Austin woman believes citizens can shape immigration policy_12405

Posted: 1/21/05

Austin woman believes citizens can shape immigration policy

By Ken Camp

Managing Editor

AUSTIN–Carmelita Hernandez believes one person can make a difference–even when it comes to big issues like shaping the United States' immigration policy.

Hernandez, a member of Iglesia Bautista Principe de Paz in Austin, started working as a volunteer with undocumented workers during an amnesty program in the mid-1980s.

“I was so excited at the time, because it looked like our government cared enough to try to solve the problem of clearing up the status for people who were here then,” she said. “I thought it might lead to a new system of handling the immigration problem, but nothing happened.”

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Hernandez said her faith in Christ motivates her each morning to ask, “OK, Lord, what do you want me to do today?”

She believed God opened her eyes to see an immigration system that tears families apart by placing workers in a position of choosing between being with their families or living where they can find jobs to support them.

She saw hard-working laborers who sent most of every paycheck back home to family in Mexico but who lacked the freedom to travel back home themselves because they feared they wouldn't be able to cross back over the border.

And she believed God led her to take action to remedy that perceived injustice.

Her passion for helping foreign-born workers in the United States grew so intense that she went back to school and earned an undergraduate degree in political science at the University of Texas with a concentration in immigration studies.

In 2000, she started writing a proposal for a guestworker pilot program that would allow immigrant workers temporary legal residency in the United States for designated time periods. She worked off-and-on preparing the proposal for more than a year before mailing it to President Bush.

“That was right before 9/11,” she lamented, thinking her proposal not only would get lost in the flurry of activity, but also might not be received as sympathetically by an administration focused on tightening homeland security.

When she received what appeared to be a routine form letter from the Department of Health and Human Services in October 2001, which acknowledged receipt of her proposal, she feared that meant her hard work was being relegated to bureaucratic limbo.

But she was pleasantly surprised when Sen. John Cornyn introduced the Border Security and Immigration Reform Act of 2003.

While Hernandez is unsure whether Cornyn is just “likeminded” or whether her ideas were forwarded to him, the guestworker program recommended by his bill closely tracks her proposal.

As long as employers in the United States offer the allure of higher-paying jobs than workers can find in Mexico, laborers will find a way to cross the border, Hernandez believes.

“The problem is not going to go away,” she said.

Hernandez believes that if the United States and Mexico worked together to facilitate the legal border-crossing of guestworkers rather than trying to prohibit undocumented laborers, it would strengthen security by providing both nations a mechanism for regulation.

From contacts within her own church, she concluded the current system forces desperate workers to live in constant terror of discovery and deportation, and it disrupts families.

A guestworker program would allow a laborer to work legally in the United States, return to his native country to spend time with family, and then return to his job without fear, she believes.

“Most people (from Mexico) who are working here don't really want to stay here,” she said. “They want to be where their parents and grandparents are–where they have roots. They just want a job to provide for their families.”

For more information about the Border Security and Immigration Act, contact Suzii Paynter with the Baptist General Convention of Texas' Christian Life Commission in Austin at (512) 473-2288 or suzii.painter@bgct.org.

Additional Resources on Immigration:
• Proposed federal Legislation to Legalize Undocumented Farm Workers: The Agricultural Jobs, Opportunity, Benefits, and Security Act of 2003

• Undocumented Immigrants: Fact and Figures from the Urban Institute Immigration Studies Program, 2004

• The Border Security and immigration Reform Act of 2003, section by section summary

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