c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ Consider the following parable told to me by an immigration lawyer:

Once upon a time there was an immigrant who came to the United States. After he found a stable job, he went back to his home country, courted a young woman, married her and both of them came to America with high hopes. They had two children but when the son was 6 and the daughter still an infant, the man died. The young mother, knowing little English, was unable to find a job or seek citizenship papers. After a year on welfare, she and her children were deported under new U.S. immigration laws.

I have put the parable in the present. In fact, it happened in the early 1930s when the present punitive laws did not exist and the family of the late Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin was not expelled from the United States.

However, if this story of courage and persistence against great odds had happened today, Bernardin would have been shipped back to Italy at age 7. If there is another child like him somewhere in America today, he will almost certainly be shipped back.

Are we really determined to deprive our country of that kind of potential? Are we really willing to take such a risk? Are we really ready to impose laws that, if they had applied 60 years, would have cost us Joseph Bernardin?

Clearly the Republican majority in Congress, aided by many Democrats _ even liberal Democrats _ is perfectly willing to take such a risk. These men are so obsessed with hatred for and fear of immigrants that they would, if they could, shut down the flow of immigration completely.

We wouldn’t ship an Italian family back today, you say?

Maybe not. Our vile and immoral hated of immigrants focuses particularly on those whose skins are of a slightly darker hue. But our present wave of nativism, like its predecessors throughout American history, is basically Anglo-Saxon. They _ Anglo-Saxons _ don’t like the Italians much, either. Or the Poles, for that matter.

For example, a Democratic congressman from California recently lamented that if the flow of immigration is not turned off, white Anglo-Saxons will become a minority there in 50 years.

After all, didn’t Anglo-Saxons discover California? That’s why it has all those funny names like Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo and San Francisco, isn’t it?

Much of this nativism is of the cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face variety, of course. It would, for example, close down the fruit and vegetable industry in California.

Moreover, much of the strength of this country has always come from the influx of young, ambitious, and hard-working immigrants _ men and women who within a generation are better educated and more successful than the typical native-born Americans.

Baby boomers, who will put an enormous strain on the nation’s finances when they retire, desperately need young, ambitious, hard-working immigrants to earn the money that will pay for the boomers’ retirement.

But such realistic economic arguments currently have no more impact on the immigrant-bashers than do arguments about losing another Bernardin. Our racism is so strong that nothing is able to resist it.

In fact, so many phony liberals oppose immigrants that their opposition is rarely called racism, a term reserved for hatred of blacks. You can hate the Chinese, Indians, Hispanics and Arabs as much as you want and no one will ever call you a racist _ except the people you are hating and they don’t get to vote on what racism is and is not.

Besides, says the American popular mind today, the whole bunch of them should be sent back to where they belong as soon as possible. They’re no good for America.

But I would remind those who share my heritage, yet are tempted by such sentiments, that they said the same thing about us not so long ago.

MJP END GREELEY