MY IMMIGRATION STANCE

Earlier this week a friend texted me, asking where I stand on all the immigration drama unfolding during the first weeks of the Trump presidency.

For the record, I’m a firm believer that the net value of immigration is a positive benefit to the United States. Being of libertarian persuasion, I feel that the flow of goods and people across borders, unencumbered by senseless hurdles, delivers wide ranging rewards — not only to the people crossing those borders. In the same breath, I’ll also argue that any sovereign nation has the right to create and enforce immigration policies that best serve the interests of that country and the people residing therein.

How these two sentiments are often viewed as mutually exclusive is beyond me, and my text response to my friend fell along that line.

“Sure, but what do you think of Trump’s policies?” my friend prodded, refusing to let me off the hook with abstractions.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. Really, it doesn’t. When Barack Obama decided to sign orders impacting immigration, he didn’t run them past me first. Likewise, when the Department of Homeland Security issued two new memos on Tuesday, each giving officials sweeping reach to target “removable aliens” for deportation, I wasn’t consulted.

Aside from penning letters to my elected officials and voting, there is little I can do to influence immigration policy. Yet that doesn’t mean I get a pass on the matter. No one living in a city or region like ours — with a fast-growing immigrant population — can be absolved from the issue.

This point was made very real to me when I decided a few years ago to work at a nonprofit dedicated to engaging the Chattanooga area’s booming Latino demographic, which is estimated to make up 15 percent of the city population by the year 2020. The organization, La Paz Chattanooga, historically takes a nonpolitical approach to immigration (note: I’m no longer at La Paz). Instead, it chooses the position that no matter what policy comes out of Washington, D.C., or Nashville or wherever, while someone is here, we’re neighbors. And for the good of the entire community, well-meaning people should never live in the shadows.

It was a funny proposition that a blonde-haired, blue-eyed guy who spoke nary a word of Spanish would work there, but I was quickly welcomed, and helped out with fundraising and public relations. Politics were never discussed in the office, and while immigration debates raged elsewhere, the staff simply labored to help the people who came through the doors.

I’ll never forget one Friday evening while working late in the office alone, I answered a soft door knock. With his wife and two young kids peering from inside a minivan, a man shyly asked if we had any emergency food. Thanks to some donations from local churches and schools, we did. It was nothing fancy, but I was able to offer him a small bag of dried beans, another of rice, and some canned goods that would last him and his family through the weekend.

In that moment, I couldn’t have cared less how that man and his family ended up here and if they had proper paperwork. The politicians could sort all that out. All I knew was that there were four human beings, four neighbors, who needed food, and a door shut in their face would drive them further into the margins of society.

This doesn’t mean my mind is free of policy ideas. But I don’t get to write policy. I do, however, get to choose how I engage my neighbors. And I choose to love my neighbors.

That’s the cornerstone of my immigration stance.