Our responsibility as Americans and Jews to welcome immigrants

By Rabbi David Segal

LIVELY OPINION

“FOR MORE than 200 years, our tradition of welcoming immigrants from around the world has given us a tremendous advantage over other nations.”

So began President Obama’s speech two weeks ago, as he announced executive action on immigration to increase border security, retain skilled immigrants to benefit our economy, prioritize deportations to focus on criminals, and create a mechanism for certain undocumented immigrants to become accountable citizens.

The legality of this unilateral approach is being debated fiercely among the chattering class (although among actual legal experts, there seems to be more consensus that it is within the bounds of presidential authority).

As a rabbi, I offer here not a legal or political opinion, but rather a Jewish reflection on immigration.

Consider this sentiment:

“The New Immigrants, in the . . . imagination of many native-born Americans, lacked self-discipline and work ethic, lived immoral lifestyles, and could not be trusted not to throw their votes (should they attain citizenship) to corrupt machine politicians or radical troublemakers.”

It sounds like a summary of contemporary anti-immigrant views, but it’s from a report about immigration to America in the 1920s.

The “New Immigrants” they’re talking about were mostly Catholics and Jews, Eastern and Southern Europeans whom the white Protestant majority thought would bring down the nation.

EVERY SLUR we sling, every racially dismissive comment we utter, every prejudice that we hold about immigrants today — I guarantee someone said that about our parents or grandparents, not so many generations ago.

Every time we emphasize the rule of law at the expense of immigrant families — I guarantee someone used “the rule of law” as an excuse to keep America closed to people like us.

Our ancestors sought a better life here — fleeing pogroms and poverty — and their patriotism was questioned, their fitness to be American was questioned, their right to be here, to work hard, to pay their dues and contribute to society — that was all questioned because they looked different and spoke with an accent and were crammed into small apartments and worked minimum wage jobs.

Consider, for a moment, the immigration quotas imposed in the 1920s to slow the arrival of these undesirables — including Jews! — into America.

Think about the tragedy of the St. Louis, the ship carrying nearly a thousand Jewish refugees from Germany in May 1939, seven months after Kristallnacht. They tried, and failed, to disembark in Cuba and then Florida. Because of quotas and distrust of immigrants — in particular, yes, Jews — the ship was turned away. The refugees returned to Europe and most of them were eventually deported to concentration camps.

That, in the extreme, is what immigration quotas look like, what distrust of immigrants can cause.

If we can’t see in the faces and the stories of today’s immigrants our parents and grandparents, then we have severed our ties to the journeys that got us here.

If gratitude to our immigrant ancestors doesn’t shape how we view immigrants today, then shame on us for taking for granted the privilege of American citizenship. Talk about an empty sense of entitlement.

CONSIDER THIS, too: Among our 12 million undocumented immigrants, there may be as many as several thousand Jews. They come from Israel, Romania, Russia, Latin America, Canada and elsewhere. Jews leaving home — that’s not a new story.

And yet they are invisible to us, to the Jewish community. They live in the shadows because our lawmakers have forgotten how to lead and we Jews have forgotten where we came from, where we still come from.

One observer asks: “How would any of us react if a family in our congregation were to be arrested and deported for overstaying a visa?”

Now, I ask: How would we react if a family down the road in a Spanish-speaking Catholic church were arrested and deported — would it stir anything in us? Or have we simply accepted the premise that immigrants are “other,”outside our social circles, out of sight, out of mind, not our problem?

Does some niggling part of us even question whether they deserve to be here, whether they are capable of being fully American?

G-d forbid — I hope not. What would our ancestors think? (A group of Reform rabbis and allies, known as Rabbis Organizing Rabbis, has been taking action recently to prevent deportations that would tear immigrant families apart.)

AS AMERICANS, we are a nation of laws but also of stories, national myths that define our ethos. As Jews, too, we are a people of laws and stories. Leaving aside the policy details (it would be nice if Congress would take those up in earnest), what we as Jews need to rekindle is the fire of America’s story, which is a profoundly Jewish story as well.

The president quoted the Torah in his speech: “We shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger — we were strangers once, too” (paraphrasing Exodus 23:9). He could have also quoted from Leviticus 19:33-34:

“When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the L-rd am your G-d.”

The Jewish story is a cycle of exile and homecoming, of migrating and putting down roots, of being a stranger and of receiving the stranger. At times we’ve been buffeted by the cruel tides of history, and at other times we’ve found refuge on welcoming shores.

How miraculous that here in America, whose founders envisioned her as a new Promised Land, we Jews have gone from being strangers to threads woven tightly into the fabric of American life. How ironic if that’s no longer the America we champion.

The Statue of Liberty, the “Mother of Exiles,” bears the words of a Jewish woman, Emma Lazarus. In her poem “The New Colossus,” she articulated that facet of American exceptionalism that is the absorption of immigrants:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me . . .

DOES THAT vision of Americas speak to us only when it concerns Jews? If so, what a failure of empathy. If we’ve lost the will to believe in that America, to trust in that promise, then we’ve come unmoored from our story, as Americans and as Jews. How quickly we’ve forgotten what it feels like to be a stranger.

Our memory lapse may be a blessing when it means we’ve found a place to call home, but it is a curse when it causes us to forget that the duty of loving the stranger is at the very heart of what it means to be a Jew.

Rabbi David Segal is the spiritual leader of the Aspen Jewish Congregation.