Perspectives Perspectives Cabrini Border Experience

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DR KATHLEEN MCKINLEY PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY

I teach a junior Sem 300 on Wealth and Poverty. In that course we study the impact of globalization, U.S. trade policies and corporate practices on the poverty of less developed countries. When the Wolfington center sponsors student trips to the border, I always encourage my students to go to learn first hand about the maquiladoras, the factories on the Mexico side of our southern border and to meet the people who were risking their lives to come to this country to find employment. When the opportunity presented itself to go with other Cabrini faculty on this trip I felt privileged to be able to meet and speak with people living the experiences we discussed in class. For me this trip put a human face on the key questions we must all address as we look around the world today: fairness, justice, caring and most importantly our moral responsibility to others.

ANN SERVEY

PROFESSOR OF ACCOUNTING

I returned from Cabrini College’s Border Awareness Experience overwhelmed. Processing the information seemed an insurmountable task. The day I arrived home I was asked to share my experience with an Adult Contemporary Issues class the next day. My internal reaction was “No way, I could not possibly prepare a talk in time.” Externally, reluctantly, I said “Sure.”

As always my global interest peaks after a visit to an area and any discussion of the immigration issue grabbed my rapt attention. The day we left I had clipped an article from the El Paso Times to read later.

Later was here and I was reviewing and processing the information from the study tour in preparation for my impending talk. This article by Chris Roberts, El Paso Times, June 23 titled “Immigrant copes with tragedies, detention” and the Border Awareness Experience gave me my voice and prompted me to state the obvious. To summarize the article:

“Veronica Villa, mother of eight children, an undocumented immigrant has lived in the United States for 14 years. She attended her father’s funeral in Juarez and on June 10 she was detained by the U.S. Border Patrol while trying to re-enter the United States and faced immediate deportation. Her husband visited her regularly at the detention center. One day he arrived too early and was told he couldn’t see her. Before he could return to the prison, he was killed in a single-car accident. In two weeks, Veronica lost her father, her husband and she was detained.

For humanitarian reasons, she was given a different process by the Border Patrol. Veronica was reunited with her children and was permitted to remain in the United States at least until her court case is resolved. Veronica’s release took longer then expected and she was unable to attend her husband’s burial.” (El Paso Times, 6/23/2007) No fence, no wall should separate families.

DR JEFFREY GINGERICH ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY

The trip for me was powerful in terms of the experience of being on the Mexico-U.S. border. Even though I try to keep up and educate myself on the issues of immigration to the U.S., it was really transforming for me to stand on the border fence, and to watch young children peaking through the fence to the U.S. side, while large Border Patrol SUV’s cruised nearby. Things that seemed so rational from far away in Pennsylvania, suddenly felt very irrational during the time we spent at the border.

DR NICHOLAS RADEMACHER ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

The Border-Awareness Experience provided faculty the opportunity to see first-hand the complexities surrounding immigration from the perspective of key players on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The trip enriched my knowledge and understanding of the immigration issue, which will in turn enrich my work in the classroom. The topic is relevant to many of the classes that I teach from Liberation Theology, which has to do with ending economic and political oppression, to the history of the Catholic Church in America, which centers on the stories of immigrants. The dignity of the human person is at the center of Catholic social teaching as are the concomitant rights that we all have with respect to the common good: a right to life and the means to develop as fully as possible as human beings. We also have the obligation, at both the institutional and personal level, to enhance one another’s access to what will fulfill basic human needs such as but not limited to food, clothing, shelter, and meaningful work. While most of the attention on the issue of immigration, both legal and illegal, focuses on the institutional response (i.e., what is the government doing?), during this trip, when the human side of the debate overcame the abstractions of policy debate, my attention turned to the personal response. What can we do in our everyday lives to overcome the divide between rich and poor, to help the people who come here in search of those things that will help them become more fully human? In part, the answer was in the terrain – the desert – a place where, in the history of Christianity, women and men would go in search of solitude, to find God by overcoming that self-centeredness that separated them from God. In reading a meditation by Thomas Merton, who wrote a half-century ago, “Everywhere is desert,” I was reminded that the struggle for survival at the border is not limited to the people on both sides of the fence who are still there engaged in that daily effort. Rather, the struggle is present in each of us everyday, in the search for God and the over-coming of self-centeredness; the struggle continues even here as we strive to fulfill our responsibility to ensure the dignity of all persons not only at the institutional but also at the personal level through thoughts, words, and actions.

DR JERRY ZUREK COMMUNICATION PROFESSOR

The fight over immigration puts the label of “illegal” on many Spanish-speaking people in the United States. On this trip, I met so-called “illegals.” I met men sleeping on a hard tile floor of a large room like Jazzman’s Cafe, rising at 1 a.m., to be chosen by farming companies to work from 3 a.m. until 2 p.m., picking peppers under a scorching sun. What they told us they want is the opportunity to work hard, at jobs that we Americans need to be done, to make a better life for their families. I found that the problem is not that they are “illegal.” The problem is that we in the United States are more interested in partisan politics than in fixing a broken system.

afternoon until past midnight and then work in the elds from 2 or 3 a.m. until early afternoon the next day. This center serves 5,000 farm workers, provides a place where they can rest, get a shower and a good meal. It also provides English classes, health workshops and cultural events.