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The Hospitality of Housing Policy
by Leslie G. Woods
Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house? (Isaiah 58:6—7a)
The stories of the Hebrew Bible place a tremendous emphasis on the idea of place — of having a place to call home. It is not such a surprise, really — it is a collection of stories produced by the descendants of people who wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. Of course home was important to them. And likewise, the concept of hospitality, of inviting others into their homes, was a foundation of society, because they had once been strangers / sojourners / resident aliens / immigrants / refugees, and they knew what it felt like to be strangers in a strange land.
Likewise, hospitality returns as a central theme in the ministry of Jesus, the length of which is marked by acts of hospitality. His hospitality knows no bounds as he welcomes those at the margins of society. He shares meals and communes with those to whom no one else will even speak. The conduct of his own ministry is dependent upon the hospitality of others. Think of all the events that take place in people’s homes. Both the hospitality of Jesus and the hospitality that Jesus receives are pervasive and enabling throughout the Gospels.
The Rationale for the 218th General Assembly’s (2008) new statement, “From Homelessness to Hope” discusses God’s hospitality:
God makes a home and a place for all at the table, but humans, through sin, have excluded particular groups of people … Due to human sin, hospitality too often becomes a matter of sharing our crumbs rather than offering an abundant loaf … In contrast, true hospitality is equated with justice. Each person is provided not only a chair and a meal, but a bed and a place of shelter, indeed the opportunity to become an ongoing part of the community. True hospitality requires emancipation of slaves and economic redistribution, so all may find a place to be at home.
Certainly, the question of hospitality for the stranger is a question for the church, but what about U.S. national policy? The question of U.S. hospitality is the concern of this Washington Report to Presbyterians. Whether the issues concern immigration and family reunification, refugee policy, or the homelessness and affordable housing crisis at home, U.S. policies have much for which to answer when it comes to hospitality.
Homelessness and the lack of affordable housing, a safe place to call “home,” in the United States have reached a crisis. It is difficult to measure homelessness, for obvious reasons, but the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty estimates that approximately 3.5 million people in the U.S. — 1.35 million of them children — experience homelessness in a given year. A January 2005 study reported a point-in-time estimate of 744,313 people experiencing homelessness on a particular night.
Of course, the problem of homelessness is inextricably linked to the lack of available, affordable housing. Housing is considered affordable when a household spends 30 percent or less of its income on housing costs. Between 1997 and 2005, the number of working families paying more than half of their income for housing increased 87 percent. When counting the families living in severely inadequate or dilapidated housing, the number with critical housing needs rises to 5.2 million.
These families live on the edge and are constantly at risk of homelessness. All it takes is one illness, one unexpected increase in a utility or grocery bill, or the inability to buy gas to get to work. The result is a choice between paying rent or paying for medicine, heat, gas or food.
But of course housing isn’t just about having a roof over one’s head. It’s the fulcrum of well-being, the starting point for climbing out of poverty. Having a home, not just housing, means a safe place to go at night to rest. Its location determines opportunity: where children go to school, what jobs are nearby for parents, what transportation is available, what air we breathe, what water we drink. Where we live and whether we have a home plays a significant role in determining our opportunities and future successes. The Israelites’ preoccupation begins to become clear.
Congress has approved, and the President has just signed, a bill hailed as the most comprehensive housing policy in decades. Media coverage has mostly focused on the bill’s target of shoring up the rocky financial markets, throwing a lifeline to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and foreclosure prevention. The bill also contains provisions that will benefit those already suffering from inadequate wages and high housing costs long before the foreclosure crisis: low-income renters.
The bill establishes a National Housing Trust Fund, which will provide a dedicated source of revenue so that 1.5 million affordable homes can be built or maintained in the coming years. In addition, the bill includes:
- $4 billion for neighborhood stabilization in areas blighted by foreclosure;
- improvements to Section 8 Housing Vouchers and Project-Based Section 8;
- temporary increases to some low-income housing tax credits;
- clarification of FEMA’s role in providing relief when Public Housing is impacted by disaster;
- and additional funding through the McKinney-Vento Act to provide emergency assistance for homeless children, youth and families who are homeless due to foreclosures, whether they rented or owned their homes.
