March 6, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: A new Cause – and Call – for Civil Disobedience
 
By David Yount
Scripps Howard News Service
 
Every Sunday morning on our way to worship, my wife and I pass scores of men waiting in the parking lots of abandoned businesses for someone to come by to offer them work.
 
They are all unskilled day laborers, living day to day, hoping for subsistence wages for menial (but often onerous) work from contractors, who drive by and select the fittest prospects.
 
Within recent memory, the legions of the unemployed gathered in the parking lots of convenience stores, and were accused of deterring customers -- occasionally whistling at women, urinating in public, and brawling with competitors for their services. So the police moved the men to abandoned lots to wait for work.
 
Why aren't they jailed for vagrancy? And why don't they go to the state employment agency for assistance?
 
The answer to both questions is that nearly all of them are illegal immigrants. Currently, there are an estimated 11 million of them in the United States attempting to eke out an existence. There is no room for them in jail, and no one cares to pay the airfare to return them to their countries of origin. Moreover, state and local governments shy from offering them employment services intended to serve law-abiding American taxpayers.
 
There are attempts to sugar-coat the problem, either by referring to the day laborers as "undocumented workers," as opposed to illegal aliens. Or by looking on the bright side: these people are more than willing candidates for jobs no American wants -- waste collecting, cleaning motel rooms and offices, tending to lawns or other people's children, washing dishes.
 
The New York Times editorializes that ours "is a nation that insists on paying as little as possible for goods and services." These workers feed "the American addiction to cheap labor."
 
But turning a blind eye is no remedy. Those Americans who hire illegals tend to flout our labor laws, and jingoistic vigilantes try to make the illegals' lives even more miserable by harassing them.
 
In the absence of a federal initiative to treat the aliens at least temporarily as guest workers, state and local governments are prone to penalize the workers. Georgia's legislature passed a law imposing a fee on alien workers' attempts to wire money to their families. On Capitol Hill, the House passed a law that would make any American assisting an undocumented worker liable for arrest for "alien smuggling."
 
As you might imagine, the nation's churches have been in the forefront of assisting the workers to get jobs, at the same time protecting the public order. On Ash Wednesday, the leader of the nation's largest Catholic archdiocese did more. Los Angeles' Cardinal Roger Mahoney asked his flock to devote the 40 days of Lent to praying for the humane reform of immigration laws.
 
It was not an idle sermon. Mahoney promised that, should Congress make it a felony for Americans to shield or support illegal immigrants, he would instruct every Catholic to defy the law by civil disobedience.
 
David Yount's latest book is "Celebrating the Rest of Your Life: A Baby Boomer's Guide to Spirituality" (Augsburg). He answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount@erols.com