The immigration reform debate in the U.S. has become so discombobulating I had to check into a treatment center. I hope you might find the following useful, should you decide that you too may be a problem thinker, suffering from the disease of immigrationism.
Immigration Anonymous ( IA ) is a fellowship of U.S. residents who share their experience, strength and hope with one another that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from immigrationism. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop stinking thinking. There are no dues or fees for IA membership; we are self-supporting through our own contributions. IA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution; does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to think soberly about immigration policy reform and help other problem thinkers to achieve sobriety.
The following are the 12 steps of recovery:
Step One: We admit that we are powerless over illegal immigration and our borders have become unmanageable.
Playing the blame game just maintained my stinkin thinkin. Recovery is a process, not an event. It starts with me and it’s one step at a time, one day at a time. I’ve stopped blaming them. I am the problem thinker who is sick, not those who are crossing our borders. I am comforted by the truth expressed by Henri Nouwen: “Our brokenness is truly ours. Nobody else’s.”
This step required me to begin to get real. The IA program specifically states: “Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually mean and women who are constitutionally in capable of being honest with themselves.”
I had to admit that I suffered from multiple delusions. I realized that my stinking thinking contained “shortsighted and perverse notions of charity.” I figured that we were doing undocumented immigrants a favor by allowing them to be in this country to get along the best they could, as long as they didn’t become a burden and contributed something to our society. Then, I was confronted with the following: “This kind of charity has no real effect in helping the poor: all it does is tacitly condone social injustice and to help keep conditions as they are – to help keep poor people poor.” The poverty of my own thinking became apparent. Maybe that’s what the folks in Alcoholics Anonymous figured out when they wrote in 1939, “Therefore, the main problem of the alcoholic centers in his mind, rather than his body.” Those of us in Immigration Anonymous know this to be the nucleus of our malady. My life became unmanageable because of the powerlessness that my own thinking produced.
Step Two: Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.
Don’t expect your elected officials to do anything whatsoever to resolve this issue anytime soon. In case you’re wondering, a “guest worker permit program” will be about as effective as an aspirin for colon cancer. It is during my work in Step Two that I have come to appreciate the reality of the phrase, “Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point.” I have tried every method I can imagine to restrain, control or abstain from my stinking thinking. Nothing has worked. I had to surrender.
This step really put the disease of immigrationism in perspective for me: “Whatever our protestations, are not most of us concerned with ourselves, our resentments, or our self pity? Selfishness – self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self delusion, self-seeking and self-pity, we have made decisions based upon self interest that have placed us in a position to be hurt. So, our troubles are basically of our own making. Above everything, we must get rid of this selfishness.” Remember, the first thing a nut has to do to begin recovery is to become aware that “I’m nuts!” Thank God I’m not alone! I am so grateful that there are those who have recovered from this insidious disease who can share the path of recovery they’ve followed successfully with me.
I certainly hope the U.S. government refrains from any further reform of immigration policy guided by fear, resentment, delusion, selfishness and self-pity. The IA program has taught me that this is not the way to go in terms of thinking about the resolution of the immigration matter.
Step Three: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understand him.
I have come to believe that there is a God and neither I, nor the United States “is it.” To “reduce other people to things, whose value resides only in their usefulness, not in what they are in themselves” is just plain wrong. When we became problem thinkers regarding immigration, “crushed by a self-imposed crisis we could not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that God is either everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or He isn’t. What will our choice be?”
We need help. The solution must come from a power greater than ourselves, rather than relying upon Tom Ridge, Bernard Kerik, or whoever they finally appointed to replace Ridge, who has not employed an undocumented housekeeper or subcontractor, dined knowingly at an eatery that employed undocumented workers, has stock in Wal-Mart or any association whatsoever with companies that have been/might be alleged to benefit from the economic usefulness of undocumented labor. We are all sinners in need of salvation here. Heaven help us all!
I like what Thomas Merton has to say about God’s will, as it pertains to the current state of the immigration debate in the U.S.: ” If you can never make up your mind what God wills for you, but are always veering from one opinion to another, from one practice to another, from one method to another, it may be an indication that you are trying to get around God’s will and do your own will with a quiet conscience.”
Step Four: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
I adore what Senator John McCain has to say about this step: “Don’t let fear convince you that you’re too weak to have courage. Fear is the opportunity for courage, not proof of cowardice. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity to act despite our fears. We were meant to love. And we were meant to have the courage for it.”
The one remarkable thing I have learned about taking inventory is that the objective is not necessarily about what’s in stock, it’s also about what’s missing. After completing this step, the glaring absence of love permeated every dimension of my stinking thinking. I can only hope that this revelation will benefit you as well. I pray for the day when Congress will initiate hearings that will focus on our moral responsibility regarding the illegal immigration issue, guided by the truth that we are meant to love, rather than were. Will you join me in this prayer?
