Gina goes to church on Amsterdam Avenue. She has a green card and a steady job as a nurse’s aide. Her daughter Maria goes to Catholic school on 153rd Street. Her grandparents are undocumented immigrants but have productive lives. It is a happy family that spills out with joy in front of the school at recess time and in melody from their Pentecostal church on Sundays. But what if the music stopped? Current changes in citizenship laws and regulations are ominous for the family. Their church needs to start preparing on how to weather the storm. They need to take heed of certain other warning signs coming from their homeland Dominican Republic.
There are large numbers of foreign-born residents in Washington Heights/Inwood who don’t have citizenship. Many probably have a green card through family reunification provisions, but this may not be good enough. Further, citizenship has certain long term advantages.
♦ It may be hard to hold onto those green cards in the future.
♦ Most importantly, immigrants who become citizens make more progress in America:
Gain higher educational levels;
Get better jobs;
Income rises higher; and
Involvement in churches is greater.
Why is this?
There are many studies that show that people without citizenship tend to measure their progress by how far they have progressed over the people who stayed back in the home country. The psychological self-assurance of one’s progress is easier, of course, if you set a lower standard in one’s mind. But this can become the endpoint of aspiration.
Even so, the pressure to demonstrate to the folks back home how well one is doing in the United States can be intense. In the older wave of Italian immigrants, Carlo Levi remembers in Christ Stopped at Eboli, how his fellow countrymen spent so much money on their return trips to Italy to prove how well they were doing in the Land of Opportunity. In fact, putting on a good face could almost bankrupt the visitors. And most never gain enough money to take that dreamed of retirement back home. In our day, immigrants from north Africa have to live up to their reputation as “The Big Men” in America. Among Dominican Americans, remittance payments back to the Dominican Republic amount to investments of several billion dollars a year ($2.7 billion in 2017).
In contrast, citizens compare their progress with other citizens. At first, the comparison may be discouraging because language, connections, and education may keep one back. So, the tendency is that the newly minted citizens fight harder to integrate faster into the tracks of upward mobility. They also fight harder and more successfully against abuse and discrimination against new immigrants. There are many exceptions, but the trend is clear.
Further, citizens tend to have more active roles in American organizations like churches. This connection provides social capital in the form of encouragement, connections, and even material help. All immigrants, citizen and non-citizen, benefit from these connections, but the citizen senses himself or herself more permanent and is more active in the churches.
So, the proverb for churches is this: if you want really active church members, help them to become citizens.
The future of religion in NYC
Citizenship, the Census, and Religion
♦ Federal aid to Washington Heights/Inwood is proportional to how many people live there according to the U.S. Census. It may become proportional to how many are citizens.
♦ The federal government has proposed to exclude nonregistered immigrants from federally funded housing projects, which includes all of the projects in Washington Heights/Inwood. Right now, the proposal doesn’t affect green card holders, but could a new requirement loom in the future?
Citizenship in the United States was a historic breakthrough with religious roots for common people and popular democracy. For the first time in history, the principle was established that every human being is equal and should have an equal voice and vote on the government leaders and policies. Citizenship wasn’t by blood but by covenant of equal humans.
This development was a realization in politics of the teaching of Christianity, as expressed in the apostle Paul’s letter, chapter three, verse 28, to the church in Galatia, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This particular verse and its wider meaning were continually debated in Europe and the Mediterranean. The basic question was who is my brother or sister or my potential brother or sister? Eventually, the meaning of this verse gave rise to advocacy of universal citizenship and modern democracy. But it was not without a struggle. As we know, the founders of the United States compromised the radical idea of citizenship for all in the face of slave interests. Some argued that African Americans were “children” or not even human, so not eligible for Paul’s teaching to receive the gospel, membership in church, and, certainly, not political power.
To realize the democratic dream, the U.S. Constitution “marked a turning point in world history,” writes the U.S. Census website. “Previously, censuses had been used mainly to tax or confiscate property or to conscript youth into military service. The genius of the founders was taking a tool of government and making it a tool of political empowerment for the governed [the people] over their government.”
