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Immigrant Justice: Let the Walls Speak

Ask permission to let the walls of your coffee hour space or RE classroom "speak" for immigrant justice. Sponge-paint butcher paper and hang to create a symbolic wall, as pictured at right. Pick from the projects below to teach your congregation about immigration through interacting with the wall. You can do just one or two of the projects, or display a different project each Sunday for a month.

Note: The collections of links for the projects below are not exhaustive collections, but starting points. Keep in mind that members of your own congregations are a great source for stories and materials too.

Poems from Angel Island

Most people know about Ellis Island, but Angel Island off the coast of California is not as well known. Between 1910 and 1940, about 175,000 Chinese immigrants were detained and processed at Angel Island. Chinese immigrants experienced a great deal of discrimination and some were forced to stay on Angel Island for months or even years. There, detainees carved poetry into the walls to describe their experience. Use the wall you have created as a background for posting poems by detainees, along with photos and information about the history of Angel Island.

Angel Island Immigrant Station Poetry
Text of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act
History of Angel Island Immigration Station
Angel Island Poetry Site—Includes Asian American History timeline
Information about Asian American immigration today

Stories from Detainees

Post detainee stories and facts about immigrant detention on your wall. Possibly pair with advocacy for HR 1215, a federal bill to ensure humane treatment of detainees, by posting a letter or petition to you Representative for congregation members to sign.

Detention Watch Network—Includes facts, a map, and story archive
T Don Hutto Facility in Austin, TX/Detention of families—Includes a 17 minute video
HR 12515, The Immigration Oversight and Fairness Act of 2009 Press Release
Text of HR 1215 and current co-sponsors

Border Crossing Stories

Post stories of border crossers on your wall. In 1994, Mexico experienced economic crisis. The U.S. responded with increased border enforcement to prevent illegal crossings: Operation Gatekeeper in California, Operation Hold-the-Line in Texas, and Operation Safeguard in Arizona. These operations targeted the most easily crossed areas. As a result, would-be immigrants were funneled through the more dangerous stretches of desert, causing a dramatic spike in deaths of border crossers. Since the mid-1990s, more than 4,000 people have died crossing the border from Mexico into the United States.

No More Deaths—No More Deaths (NMD) has compiled 400 border crossers' stories of maltreatment by Border Patrol in their report Crossing the Line. Some NMD volunteers have been arrested for providing humanitarian aid.
Border Film Project—An art project that gives disposable cameras to undocumented migrants crossing the desert and American Minutemen trying to stop them.
Arizona border deaths by year—Arizona is the busiest point for border crossings.
Mexicans cross 'the border' at a theme park

A Wall About the Wall

Many communities intersect at the border between the United States and Mexico, and all of them are affected by the border wall. Research the following links to post stories, facts, and photos on your "wall" about border communities and the impact that the real border wall has had on them.

The O'odham American Indian community
Listen to the Native Americans on Immigration
Border Stories: A Mosaic Documentary
Map: Securing the Border
South Texas
Sierra Club Border Map and video about impact on wildlife. (Note: the legislation the map refers to, HR 2593, is from the previous session of Congress and is now out-of-date).
The Minuteman Project—Also see WeCanStopTheHate's critique of The Minuteman Project.

See links from the project above, Border Crossing Stories, for stories of border crossers and aid workers.

Migration Maps

Make or print maps to post along your wall showing the history of human movement into and through the United States. At the end of the wall, post a world map. Attach small slips of paper to thumbtacks or pins for congregation members to write their name on and stick onto the map to show where they or their fore-parents came from.

Homo erectus migration from Africa into Europe and Asia
Migration from Siberia to Turtle Island/The Americas
Pre-Columbian location of American Indian Tribes
Puritan migration to Turtle Island/(U.S.)
Slave Trade from Africa to the Americas
1830 Indian Removal Act forced migration
Immigration to the United States 1880-1920
Interactive Map—Clink the box that reads "All Countries" on the upper left-hand side of the map to see settling patterns for different foreign-born groups.
Migration Policy Institute Maps—Includes maps of foreign-born groups in U.S., as well as a map of the U.S.-born senior population in Mexico.
Latino Population Growth 1980-2007

Immigration in the News

Use Google News or a similar search engine to find stories about immigration every day for a week. Post them in chronological order along the wall. Other sites for finding current news article:

Immigration and Race Timeline

This project is a good one to leave up all month so people can do research at home and continue to add to it. Choose dates from the links below and turn your wall into a timeline. Pay special attention to the relationship between race and immigration policy. A quick way to add dates is to copy them from the websites into a Word file, print and cut them out, and paste them onto the wall. Add dates about the history of your church. Leave space for members of your congregation to write when they or their fore-parents entered the United States, and post photos if they have them.

Create a Prayer/Meditation Wall

Provide colorful post-it-notes and markers for congregation members to post their own prayers, hopes, poems, art, and meditations for just and humane immigration reform.

Voices that Shape the Debate

Find quotes from people and organizations whose perspectives on immigration span a wide spectrum and post them along your wall. Whose voices are the loudest? Whose voices aren't being heard? Why? How do UUs make their views on immigrant justice heard?

Janet Napolitano; Tom Tancredo; Georgetown University student Juan Gomez; Mexican President Felipe Calderón; Elvira Arellano; Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine; John Tanton, founder of FAIR; Ned Norris, Jr., Chairman of the Tohono O'odham Nation; Indigo Girls; President Obama; Prerna, DREAM Activist; John Quiñones, co-anchor of ABC Primetime; Lou Dobbs, CNN news anchor.... who else is speaking out?
Unitarian Universalist voices: ministers; youth; New Sanctuary Movement coalition members; official UUA statements; op-ed writers; immigrants; volunteers and aid workers; psychologists; lawyers; Gulf Coast advocates; interfaith council members, retirees, and parents.

Take Your Wall on a Trip

Your wall can be an educational and eye-catching visual for tabling at rallies, vigils, and coffee hours (see photo on upper right side of this page).

Last updated on Monday, April 6, 2009.