The Southern Cross recently reached out to parishes with a Spanish-speaking population to gather perspectives on how immigration laws have affected them.
This is the second installment of a four-part series.

By Dana Clark Felty
For the Southern Cross

“Families are being torn apart,” Erika Garza told The Moultrie Observer in June. “I don’t think people recognize the severity of the issue.”
Four-month-old news headlines of Georgia’s tough, new immigration laws have faded from memory for most residents of Moultrie, a 15,000-resident farming town about 20 miles northwest of Valdosta.

But for the local migrant community, the effects of fear and uncertainty still linger.

“There is a sense of hopelessness and defeat that hovers over our small town,” said Garza, a member of Immaculate Conception Parish in Moultrie. “People live in fear of losing their jobs, their property and their family members. Their spirits are crushed. Every road block, every arrest, and every deportation floods the town with panic.”

Garza herself is the eldest daughter of a migrant family.

Her grandparents came to the U.S. legally after applying for and receiving permanent residency while living in Mexico.
The family’s frequent moving across the southeast, was “rough,” she said.

“I went to two and three schools every year. It was difficult to make and keep friends, be a part of organizations at school, and participate in other activities in the community because of all the moving.”

Her father, who has worked on farms since he was 9, still follows the crops in Florida. When able, he comes to visit the family in Moultrie, where her mother and three youngest sisters eventually settled down.

“My mother decided to stop migrating, because it became too difficult once she had my three younger sisters,” Garza said.
For her senior year of high school, Garza moved in with an aunt in Florida. She then attended college and completed law school at Florida State University.

Today, the 26-year-old Garza works as a staff attorney and Judicial Law Clerk at the Dougherty County Superior Court and serves as an activist within the Hispanic community.

“I have always had this dream of helping the Latino Community. I just never knew how I would be able to help,” she said. “Then I attended a GLAHR (Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights) leader training for a weekend back in June, and I just hit the ground running when I got back to Moultrie. I started uniting, informing, and encouraging the Latino community.”
On July 1, the day new immigration laws took effect – Garza and other members of Latinos Unidos of Moultrie organized a “a day of absence,” when Hispanics were encouraged to demonstrate their economic power by not going to work.
The new law, H.B. 87, requires many Georgia businesses to use the federal e-Verify system, which checks the work eligibility requirements of newly hired employees.

Days before the bill went into effect in July, a federal judge put on hold two parts of the law pending the outcome of a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality. They include a provision that would allow police to investigate the immigration status of suspects who they believe have committed another crime and who cannot produce identification. The other part would punish those who -– while committing another offense – knowingly transport or harbor illegal immigrants.

“The apparent legislative intent is to create such a climate of hostility, fear, mistrust and insecurity that all illegal aliens will leave Georgia,” U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Thrash said in his ruling in June.

Garza argues that most of the jobs immigrants perform, including working on farms, packing sheds and factories, are jobs Americans don’t want.

But ultimately, she sees immigration reform as a moral issue.

“The immigration legislation in the U.S. is an example of how we have lost sight of God and his word. We forget that we are all the children of God,” she said.

In other parts of the diocese, priests, deacons, sisters and ministry leaders say significant numbers of   parishioners are living in constant fear.

When asked if anyone was afraid to leave their homes, nearly all of the 15 participants in a Spanish-speaking prayer group at St. Peter Claver raised their hands. Some said they are legal immigrants and all said they have lived in the U.S. no less than 10 years.

“Todos los dias,” many repeated. “Every day.”

Participants shared stories of brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews who were arrested for traffic infractions, jailed for months and eventually deported.

“When I was doing my green card process, I knew what I could do and I knew if I was driving without a license they could stop me and really stop the process,” said group leader Ethel Zuniga. “Even now, I have to be careful. And that’s what people have to know. But also, some of them have to go out. They have to work. They have to take their children to school, pick them up, buy groceries.”

Sister Grace Calvisi, coordinator of Hispanic Ministry at St. Peter Claver, said she recently assisted a family in which the father was deported to his native Guatemala leaving behind a pregnant wife and two-year-old child.

“That’s why there’s pain when things happen to families, to good solid Catholic families, when you see a family breaking up for no reason, for no good, solid reason,” Calvisi said.

Immigration laws have hit young people especially hard.

“In our youth group, the children express anxiety about what’s going to happen to their families. They express discrimination in the schools,” she said.

Deacon Mark McGrath works with several young Hispanics involved in youth group activities at St. Matthew Parish in Statesboro who are good candidates for universities but are fearful of enrolling.

McGrath, an associate professor of Spanish at Georgia Southern University, said he knows a young woman who wants to go to college but is afraid she’ll be forced to leave if her parents, who are illegal immigrants, are caught.

“Other high school graduates who are very deserving of scholarships are not eligible and find it difficult to go to college,” he said.
 
 
Dana Clark Felty is a freelance writer in Savannah and former award-winning religion reporter for the Savannah Morning News.