In this step, I was required to list the resentments I had regarding illegal immigration on paper. Upon completion, I reviewed my list. “The first thing apparent was that this world and its people were quite wrong. To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us ever got.” I had all kinds of these bad thoughts and feelings. They were poisoning my soul. My sponsor in IA has really helped me to understand that the pages of history are replete with one theme: the hopeless flee to a place that is hopeful. The undocumented immigrants in my community are here because of just that. Heck, my grandparents came here for the same reason. When I place myself in their shoes, I know I would be scheming to cross the U.S./Mexico border as well.
Step Five: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.
Wow, this one is tough. I was required to read aloud all the resentments, fears, delusions, self-centeredness and self-pity identified in step four to my IA sponsor. I began to cry within the first ten minutes. The shame that the confession of these attitudes, beliefs and illusions I held about undocumented immigrants was overwhelming. Yet, when completed, I felt light, like I could float, that I was somehow cleaner on the inside, and more attractive on the outside. The world and those around me appeared more inviting, less threatening.
My sponsor characterized this feeling as becoming prepared for the second journey: “The second journey begins when we cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the morning program. We are aware that we have only a limited amount of time left to accomplish that which is really important – and that awareness illumines for us what really matters, what really counts.”
It is in this step that my recovery from the stinking thinking about immigration reform in the U.S. really began to take hold. There seemed to be a faint light visible at the end of a very dark tunnel. My IA sponsor captured the essence of what I felt in the following; “When being is divorced from doing, pious thoughts become an adequate substitute for washing dirty feet.”
I prayed for over an hour with my sponsor as we completed this step.
Step Six: “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.”
I don’t know if I’ve been entirely ready for anything in my life. My sponsor said I need to jump the curve: “Jumping the Curve means leaving one stage of development for another….it involves leaving the comfort and familiarity of the old world of conventional wisdom, processes, traditions, leadership styles and products…..If that were not intimidating enough, those who do jump will find that the next curve does not even exist yet. In fact, it is being created by the leaders who are in the very process of guiding their organizations through “midair” the gap between today’s fading epoch and the demands of the new era that is still unsettled and in evolution.”
My IA sponsor said ready refers to a sincere willingness to repent, to change, to trust God to transform you into something better. I was as ready as I could be, so I completed this step.
Step Seven: Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
“Humbly?” Like me, most of my colleagues in IA are self-obsessed, small-minded, self-righteous, have all the answers types. My IA sponsor said “There is little hope for us until we become tough-minded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance.” We prayed together.
Step Eight: Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
My sponsor said, “regeneration carries a price which those who think of it idly will balk at.” He went on to say that I was now preparing for action, rather than honest introspection. I had to admit that my illness had hurt others. My family who heard my self-righteous prejudice flung through the rooms of our home, co-workers, friends, my community, my country and my own soul. My sponsor reminded me to put myself on the list. I began to realize the wisdom in “To the degree that I harm my brother, no matter what he is doing to me, to that extent I am harming myself.” I became willing and was prepared to move forward.
Step Nine: Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
My sponsor said the essence of this step is captured in the following, “If we are sorry for what we have done, and have the honest desire to let God take us to better things, we believe we will be forgiven and will have learned our lesson. If we are not sorry, and our conduct continues to harm others, we are quite sure to drink, sink. We are not theorizing. These are facts out of our experience.” (emphasis edit mine). I found that there was something supernatural that occurred when I met folks face-to-face and confessed my role in the harms that I had caused them. Some forgave me. Others didn’t. It’s the sincerity of my amends that mattered coupled with the deep desire to refrain from offending anyone in the same way again.
Step Ten: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
It is in this step that I began to learn that “Forgiveness is not an occasional act. It is a permanent attitude. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.” This was to be a lifelong process that required daily monitoring and self surrender to God.
Step Eleven: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our constant contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for the knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
My sponsor shared the fact that “His appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as two beams on the cross.” My heart had to change before I could expect society to change. My life makes a difference.
Step Twelve: Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other alcoholics problem thinkers, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. (emphasis edit mine).
Giving it away without expecting anything in return is the secret to recovery. Forget the profit motives, turf issues, misguided patriotism, sovereignty issues, protecting what you have etc. Recovery is counterintuitive. Writing my experience with these twelve steps is only one way that I am attempting to carry the message.
Summary:
I hope you found something that I’ve shared within these pages that will motivate you to find the courage to take these steps. I will conclude with a quote from my IA sponsor: “Whenever the gospel is used to reduce the dignity of anyone created in God’s image, it is not, of course, the true gospel. People who use God’s name to justify prejudice, contempt, and hostility are not doing God’s work. They’re working for the Poser. This is not to say they are not sincere about God and the gospel. It is only to say they are sincerely wrong.”
Immigration reform is the civil rights movement of the 21st century. Once again, the United States is confronted with the issue of integration. As one author states, “What has failed at every level, from the society of nations, to the national society, to the local community, to the family is integration: We have failed to remember “our community as members of the same body.” We have committed what to the republican founders of our nation was the cardinal sin: we have put our own good, as individuals, as groups, as a nation, ahead of the common good.
It’s time to sober up America. Keep coming back! It works!
Voice from the crowd: “If you work it!”
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