fact that English has prevailed as the lingua franca and that all these immigrants seem to share a common adherence to free enterprise and democratic republicanism?” Anglo-Protestant culture” becomes an imprecise shibboleth of misty semantic vagueness.
One might detect in Huntington a hostile attitude towards Latin American migration, which initially seems to be directed towards the poor Mexicans laborers, but, as his analysis of prosperous Cuban immigrants in Miami suggests, finally encompasses the entire Latino/Hispanic population in the United States. This community becomes the dreaded” other,” a dreadful image that plays a rather ambiguous and paradoxical role: it seems to threaten the cultural integrity of the United States, but conversely it might also convoke the nation to preserve its cultural purity and resist its potential contamination by the intruders.
Huntington’s discomfiture is intense regarding the encroachment of Spanish in the American public life. He calls attention that now in some states more children are ominously christened Jose rather than Michael. He also seems disturbed by the fact that many corporations, before any further procedure, prompt a prior electronic selection: “English or Spanish?” This increasing public bilingualism threatens to fragment the US linguistic integrity. Linguistic bifurcation becomes a veritable menacing Godzilla.
Huntington is obviously over stressing the linguistic problem. There are certainly linguistic difficulties, partly occasioned by the difficulties of English spelling and phonetics (for rightly has written the Argentinean author, Ernesto Sabato, that “English is a language invented by Mediterranean pirates who wrote London and pronounced. Constantinople”). But, the truth is that most Hispanics try to master English and to assimilate to the ” American way of life” (whatever that vague shibboleth might mean). But, paradoxically, Huntington is also worried because the Hispanics might become bilinguals and could thus have an employment advantage in many urban centers. Thus, the same Harvard professor who hopes that Americans remember and celebrate their culture, language, and traditions, expects from Hispanics that they forget theirs as soon as possible. So much for professorial coherence!
Huntington neglects altogether the economic causes for the Latin American migration – its economic and social benefits both for the sending (remittances) and the receiving nations (lower wages for manual jobs). He does not seem to have any concern regarding the process whereby they become our new douloi and pDTOl1wi, servants at the margins of our society, in a kind of social Apartheid, cleaning our stores, cooking our meals, doing our dishes, cutting our grass, picking our tomatoes and oranges, painting our buildings, washing our cars, staying out of our way …
Incredibly, Huntington disdains their alleged lack of work ethic. Anyone of us, just looking around our own institutions, could relate countless stories of immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and other Latin American countries with two full time jobs, additional part times, devoid sometimes of health insurance, vacation, or pension benefits. And they keep going on, looking at nights nostalgically at “Ia misma luna” as their children across the frontier.
Huntington also neglects the history of violence and conquest behind a substantial segment of the US Latino/Hispanic population. How can we discourse about these people without bringing into the conversation the 191h century military annexation of several Mexican provinces, the 1898 conquest of Puerto Rico, and the suffering that many Latin American nations endured from US hegemony during the 201h century? Have we already forgotten the plight of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua during the Reagan White House?
Obfuscated by Huntington are the consequences of the present trend among metropolitan Third World diasporas towards holding dual citizenship. An increasing number of Latin American nations now recognize and promote double citizenship, a process that leads to multiple national and cultural loyalties and to what Huntington classifies, with a disdainful and pejorative tone, “ampersand peoples.” Dual citizenship, Huntington rightly recognizes, leads to dual national loyalties and identities. It supposedly violates the Oath of Allegiance and disrupts the exclusivity of the Pledge of Allegiance. He even tells of a 1998 Mexico-United States soccer game in Los Angeles in which Mexican Americans jeered the US team and cheered the Mexican as supposedly indisputable evidence of the emerging major threat to national loyalty.
Migration is an international problem, a salient dimension of modern globalization.
Borders have become bridges, not only barriers. Globalization implies not only the transfer of financials resources, products, and trade, but also the worldwide relocation of peoples, of human beings who take the difficult and frequently painful decision to leave their kin and kith searching for a better future. The intensification of global inequalities has made the issue of human migration a crucial one. It is a process that requires analysis from: 1) a worldwide perspective and horizon; 2) a deep understanding of the tensions and misunderstandings arising from the urban proximity of peoples with different traditions and cultural memories; 3) an ethical perspective that privileges the plight and afflictions of the migrants.
Huntington pontificates the obvious: that there is a serious immigration problem in the United States and that it foregrounds sensitive issues about national identity and compliance with the law. But the way he focuses this social predicament obfuscates its analysis. He seems to suggest stricter policies regarding illegal migration, stronger measures to enforce cultural assimilation of the legal immigrants, and the rejection of dual citizenship. This would not only be utterly archaic and anachronic; it might also become the theoretical underground for a new wave of xenophobic white nativism.
The train has already left that outdated station. What is now required is a wider acceptance and enjoyment of multiple identities and loyalties and, if religious compassion truly matters, a deeper concern regarding the burdens and woes of displaced peoples. The time has come to prevail over the phobia of diversity and to learn how to appreciate and enjoy the dignity of difference.f For, as Dale Irvin has recently asserted, “the actual world that we are living in… is one of transnational migrations, hyphenated and hybrid identities, cultural conjunctions and disjunctions.”