The bill in its entirety is impossible to evaluate because of its scope and size. As for the measures taken to stabilize the economy, only time will tell if they are successful; but in this bill we see some significant strides of hospitality through improved policies. People’s lives will be changed for the better by some of the provisions in this bill. Some homes will not be foreclosed upon. More families will have access to Section 8 vouchers. Local governments will be able to get grants to rehabilitate empty, foreclosed buildings, and revitalize their neighborhoods.
But tonight in the United States, 744,000 people may go to sleep outside, or in a shelter, or in a motel, or in a car, or on a friend’s couch, because they do not have a home. It is important to take time to celebrate the victories, to enjoy the success of enacting one bill; but we have a long way to go.
The Plight of Immigrant Families
by Mary Anderson Cooper
The 2006 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) reaffirmed its earlier policy regarding immigrants living and working in the United States, calling for efforts to provide:
- an opportunity for hard-working immigrants who are already contributing to this country to come out of the shadows, regularize their status upon satisfaction of reasonable criteria, and over time, pursue an option to become lawful permanent residents and eventually U.S. citizens;
- reforms in our family-based immigration system to significantly reduce waiting times for separated families who currently wait many years to be reunited; (and)
- the creation of legal avenues for workers and their families who wish to migrate to the United States to enter our country and work in a safe, legal, and orderly manner with their rights fully protected.
Immigration is one of the most contentious issues facing candidates in the 2008 election. As the economy worsens and unemployment increases, some voters resent spending government funds to provide education and social services for immigrants whose legal status is questionable, while others believe foreign workers take jobs that Americans want and need. On the other hand, employers contend they cannot afford the salary demands of native-born workers and say their businesses would fail without the labor of immigrants. Whatever the truth is of these competing views, the fact is that children and families of non-citizen workers are very often condemned to lives of separation and deprivation because the adults work in the United States while family members are left behind in the land of their birth.
In theory, U.S. policy supports and encourages reunification of families in which the adults are citizens of countries other than the United States. In reality, the system is short of staff, hampered by bureaucratic inefficiency, and faces a massive backlog in processing applications, so that even the least complex cases take many years to process. According to a recent study by the League of Women Voters:
It could take as long as 20 years for the spouses and minor children of legal permanent residents to legally join them in the U.S …. Each year that the current family preference and country quotas remain in place, the backlogs increase, and the waits for families to reunite grow longer.
Before 1965, federal policy favored immigrants from Europe, to the near-exclusion of people from other parts of the world. The Immigration Act of 1965 created a “family preference” system to systematize the sponsorship of relatives by legal immigrants. Since then, 50 percent to 70 percent of immigrant visas distributed annually have gone to close family members of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. The first priority goes to spouses, minor children and parents of such individuals. A far more restricted second category of preference goes to unmarried adult children of U.S. citizens or legal residents, and siblings and married children of citizens.
A 2004 report in The Future of Children, published by Princeton University and The Brookings Institution, stated that 21 percent of immigrant children are poor, compared with 14 percent of native-born children in the United States, primarily because immigrant parents are more likely to have low-wage jobs. In addition, non-citizens are ineligible for most federal programs of aid to poor households, such as welfare, Medicaid and food stamps, even when the families are in the United States legally. The religious community contends that immigrant workers are required to pay taxes and thus should be entitled to receive the benefits those taxes support, including public assistance, health care, and quality education. Allowing poor immigrant parents to participate in income assistance programs would also give them access to educational programs, English language instruction, and employment services, all of which could increase family earnings.
Because it is difficult to obtain legal status for their families, immigrants have, in the past, returned home periodically to see their relatives; but the increase in border security and the rise in travel costs has decreased this practice. Immigrants are reluctant to apply for visas, fearing they cannot meet the income requirements for readmission, especially if they support households in both countries; and revealing their low-income status could jeopardize their ability to bring relatives into the United States legally later on. This enforced separation only weakens family structures, once again leaving the children without an intact family.
