Undocumented immigrants — “illegal” in the shorthand parlance of sound bite politics — are still coming in droves to the United States. And they are being met increasingly with wave after wave of hostility in state legislatures in the vacuum of any federal effort to reform what all sides agree is a fundamentally broken immigration system.

Today’s immigrants are like the immigrants of the past who, essentially, built the nation, and Huntz is convinced that the very livelihood of the Unites States depends on whether the nation welcomes immigrants or, as has been the case in recent years, continues to scapegoat and shun them, turning them into social pariahs.

Huntz guides the Justice for Immigrants Committee through the Human Rights Office which seeks to advocate for a sane reform of immigration laws at the federal level, educate Catholics in the diocese about who these immigrants are and why they are here, and prevent any more harmful laws from being passed in Jefferson City.

“What people need to realize is that Hispanics are not the only immigrants,” he said. “We also have Sudanese, West Africans, Iraqis and Asians. Immigration is not confined to just one group of people, and it never has been.”

The Justice for Immigrants Committee, made up of Catholic activists, actually is two committees operating under one umbrella to advocate for immigrant justice and issues in the St. Joseph area and the Kansas City area.

Justice for Immigrants will have a presence in the “Reign Forest” thematic park at this week’s National Catholic Youth Conference in Kansas City, providing information to the more than 20,000 Catholic teens from around the nation who will attend.

“We will be showing a movie where the children of immigrants will tell their stories,” Huntz said. “There will also be an interactive computer display where the kids will be asked to identify the country that their families came from. We will also have an immigration game in which they will learn what life is like for an immigrant in each state. The goal of the game is to become a citizen.”

In addition, the committee is planning on celebrating National Migration Week with Mass, celebrated by Bishop Robert W. Finn Jan. 10 at St. Anthony Parish in northeast Kansas City.

During that week, the committee will launch a postcard campaign in parishes, asking Catholics to send pre-printed postcards to their congressional representatives, urging them to pass the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act. The DREAM ACT, introduced last year in the U.S. Senate by Democrat Sen. Richard Durbin and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, will provide permanent resident status and a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrant children who graduate from high school, attend college or serve in the armed forces.

The Justice for Immigration Committee is also organizing a bus trip to Washington, D.C., on March 22 to lobby for comprehensive reform.

But Huntz admitted that the climate for comprehensive immigration reform isn’t good, even in Washington, D.C.

He noted that health care coverage for undocumented immigrants was quickly excluded during the debate for health care reform.

“That tells me that immigration reform will be even harder than health care reform,” he said.

And if it’s tough in D.C., the climate is virtually impossible to negotiate in Jefferson City, where draconian laws to punish undocumented migrants has faced little opposition.

“The only thing we can do in Jefferson City is to try to make it less bad,” he said.

“But regardless of the political climate, you still have to fight the fight,” Huntz said.

Huntz recalled a telephone call from a priest who had just spoken to a mother who moved here with her children, without documents, to escape the drug violence now raging in northern Mexico.

“Her son wound up in a drug gang here,” he said. “Missouri law won’t allow him to go to college. He can even get a driver’s license. And he is now in a gang, the very thing his mother wanted to keep him out of in Mexico.

“What do you say to that mother?” Huntz said. “It doesn’t have to be this way. That’s why we fight the fight.”

Huntz also said that this wave of immigration will be good for the United States, just like past waves of immigrants have been good for the country.

“You look up our history, and our economy grows ever time we have a new wave of immigration,” Huntz said.

“And every time we ‘get tough’ and restrict immigration, the economy contracts,” he said.

Huntz said that the economic crisis the nation is in has many causes, “but we have probably made our economy worse by our harsh immigration laws.”

The process of overcoming the scapegoating that is blocking comprehensive reform won’t be easy, he said.

“When an issue is complex, you can’t fight it with t-shirts and bumper sticker slogans,” he said.

“We need to get immigrants to tell their stories,” Huntz said.

“I can rattle off statistics all day, but until people encounter the other person and see the human face of immigration, little will change,” he said.

END