Church activists at summit take aim at U.S. policies

In arguments rich in biblical allusion, church and social activists Monday took aim at the nation's immigration policies — laws they contended split families, criminalize undocumented workers and undercut America's reverential self-image as a land of opportunity.

"There are 200 million migrants," Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of the Catholic Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston told those gathered for The Metropolitan Organization's Clergy Summit: Welcoming the Stranger and Immigration Reform. "War, famine, economic collapse drive them, and it's unstoppable. In our own country, 12 million undocumented people work and live in the shadows."

Borrowing language from a 2002 Catholic Conference of Bishops policy statement, DiNardo called for legalization of undocumented workers already in the country.

"Without some form of broad-based legalization," DiNardo said, "the problems will just fester and fester."

Janice Huie, resident bishop for the United Methodist Church's Texas Annual Conference, joined the call for granting legal status to undocumented workers. In May, she said, Texas Methodist leadership formally opposed job-site raids and criminalization of undocumented workers and their indefinite detention.

"We would support policies that point to the best of who we are," she said.

Huie and others reported an intensification of anti-immigrant feeling in the U.S. fueled by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"I am encountering hateful, stereotyped and racist anti-immigrant language that is almost acceptable in the mainstream," Huie said.

'Red meat issue' Rhetoric surrounding immigration issues has heated as talk radio programs exploit the issue, suggested Houston immigration lawyer, Charles Foster, chairman for Americans for Immigration Reform.

"They found this red meat issue bashing immigrants," he said.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/religion/6117984.html