The Bush Administration and the prospective nominees of both national political parties have had much to say about how to change immigration policy. Polls of the electorate show that immigration is important to voters, although losing ground to economic concerns.
The President’s emphasis is on enforcing existing laws and construction of a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. In his last State of the Union address, however, Mr. Bush recognized the need for foreign workers in this country, saying:
"…we also need to acknowledge that we will never fully secure our border until we create a lawful way for foreign workers to come here and support our economy."
Nonetheless, he has focused on increasing the number of border patrol agents and raiding employers of undocumented workers. The Administration’s policy is to incarcerate everyone caught crossing the border illegally until they are returned to their own country, and it now requires documentation of citizenship for people entering the United States by land, sea or air. A report by the Center for Immigration Studies shows that immigration among less-educated young Hispanics has dropped 10 percent in the last year because of these changes.
Sen. John McCain co-sponsored bipartisan immigration reform legislation in 2007 that did not come to a final vote in the Congress, but he now repudiates part of that plan. His platform calls for securing the borders first and then providing a path to citizenship for many of the undocumented workers now in this country, harsher penalties for employers who hire people here illegally, and a guest-worker program to protect immigrants who come here to work from threats of deportation or employer abuse. He supported funding for the border fence and for helping Mexico fight the drug trade and voted for making English the official language of the United States.
Sen. Barack Obama’s position is similar, with the difference that he supports letting undocumented immigrants apply for driver’s licenses. He believes people already in the United States illegally who have not been in trouble should be able to pay a fine, learn English, and take their place at the end of the line to apply for citizenship. Sen. Obama voted to fund the border fence, opposed making English the official language, and supports investing in improvements to Mexico’s economy to reduce the incentive to immigrate. He has proposed legislation to speed the citizenship application process, with emphasis on keeping families together.
Iraqi Refugees
by Catherine Gordon
The war in Iraq and its consequences have produced one of the largest humanitarian crises of our time and have caused the region’s greatest refugee crisis since the Palestinian displacement in 1948 and one of the largest movements of people around the globe. Nearly one in five Iraqis is now either a refugee or internally displaced within Iraq.
The United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that there are between 2 and 2.5 million Iraqi refugees and 2.2 million internally displaced Iraqis. Most of the refugees have fled to neighboring countries with approximately 1.5 million in Syria, 700,000 in Jordan, 50,000 in Lebanon and 150,000 in Egypt. This influx of traumatized people will further destabilize a region already coping with serious political issues.
These same countries have been serving as hosts to the Palestinian refugees for 60 years, many of whom still live in refugee camps in their countries. It is estimated that the refugees and their direct descendants now total 4.25 million. In addition, only one of these countries, Egypt, has signed the 1951 International Convention on the Status of Refugees, which established the UNHCR as well as setting criteria for the treatment of refugees. Because they are not signers, these governments are under no legal obligation to recognize the Iraqi refugees or give them needed assistance. Syria has played a positive role in the crisis but neither Syria nor Jordan plans a long term Iraqi presence.
As with most refugees from violent conflicts, the displaced Iraqis have been traumatized. Many of the refugees have health issues and are suffering from depression and anxiety. While Jordan and Syria have state-sponsored clinics that are open to the refugees, there is not enough capacity within the countries to provide the basic health care and medicines to many of the refugees. Chronic medical problems such as diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease are left untreated and poor housing conditions add to the health problems. Other problems facing the refugees include lack of access to education for the children, lack of legal employment (none of the host countries except Lebanon permit them to work), few financial resources and the lack of legal status in the host country.
The Iraqi refugee crisis is somewhat different from other refugee crises and is not receiving attention from the international community or media in part because of this. Rather than being highly visible living in camps in large numbers, Iraqi refugees are hidden in the cities of their host countries, scattered across the cities in apartments. They receive no aid from the host country or the international community and very few are registered with the UNHCR. In addition, the host governments are wary of the refugees and those organizations helping them, and it is difficult for authorities to reach all of the refugees to provide information.
