Mennonite Church Peace Resources for Youth

I don't have a backyard. Not in the traditional sense, at any rate. The courtyard behind my apartment is an irrigated strip of grass that the owners take care of. But my backyard, the desert that surrounds me, is a big, big place, full of every sort of danger you can imagine. Every plant has some sort of prickle or thorn. The rocks bake the earth to an excess of 150 degrees during summer days, only to brutally freeze at night. You can go miles without seeing another living being. And yet my yard is crowded. Helicopters buzz through the air, jeeps wind their way through forgotten paths, and untold thousands make their way through the endless desert in an effort to find some way to make enough money to live.

I live in Tucson, Arizona, the first major city north of the US/Mexico border in this area that stretches on for hundreds of miles to the east and the west. The border in California has been fortified with walls and increased Border Patrol agents, figuring that the sheer danger of the desert would stop the migration of those coming from the South. But the movement has not stopped; if anything it has increased, driving people, desperate for any way to make money for their families to be able to live, into the unforgiving land of the desert. Many make it through the desert. Many more are caught, and returned to Mexico without their shoes to discourage them from trying to come again. Still others don't make it out of the desert alive. Most of the time you don't hear about the hundreds of people who have died in my backyard; you probably never will. There are simply too many places to get lost in canyons and washes that line the desert for everyone who goes into the desert to be found when they don't come out.

The migration going on my backyard represents a reality that I quite simply fail to understand. I don't pretend to know what it is like to migrate to another country in order to find work, and to do so all the time fearing that you might get caught, or worse, found by the bandits that also travel the trails in the desert. I don't know what it is like to try to cross the desert with only what you have on your back and as much water as you can carry. I don't know what it is to come to a place where you are a stranger in a strange land, where everyone might be out to get you.

But what living here has taught me is that it must take a pretty awful reality to force someone to choose to leave their family and friends, the only place that most people have ever known, to take their chances in my backyard. There are just too many chances to be hurt, mistreated, or killed to be a decision made lightly, made out of greed or out of a sense of irresponsibility. The desert is too big, the separation from their homes too painful, the risk too great for people to risk their lives without having some really good reasons to do so.

This is a reality that is bigger than just my backyard. Chances are this is an issue in your backyard, too. Wherever people are needed to work, immigration becomes an issue. While the realities of what is going on in your backyard may not be the same as what is happening here in the desert, we are faced with the same issue. Jesus commands us to love our neighbors. The issue of immigration asks: What does it mean to really love our neighbors who happen to be new to our own cities, towns, schools and churches, even when our own government might see them as a problem? How do we live the reality that our migrant brothers and sisters are people that God loves, not people who can ever be described as "illegal" by anyone?

I look forward to sharing more stories from my backyard as we think about these choices together.