Street Prophets has a good post up about authoritarians and how they use religion in the war on undocumented people.

Traditionalist authoritarians don’t see themselves as having much in common with immigrants (or gays and lesbians, or residents of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward), because they don’t perceive themselves as playing by the same set of rules. They (the authoritarians) work hard, raise their kids right, and obey the law. Illegal immigrants cheat their way into the system, break laws to keep themselves here, refuse to contribute to the good of the country, take jobs from Americans, and when they’re all done, go home leaving Mom apple pie and America in sorrier shape than when they arrived. It’s going to be difficult to bring Christian traditionalists around on this issue, and you can forget the true authoritarians. They don’t give a crap about Mexicans because they don’t think Mexicans play by the rules, and they’re never going to think Mexicans play by the rules. The limit to the use of the common good ideal as an outreach strategy is precisely where it buts up against racism, tacit or overt , because racism is incapable of accepting The Other as neighbor.

Some folks are going to object that not all evangelicals are racists, of course. They’re not even all conservative. That’s true. Appeals to the common good still won’t much inroads to “persuadable evangelicals”. It simply goes too far against the grain of what the evangelical churches teach, which is fairly explicitly the inherited obligation model. So the common good would be a tough sell even to the most sympathetic. Consider the case of tax reform in Alabama, which went down to an ignominious 2-1 defeat when even the people it was designed to help voted against it because it would have encouraged Alabamanians to rely on government, not their families or communities.

And that’s selling to the sympathetic. For the not-so-sympathetic, immigration takes second place only to abortion and homosexuality on the list of social issues. It’s possible, I suppose, that immigration reform could wind up on an expanded evangelical social policy agenda, along with creation care and children’s issues, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

In sum: if you’re working on the issue-by-issue basis I’ve been talking about lately, this isn’t a winning issue.

Lest we forget why this is important:

NEW BEDFORD, Mass — During her two years working in a garment factory alongside hundreds of other immigrants, there were few assurances in Marta Escoto’s uncertain life. One of them was the promise she made to her children — I will always take care of you.

It was a promise she was unable to keep this month. Escoto and at least 360 other illegal immigrants were taken into custody here March 6 after a raid by federal agents on the Michael Bianco Inc. factory — a military contractor 60 miles south of Boston. Many of them, including Escoto, 38, were women whose detention separated them from their children, some of whom were stranded at day-care centers, schools, or friends’ or relatives’ homes.

Immigration officials said they made provisions for the children so none would be left alone. But in the days right after the raid — as a 7-year-old called a hotline and asked for her mother, and a breastfeeding baby refused a bottle and was hospitalized for dehydration — Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) began to categorize the raid’s aftermath as a “humanitarian crisis.”

Escoto, like most of those detained, was flown to a holding center in Texas as deportation proceedings began. A single mother, she was separated from her two young children, who were born in the United States and are U.S. citizens. Daniel, 2, asked for her constantly, while relatives worried about the care of frail 4-year-old Jessie — who cannot walk and suffers from an illness that prevents her from absorbing enough nutrition.

Jailing the mothers of innocent children, who in many cases are citizens. I’m so ashamed of my country.