With the 2018 midterm elections just a few days away, you’re probably being bombarded with all kinds of information: appeals for your votes or money, warnings about candidates or ballot measures, and news stories filled with analyses, apprehensions, or alarms. Most of this is ephemera: fodder for the “delete” button or recycle basket.
Occasionally, though, a piece of more enduring value will come through, and I’d like to recommend such a piece to you today. It appeared in my e-mail a little over two weeks ago, and it points to how language can widen our political and moral imaginations.
When news about the Honduran caravans began to appear in the American media, news rife with accounts of Donald Trump’s inflammatory and racist responses, an interfaith organization based in Oakland, California published a statement entitled, “U.S. Faith Leaders Call for Protection & Safe Passage for the Honduran Caravans.” The organization, called the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, affirmed in its statement the right of the caravans “to travel safely and seek protection.” In two key sentences, it showed how language choice can reflect far more than issues of style; it can compress an entire world view. Here are the two sentences:
“It is our faith traditions that call us to welcome the migrant and to treat them not as the ‘other’ but the face of God. We are also called to take co-responsibility for our brothers and sisters as so many faith communities and shelters in Guatemala and Mexico are doing as we speak.”
From the words “brothers and sisters” so much flows.
At a time when our common discourse about migrants (“undocumented,” “criminal aliens”) dehumanizes in countless ways, the phrase “brothers and sisters” takes readers to a different place. Affirming our shared humanity with the men, women, and children walking northward, it calls on us to assume responsibility for understanding the reasons motivating their flight, and it calls on us as well to support both foreign and domestic policies that uphold human rights and human dignity.
Equally important, the phrase moves us far beyond consideration of immigration as a discrete policy area (as in our “broken immigration system”) to an understanding of its place in a much bigger picture: a vision, however dimly grasped today, of what a truly just society might be.
Immigration Past, Present, and Future 