Huntington overstresses the peculiarities of the present Latin American immigration. After all, even Benjamin Pranklin once said about German migrants: “I have great misgivings about these immigrants because of their clannishness, their little knowledge of English, their press, and the increasing need of interpreters … rr And in 1855 Massachusetts Gov. Henry J. Gardner denounced the Irish immigrants swarming into his state as a “horde of foreign barbarians.” From that “horde of foreign barbarians” emerged, by the way, the prominent Kennedy family, among many others.
Huntington’s suggestion of “societal security,” as complementary to “national security,” might end up by narrowing substantially the horizons of American cultural diversity and pluralism. Is that a desirable goal to be pursued in times where in mega cities like the one where we meet today, New York, so many different worlds live and mingle in unavoidable proximity? I, at least, do not think so.
Huntington rightly underscores that in American public and political affairs culture and religion are crucial. Indeed, they matter as much as ethnicity, race, and gender distinctions. But as his views on the “clash of civilizations” became handy for a new crusade against Islam, so his posterior vision of a “clash of cultures” could become handy for a new prosecutorial inquisition, first against Latin American migrants but maybe also against their cousins: the Latino/Hispanics citizens or legal residents of this nation.
Do the Latino/Hispanics truly represent” a major potential threat to the cultural and political integrity of the United States,” as Huntington has argued? I do not think he proved or could prove his case. Whether that is something to lament, denounce, or celebrate depends on the eyes of the beholder. Mine, I must confess, are very critical. Maybe, just maybe, it would not be that negative historical outcome if the Latino immigrants in fact prove to be that apocalyptic “major potential threat to the cultural and political integrity of the United States.”
Xenophilia: towards an ethical theology of migration
Migration and xenophobia are serious social quandaries. But they also convey urgent challenges to the ethical sensitivity of religious people and all persons of good will. The first step we need to take is to perceive this issue from the perspective of the immigrants, to pay cordial (that is, deep from our hearts) attention to their stories of suffering, hope, courage, resistance, ingenuity, and, as so frequently happens in the deserts of the Southwest, death. Many of the unauthorized migrants have become, in the apt title of John Bowe’s book, Nobodies? – our new “Douloi, douloi, modern servants.
Will the Latino/Hispanics, during these early decades of the 21st century, become the new national scapegoats? Do they truly represent” a major potential threat to the cultural and political integrity of the United States”? Does a brave and intelligent Hispanic woman have to do public penance because she once asserted the right of a “wise Latina” to disrupt the exclusive privilege of white males to pass judgment on disputed crucial constitutional and juridical matters? This is a vital dilemma that this nation has up to now .been unable to face and solve. We are not called, here and now, to solve it. But allow me, from my perspective as a Hispanic and Latin American Christian theologian, to offer some critical observations that might illuminate our way in this bewildering labyrinth.
We began this lecture with the creedal memory of a time when the people of Israel were aliens in the midst of an empire, a vulnerable community, socially exploited and culturally scorned. It was the worst of times. It was also the best of times: the times of liberation and redemption from servitude.
That memory shaped the sensitivity of the Hebrew nation regarding the strangers, the aliens, within Israel. Their vulnerability was a reminder of their own past helplessness in Egypt, but also an ethical challenge to care for them. The care for the stranger and foreigner became an essential element of the Torah, the covenant of justice and righteousness between Yahweh and Israel. “When an alien resides with you in yourland, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 19: 33f). “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23: 9). “The Lord your God is God of gods … who executes justice to the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10: 17ff).
The prophets constantly chastised the ruling elites of Israel and Judah for their social injustice and their oppression of the vulnerable people. Who were those vulnerable persons? The poor, the widows, the fatherless children, and the foreigners. “The princes of Israel… have been bent on shedding blood … the alien residing within you suffers extortion; the orphan and the widow are wronged in you” (Ezekiel 22: 6f). After condemning with the harshest words possible the apathy and inertia of temple religiosity in Jerusalem, the prophet Jeremiah, in the name of God, commands the alternative: “Thus says the Lord: Act with justice and righteousness … And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow … ” (Jeremiah 7: 6). The perennial temptation is xenophobia. The divine command, enshrined in the Torah is xenophiliathe love for those whom we usually find very difficult to love: the strangers, the aliens, and foreign sojourners.
How comforting would be to stop right here, with these fine biblical texts of xenophilia, of love for the stranger. But the Bible happens to be a disconcerting book. It contains a disturbing multiplicity of voices, a perplexing polyphony that frequently complicates our theological hermeneutics. It is not merely that for many key ethical dilemmas we find in the Bible different perspectives, but that these are often conflictive, even contradictory. Sometimes we jump from our contemporary labyrinths into a biblical maze, and get even more perplexed.