While some refugees have fled Iraq because their lives are threatened for working in cooperation with the United States, the U.S. government has resettled relatively few. From 2003 to early 2007, the United States resettled only 466 Iraqis. At the end of 2006, the Bureau for Population, Refugees and Migration (BRPM) announced that the United States would resettle 7,000 Iraqis in 2007. By May 2007, UNHCR referred almost 3,000 cases to the United States but the United States had resettled only 68. The United States revised its goal down to 2,000 for 2007. The United States government hopes to resettle 12,000 this year and is setting up the mechanisms to achieve this number. Ellen Sauerbrey, Assistant Secretary of State, says a reason for the delay in processing refugees referred by the UNHCR is that “the United States has been unable to accept more Iraqis in part because of the time needed for background checks, which have become more stringent since 9/11.”
The 2008 General Assembly of the PC(USA) called on the church to “strongly advocate the United States government to act more quickly to provide haven in the United States for threatened Iraqi refugees and displaced persons regardless of their religious faith, after screening for public health and security risks” and to “strongly advocate the United States government to provide adequate staff, resources, and simplified procedures to rapidly implement an improved Iraqi refugee resettlement program.”
On July 13, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) introduced H.R. 6496, The Iraqi Refugee and IDPs Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement, and Security Act of 2008. It supports a multi-year comprehensive plan to address the deepening refugee crisis and would:
- authorize $700 million for FY 2009-2011 to relieve Iraqi refugees, internally displaced persons, and other vulnerable Iraqis;
- increase direct accountable bilateral assistance, as appropriate under U.S. law, and funding for international organizations and NGOs working in the region;
- authorize $500 million to increase humanitarian aid and infrastructure support for Jordan;
- provide technical assistance to grow the capacity of Iraqi government agencies responding to humanitarian needs inside Iraq;
- increase Iraqi refugee admissions to the U.S. by 20,000 for FY 2009-2011, and require improvements in the efficiency of the resettlement application process;
- establish a Special Coordinator for Iraqi Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons within the Executive Office of the President to ensure expeditious and effective implementation of the overall strategy; and
- urge increased cooperation between the United States Government and the international community to address this crisis.
Go to the Presbyterian Legislative Action Center and urge your Representative to support this bill.
Introducing Presbyterian legislators
Senator John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D—WV)
Senator Jay Rockefeller has served the people of West Virginia as a U.S. Senator since 1984. He is the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and of the Health Care Subcommittee on Finance and the Aviation Subcommittee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. He serves on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.
As a long-time advocate of accessible and quality healthcare, Rockefeller is recognized as one of the strongest champions for health care reform. While efforts to achieve universal health care reform have been impeded, he seized the momentum and began to focus on an incremental approach, starting with our children. Working with a bipartisan coalition, Rockefeller played a leading role in creating the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in 1997, which has given millions of low-income children access to health care, when they would have otherwise gone without access. He was a leading advocate in the effort to reauthorize and expand the CHIP program in 2007, and continues to lead the charge in protecting children’s access to health care and working to expand coverage to the millions of uninsured youngsters in the United States.
Ecumenical Advocacy Days — Enough for All Creation
The program for Ecumenical Advocacy Days (March 13–16, 2009) will focus on the world’s abundance and how it can be allocated to address concerns regarding climate change, immigration and migration, and poverty. Religious advocates and activists will gather in Washington D.C. for worship, issue briefings, workshops, advocacy skills training and lobbying with Congress. Information and registration forms will be available soon at the Advocacy Days Web site.
Save a Tree!
If you want to receive Washington Report to Presbyterians electronically instead of by mail, send your name, mail address and email address to mary.cooper@pcusa.org. Members who subscribe electronically to Washington Report will also receive Witness in Washington Weekly, an online weekly update of legislation before Congress, with related Presbyterian policy and links to more information.
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