As you can tell from our chart, the U.S Census bureau has collected information on citizenship. This practices stretches back to the early 19th Century. In 1950, a citizenship question was poised to every household. In 1970, the Census moved the question to the so-called long census form that went out to a large portion of the populace, but not to everyone. A short form without the citizenship question went to everyone. Some of the reasons for the change were to keep response rates high and to save money. In 2010, the Census ditched the long form, moving the citizenship question to the American Community Survey (ACS), which is given every year to 3.5 million households across the country.
One of the main reasons for the ACS was that areas of the country that were growing fast wanted federal money to match their increasing number of people who needed federally-funded but state and locally provided government services. Those fast growing regions didn’t want to wait ten years for the money to be re-divided in order to pay for more students, more hospital patients, and the like. It could amount to hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
So, we are using the American Community Survey to determine the number of non-citizens in each part of Washington Heights/Inwood. But the U.S. Census keeps the data on each individual anonymous so there is no way to determine an individual’s current citizenship status.
Religious teachings on the census
Religious thinkers have long written about the use of censuses. In the United States, Christians associated the census closely with the new idea of citizenship offered to anyone who swore by the national covenant, called the Constitution.
Najuma Smith-Pollard of the University of Southern California’s Pastor Cecil Murray Center for Community Engagement has summarized Biblical references to censuses:
“Censuses are chronicled in both the New Testament and the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible); for this reason, members of the faith community see their participation in the census as undertaking spiritual work that connects them to an ancient lineage of belief and practice.
The Book of Numbers records two censuses of the Israelite people: one at the beginning of the 40-year wilderness experience, after the community escapes captivity and flees Egypt, and one at the end of that period of wandering. The population counted in the census of Numbers 1:1-3 was 603,550. The later census (Numbers 26:1-4) recorded a population of 601,730.
Near the end of his reign, King David asked his military leaders to conduct a census of the tribes of Israel, which was recorded in 2 Samuel 24:1-2. In 2 Chronicles 2:17-18, Solomon took a census of the foreigners in the land for the purpose of distributing laborers. Finally, during the time of Nehemiah, a complete census of the people was recorded in Ezra 2.
Mentions of two Roman censuses are found in the New Testament. The most well-known, of course, took place at the time of Jesus Christ’s birth, reported in Luke 2:1–5. And the final census mentioned in the Bible was also recorded by Luke, in the book of Acts 5:37.”
Muslims, Buddhists, and other religious people in the United States generally see participation in the Census as part of their commitment to American democracy.
Warning signs from the past and the Dominican Republic
The issue of providing taxpayer money to unregistered immigrants is quite old. In the early 1950s, my father pushed to provide health and educational services in a rural Texas county to migrant workers from Mexico. He ran into a lot of opposition, particularly from the rich and the poor native Texans.
A green card’s guarantee to permanent residency is not as strong as that given by citizenship. We might want to look at the current controversies in the Dominican Republic for some wisdom.
The Dominican Republic used to guarantee birthright citizenship (born on Dominican Republic soil) and honor residence permits. The country employed millions of poor Haitian immigrants for the cheapest jobs. However, the poorer Dominicans resented the competition from the Haitians for jobs. Dominicans wondered if wages were being held down. Furthermore, some bad actors would float within the migration to take advantage of ordinary, hardworking migrants. There was not necessarily any more crime than normal but immigrant crime stands very visible to public perception.
Further, many Dominicans felt that the cultures did not mix well. Many Dominicans identify as White Hispanics and see the Haitians as part of Black culture. The languages are different (Spanish for Dominicans, Creole for Haitians), the historical heroes are different, and so forth. The history of the two peoples’ interaction was fraught with tension.
The result has been some terrible incidents. In 2015, anger at Haitian crime lead to the lynching of a Haitian.
The Dominican Republic is in the midst of a big immigrant controversy. The party in power is preparing to build a wall between the countries. The government says it will revise previous residency permits and not honor birthright citizenship, because they were not the product of legal immigration. Large number of Haitians have been deported.
Churches in Washington Heights/Inwood should heed this warning sign and move their congregants into citizenship.
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