In the Hebrew Bible we also discover statements with certain distasteful flavor of nationalist xenophobia. Leviticus 25 is usually read as the classic text for the liberation of the Israelites who have fallen into indebted servitude. Indeed. But it also contains a nefarious distinction: “As for the male and female slaves whom you may have, it is from the nations around you that you may acquire male and female slaves. You may also acquire them from among the aliens residing with you, and from their families … and they may be your property … These you may treat as slaves, but as for your fellow Israelites, no one shall rule over the other with harshness” (Leviticus 24: 44-46). And what about the terrifying fate imposed upon the foreign wives (and their children), in the epilogues of Ezra and Nehemiah? They are thrown away, exiled, as sources of impurity and contamination of the faith and culture of the people of God. Not to mention the atrocious rules of warfare that prescribed forced servitude or annihilation of the peoples encountered in Israel’s route to the “promised land” (Deuteronomy 20:10-17). These all are, in the apt expression of Phyllis Trible, “texts of terror.”
This conundrum is a constant irritating modus operandi of the Bible. We go to it searching for simple and clear solutions to our ethical enigmas, but it strikes back exacerbating our perplexity. Who said that the Word of God is supposed to make things easier? But have I not forgotten something? After all this is an activity organized and sponsored by a Protestant Seminary. And if something distinguished the Protestant Reformation was its Christological emphasis. Solus Christus, after all, was the main tenet of the Reformation. What then about Christ and the stranger?
The parable of the judgment of the nations, in the Gospel of Matthew (25: 31-46), is pure vintage Jesus. It is a text whose connotations I refuse to reduce to a nowadays too corrunon and constraining ecclesiastical confinement. Jesus disrupts, as he loved to do, the familiar criteria of ethical value and religious worthiness by distinguishing between human actions that sacramentally bespeaks divine love for the powerless and vulnerable from those that do not. Who are, according to Jesus, to be divinely blessed and inherit God’s kingdom? Those who in their actions care for the hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, and incarcerated, in short, for the marginalized and vulnerable human beings. But also those who welcome the strangers, who provide them with hospitality; those who are able to overcome nationalistic exclusions, racism, and xenophobia and are daring enough to welcome and embrace the alien, the people in our midst who happen to be different in skin pigmentation, culture, language, and national origins. They are the powerless of the powerless, the poorest of the poor, or, in Jesus’s poetic and prophetic language, “the least of these.”?
Why? Here comes the shocking statement: because they are, in their powerlessness and vulnerability, the sacramental presence of Christ. “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me … ” (Matthew 25: 35). The vulnerable human beings become, in a mysterious way, the sacramental presence of Christ in our midst.
When, in this powerful and imperial nation, you, its citizens, welcome and embrace the immigrant, who reside and work here with or without some documents required by the powers that be, you are blessed, for you will be welcoming and embracing Jesus Christ, your Lord. They are human beings designed and shaped in the image of God. They deserve to be recognized as such. And, by the way, they also, as several church leaders have already claimed, deserve the best health care that this wealthy nation can provide. No more, but no less than any of us here present tonight.
This nation has a tendency to play the role of the Lone Ranger. Yet, migration and xenophobia are international problems, affecting most of the world community, and have thus to be understood and faced from a worldwide context. The churches and Christian commununities need to address this issue from an international ecumenical perspective. For, as Pope Benedict XVI has rightly admonished world leaders in his recent encyclical Caritas in veritate:
[M]igration … is a striking phenomenon because of the sheer numbers of people involved, the social, economic, political, cultural and religious problems it raises … [We] are facing a social phenomenon of epoch-making proportions that requires bold, forward-looking policies of international cooperation … We are all witnesses of the burden of suffering, the dislocation and the aspirations that accompany the flow of migrants… [T]hese laborers cannot be considered as a commodity or a mere workforce. They must not, therefore, be treated like any other factor of production. Every migrant is a human person who, as such, possesses fundamental, inalienable rights that must be respected by everyone and in every circumstance. (Caritas in veritate, 62)
We need to countervail the xenophobia that contaminates public discourse in the United States and other Western nations with an embracing, exclusion-rejecting, perspective of the stranger, the alien, the other, one which I have named xenophilia, a concept that comprises hospitality, love, and care for the stranger. In times of increasing economic and political globalization, when in a megalopolis like New York, many different cultures, languages, memories, and legacies converge, xenophilia should be our duty and vocation, as a faith affirmation not only of our common humanity, but also of the ethical priority in the eyes of God of those vulnerable beings living in the shadows and margins of our societies.
Allow me to conclude, disrupting the English-only environment of this event, with some verses of the song Extranjeros, written by the Spanish songwriter Pedro Guerra, in the language of most undocumented immigrants of this nation.
Por ser como el aire su patria es el viento
Por ser de la arena su patria es el sol
Por ser extranjero su patria es el mundoPor ser como todos su patria es tu amor
Recuerda una vez que fuimos asiLos barcos y el mar, la fe y el dios
Llegar a un lugar pidiendo vivir
Huir de un lugar salvando el dolor.
