By Ellen LaBruce - We received several calls last week from folks who spotted immigration officers moving through the valley, checking identification cards of Latinos at shopping centers and restaurants along highway 12.  Some people who were loaded into vans and driven away have not been heard from since.

It happens predictably every year after the harvest. When the grapes are in and the vegetables picked, our community’s “surplus work force” is gathered up as well and deported or scared away.  The event is barely felt in most of Sonoma, a mere blip on the radar screen: Juan doesn’t show up for his shift at the restaurant; Rosa seems preoccupied and tearful as she sweeps the front walk.  For some it is a minor inconvenience.  For others it is a life-changing event.  Children may come home to an empty house. Women wait anxiously for news of their husbands. Fathers who have been sent to Mexico make the dangerous and expensive journey back, desperate to reunite with their families.

Even Mexican-Americans who are U.S. citizens cannot escape the uneasy feeling – perhaps they are thinking of a time in the 1930’s when the U.S. government rounded up Mexican people, regardless of their legal status, and shipped them - including U.S. citizens - to the interior of Mexico. As a nation we just got around to offering an official apology this year.

Each I.N.S. sweep – while perfectly legal – defines a man working to provide for his family as a criminal and his wife and children as fugitives.  These individuals are the men and women who tend our fields, make our wine, care for our homes and rock our babies to sleep.  They have come to this country for the same reason that immigrants have come to America for generations: to build a future for their family.  (Mexico, with the 9^th largest economy in the world, ranks 53rd in measures of individual prosperity: long life, education level and having a decent standard of living.)  

There are many factors that color the current debate about immigration reform, among them the security of our borders, labor shortages, and the presence of several million undocumented workers already in the U.S. who live and work in the shadows of our society.  But the current debate must also include the impact on human lives - families caught up in an economic catch-22, doing what it takes to provide for their children, but who cannot speak out because they feel they have no voice.

 Most people agree that immigration reform is needed. Our current laws do not take into account our country’s dependence on the immigrant labor force – hence the sporadic sweeps to pick up undocumented workers after the growing season.  Two bills are being considered in Congress right now:

• House Bill  4437 (Sensenbrenner) which makes any undocumented person, adult or child, an aggravated felon and curtails fundamental due process rights in immigration proceedings; 
• Senate Bill 1003 (McCain) establishes a guest worker program that provides for documentation and monitoring of guest workers, and protects them from abuses by unscrupulous employers.  

 As a community we must educate ourselves about the proposed legislation and push for reform that will restore dignity to the hundreds of people who come to our valley, not for a handout but to do the hard work needed to make Sonoma what it is.

Ellen LaBruce, Executive Director, for the Board of Directors of La Luz Center