There is something about a cherry picker that everyone can appreciate. Riding high with some guy like a bird in the sky is my idea of something to do. Especially handy at parades, rallies, and street festivals I would imagine. Whenever someone introduces the term “cherry picking” I tend to think of the bucket truck. Just how did the bucket truck get to be associated with taking something — especially something attributed to the Lord and Ruler of the Universe — and using it without any context?
Don’t know, but I was thinking about cherry picking this morning as I was reading Leviticus. There is nothing like a bit of Old Testament before breakfast, but I was reading this particular piece because it came up in today’s Daily Office, the Lenten discipline of saying Morning Prayer having persisted into Easter. In amongst those crazy-ass laws, I was a bit take aback to read, “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.”
Now, I’m no more interested in grinding an ax on immigration than Ace. It’s an important thing, but it’s not really my thing. But the thing is this: it’s all of our thing at this point and because of that and because this particular line came up this morning, I’mma talk about it this time and be done. And the modern story about immigration has to do with the story of a dam that the Brown Brothers, George and Herman, along with their brother-in-law Daniel Root wanted to build near Austin, Tejas. They needed government help (read government money) to get the job done. It was cheaper to get a Congressman elected than to build the dam, so they got good old Lyndon Johnson elected and set him to work.
Good old Lyndon did right by them and a little further down the line they got him elected Senator. By the time he was President, the Brown and Root Company had ventured into major construction projects like military bases, off-shore oil rigs, and huge projects in the Tejas oil fields. They had known that Lyndon had somewhat questionably liberal tendencies, but they never thought that he would threaten the cheap supply of illegal labor that they had come to rely upon. With the Immigration Act of 1965, Johnson did not correct what everyone knew was a rampant issue in the Southwest: hiring of non-resident aliens who were not subject to employment law or payroll taxes because they were paid under the table and, well, in the country illegally.
Brown and Root, until recently a subsidary of Halliburton, known of late as Kellogg, Brown and Root (or simply KBR), and also a builder of Navy ships, ensured that its workers and workers like them would not become legal residents. As the labor market grew faster than available labor could satisfy the need, the South Texas oil field way of doing business became better known throughout the country. First we maybe did not notice so much, but now that the labor market has contracted, you bet your asses we do.
Which does not change the fact that the non-resident aliens who were doing these jobs are here doing them illegally. Just ask Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. He will tell you about how the aliens he arrests in wide ranging sweeps do and should feel shame for their law breaking ways as they sit in a tent city in the desert outside Phoenix and eat their green bologna while they wear their pink panties. I’m not disagreeing that a law has been broken, and while I do think the law should be changed that’s not where I’m going at the moment.
What I am saying is that this is about all of us and how we treat the stranger in our midst. I’m a pretty big fan of pink panties, but my fandom is pretty exclusive to those worn by women who want to wear them. You can be into men wearing them, but it’s still about consent. And dignity. And that the story of their being here may be more complicated than it appears. I think what Leviticus is trying to get at is that how we treat aliens in our community says a lot about us and very little about the aliens.
Of course the verse just a little bit before that said not to get tattoos, and I’m totally blowing off that one.