THE MORAL MEANING OF IMMIGRATION

When Latino faith communities celebrate the Christmas

time posadas this year, the reenactment of the journey

to Bethlehem will serve as reminder that Jesus, Mary and Joseph suffered rejection as immigrants from rural Galilee.

Hopefully, this will underscore the moral meaning of immigration - a message made more important because the new Congress with Democratic majorities promises to revisit immigration legislation in 2007. Unfortunately, immigration has more than just a moral dimension: it also has economic, political and cultural ones.

To avoid distorting immigration truths, you have to take all the factors into account. For instance, since they were not invited here by Native Americans in 1620, the Puritans should be considered "illegal aliens." But they had mastered an agricultural economy superior to the existing Native American hunting and gathering. Puritan farms fed more people in smaller areas, and when it came to conflict they were able to dominate the Native Americans by sheer weight of numbers.

The same sort of thing happened as the United States expanded westward, once again without an invitation. The Mexicans were there first. This time, it was an industrializing economy that prevailed. God was tucked in by invoking "Manifest Destiny."

Blithely ignoring an ugly side of history, waves of Catholics from Ireland, Italy and elsewhere as well of Jews from Germany, Russia and Poland later entered the United States, worked hard, raised their families and contributed to the "melting pot." The country was so large and the need for workers so great that (except for the Chinese) there were no limitations on immigration until the 1920s when the KKK marched up Pennsylvania Avenue, white sheets and all, and secured racial laws meant to preserve a white Protestant majority. Washington had been forced to address immigration as a cultural problem.

Ironically, these restrictions went for naught as the Great Depression virtually eliminated mass migration. Economics always intrude. With the return of U.S. prosperity in the 1950s, attitudes changed. The country saw itself as Protestant-Catholic-and-Jew while the civil rights movement was opening doors to people of color.

However, the need for new immigrants to feed the economic fires was stymied by the unfair laws of the 1920s. This imbalance produced the migration to the mainland of 40 percent of all Puerto Ricans - Latin Americans ...