Illegal immigrants or neighbors in need?

Feelings about the current U.S. immigration policy run deep on all sides, but some United Methodists living near the U.S.-Mexico border who offer helping hands to Hispanic immigrants —legal and illegal — see what's happening there through different eyes.

Volumes of trash left along remote desert trails anger the ranchers who own the land. But instead of trash, people who feel a Christian duty to help the immigrants see personal belongings the travelers were forced to abandon because their coyote — the person paid to guide their illegal travel through the blazing desert — said they could only take water with them for the rest of the trip.

Some see hordes of cheap laborers streaming into the United States to take away jobs needed by American workers and drain already strained social service coffers. But others also see people who cannot support their families where they live so they are trying to feed, clothe and educate them in a new land.

Many fear the massive amounts of drugs that are smuggled across the border and the violence associated with the contraband. But others also see parents who fear for their children and try to escape the murderous drug cartels that rule the areas around the homes they abandoned.

"You guys are part of the enemy by helping these people. What's wrong?" an angry man once asked someone trying to save lives by providing drinking water in the desert. "What don't you understand about the word illegal'?"

But Paul T. Fuschini, a United Methodist in Tuscon, Ariz., who leaves water in the desert for thirsty undocumented immigrants, sees them as "my neighbors — they just happen to live a little further down the street.

"The situation here on the border is so different than what people from other areas can imagine," Fuschini says. "This is not something that's new. This has been going on for a long time. It's been a situation where people come and go. They work, they make some money and they go home and they take care of their families."

El Mesias United Methodist Church dates back to the 1880s in Nogales (population 20,878), the largest international border town in Arizona. In earlier days, church members from Mexico could just walk a few blocks to another country to worship, but now they need a tourist visa.

"We have people who live in Mexico, but they work in Arizona. They come in every Sunday and attend our church," the Rev. Ernesto Trevio says of almost half of his 70-member congregation.

Some people who live in Arizona, work across the border in Nogales, Mexico, at the many U.S.-owned factories that sprang up following passage of the NAFTA agreement.

"The people who live in Nogales, Ariz., have papers and don't have problems with immigration," Trevio says. "The problem is with the people who live in Mexico and cross as a tourist and stay for work. These people have some problems."

Tom Gillem