In response to the Nampa Raids

Speech for Candle-light Vigil, December 7, 2008
Rev. W. Thomas Faucher, Pastor, St. Mary's Catholic Church, Boise, Idaho

Seventy five years ago, as Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office as President of the United States in the midst of an economic and moral crisis of worldwide proportions, he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But we did have more to fear. The economic crisis and its effects on the peoples of the world eventually led to war both in Europe and Asia.
Roosevelt was still president eight years later, sixty seven years ago this very day, when America was plunged into war by the immoral actions of another nation, actions which violated all international laws. This caused him to say that December 7, 1941 was a “day which will live in infamy.”

Sixty five years ago, a victim of that war, a young Anne Frank, writing in her diary said, “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.”

Forty years ago, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Doctor Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream.” Four years later Pope Paul VI said, “If you want peace, work for justice.”

This list of famous quotations could go on and on. But what all of these people had at the core of their convictions was the belief that the laws under which people were living had betrayed those people, either by the injustice of the laws themselves or the lack of enforcement of just laws.
Now the United States and the world are grappling with the reality of another economic and moral crisis. Poor laws, lack of enforcement of good laws, greed and incompetence have created a worldwide business crisis of epic proportions. At the same time the world is dealing with terrorism, a Middle East torn with strife, genocide in Darfur, starvation in Zimbabwe, and other horrible realities. It is in this context that we must see and understand the moral crisis that is the immigration reality in the United States and throughout the world today.

We have gathered here at the Anne Frank Memorial because of the arrest and detention of men and women within our own state of Idaho by Federal authorities. This is a terrible thing. But this action, and the many similar actions throughout the country are neither the problem nor the solution to the problem. These actions, divisive, destructive and devastating as they may be, are only symptoms of the much deeper and more profound crisis facing the world.

What unites the moral crisis of the economy, the moral crisis we call terrorism, the moral crises of the Middle East, Africa and other places in the world, and our own immigration crisis is the failure of law.
I speak today as a lawyer. Not an American civil lawyer although I come from a family of lawyers, but as a Canon Lawyer, a church lawyer of the Roman Catholic Church. There are many definitions of law, but today I want to give not a definition but a description of law. Law is the “owner’s manual” of society. The laws found in the books tell us how to maintain our relationships with each other, how to interact, how to work together, how to preserve our rights and preserve the rights of others. And just as with the owner’s manual of our cars, if the information in the manual is wrong, or if we consistently violate the rules of the manual, the whole system eventually breaks down and ceases to function. That is what has happened both within our own country and throughout the world.
Applying this to the economic crisis, after his inauguration speech President Roosevelt and Congress passed new and better laws about the economy and included rules and regulations. Most Western nations did the same and these nations did not start the Second World War. It was the nations which passed evil, racist, unjust laws which led us into war.
Even after the war, for most of the past seventy years our economic laws and the enforcement of just regulations have worked reasonably well. But in our country and in other countries as these laws were replaced or ignored the economic system began to collapse. Greed and incompetence on the part of thousands of people, unfettered by the enforcement of just laws, created the situation with which we now face.

The economic and commercial legal system of our country and throughout the world is broken. The same can be said of the moral and terrorist crises throughout the world. Darfur, Zimbabwe, Israel, Palestine, Iraq and all the other areas of violence and destruction all have one thing in common – a lack of peace. The plaintive cry of Pope Paul VI – “If you want peace, work for justice” – spotlights the lack of justice and the failure of law.
The moral and legal system governing nations and the relations between nations is broken. And both here in America and in nations around the world the moral and legal systems governing the movement of people from one land to another, the right to immigrate, the rights of divided families, the rights of divided tribes, the rights of poor people, and the right of all people to be free from racism – these legal systems are broken.

The points I wish to make today are two. First, if we who are concerned with the immigration policies of America only see the blatant and egregious injustices of our own land, we will never find a solution to the immigration problems facing us. That viewpoint is simply too narrow. I believe that this narrow focus is the reason the efforts to solve this crisis in Congress have failed in the past and will continue to fail in the future. Putting a band-aid on a gaping wound never heals anything.

Second, what we must do is seek the inclusion of the American immigration crisis into the world crisis of the movement of peoples and the reality of racism. The whole issue of the rights of people to live in peace and justice where they choose to live must be seen as an essential part of the even larger issue of the repair and replacement of the broken economic and international relations systems.
In other words, we must make every effort to educate our political leaders that as they deal with repairing the economic laws they need to see that the exact same thing must be done with the international laws of justice and the rules and regulations on the movement and rights of peoples. Both nationally and internationally these legal systems are broken and they must be repaired and replaced together.

We must work to expose the reality that an immigration raid and imprisonment of people in Nampa, Idaho is actually part of the larger world realities of Darfur, Zimbabwe, and Baghdad, and essentially connected to the collapse of the international banks and the plunge of the world’s stock markets. We must convince people that the injustices within our immigration laws are connected to the injustices within our economic laws.
Does the United States have the ability and will to do this? Part of Doctor Martin Luther King’s dream has become a reality in our new president. This should give all of us hope that maybe we do. To inject the solving of the immigration crisis into the solutions of the economic and international relations crises will take great moral and political courage. It is my prayer and my hope that the new president and the new Congress can be educated to understand the connection and inspired to truly bring justice back into our moral and legal systems.
President-elect Obama, I address my last remarks to you. I ask that you include in your inauguration speech this sentence: “I hereby pledge to do all I can to reform the legal systems of our country and the world so that all peoples have laws which create justice, support justice, and inspire justice.”