What's-Behind-The-STANK-Of-The-Old-Woild-Odor
Jews Unite Behind Push for Immigration Reform
Rex Weiner
June 26, 2013
Los Angeles
Rabbi Mark Diamond stood on the border with Mexico on a brisk February day, alongside the Rev. Alexei Smith of the Catholic Archdiocese, the Rev. Mary Glasspool of the Episcopal Diocese and a host of clergy from Presbyterian, Methodist and United Church of Christ ministries.
All of them peered through the corrugated steel wall at the rough miles between countries. The scene evoked thoughts of the old adage Mexicans invoke about their country: “So far from God, so close to the United States!”
Diamond, the American Jewish Committee’s Los Angeles director, who arranged the clerics’ 25-member fact-finding mission, is hoping to bridge a comparable distance — between a life of promise and a life of uncertainty — for millions of noncitizens in the United States.
Diamond’s key role in organizing this gathering was no isolated communal act. After months of delay, the U.S. Senate is set to vote on the most comprehensive immigration reform legislation in 27 years. And Jewish groups across the country are acting together in a way characteristic of the community on few issues besides Israel.
“It’s about the right thing to do,” said Robert Gittelson, co-founder of Conservatives for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, and a Republican. In op-ed pieces and interviews, Gittelson, a retired Jewish businessman from California’s San Fernando Valley, has called certain GOP strategies on immigration reform “un-biblical” and “cruel.”
Those leading an active push for the bill, which will offer a path to citizenship for some of the nation’s 11 million undocumented aliens, include the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Bend the Arc and the National Council of Jewish Women.
The Senate vote — and the even harder struggle that will follow in the Republican-controlled House — represents the fulfillment of a sustained campaign by the Jewish community for immigration reform, which has built momentum over the past decade.
Whether or not the necessary votes are mustered from both houses to land a historic immigration law reform bill on President Obama’s desk, Jewish outreach, particularly in the Southwest — home to the largest share of America’s emerging and increasingly powerful ethnic and interfaith populations — promises to be politically and socially influential beyond the issue it addresses.
California, with 2.6 million undocumented residents, is a front line in the battle for this reform. And a Jewish establishment ever mindful of its need to operate through alliances and coalitions to advance its own interests is not blind to the implications of the issue in a country whose demography is shifting rapidly. In addition to working with Latino groups, the ADL’s Southwest regional office has forged alliances with Asian groups representing undocumented Koreans, Chinese, Filipino and other Asian Pacific immigrants in the Southland.
“It’s the ethical thing to do,” said HIAS president and CEO Mark Hetfield, of the community’s immigration reform activism. But he quickly added, “It’s in our strategic interest.”
Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, reflects the deepening relationship that Jewish groups are developing through their visibility on the immigration issue.
“I really admire the way that the Jewish community has gone deep in support of immigration reform,” Salas told the Forward. A 15-year veteran of immigration rights activism, Salas fondly recalled a 2006 mass mobilization, when a procession through L.A. streets began with a cantor blowing a shofar and singing “Let my people stay!”
Salas counted efforts by Jewish organizations as second only to Catholic groups in their impact. A key factor, she said, is that HIAS and the AJC, founded at the height of Jewish immigration more than a century ago, have a built-up institutional expertise at integrating new arrivals into American society, with programs, legal resources and family services already in place — but now serving Spanish speakers instead of Yiddish.
The Ford Foundation recently awarded a two-year $1 million grant to the AJC’s Bridging America Project, which is planning “joint advocacy workshops in Dallas, New York and Washington, D.C.; a ‘national conversation’ among Latino and Jewish leaders about issues of mutual concern, and conferences in Houston, Miami and New Jersey on the economic benefits of immigration, among other activities.
Salas has also worked closely with the ADL, which keeps a keen eye on extremist groups that have set up vigilante patrols on the border between the United States and Mexico. An ADL study reported that “violent incidents against illegal immigrants have been brutal and are occurring with greater regularity, further intensifying the atmosphere of fear and suspicion on both sid
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