The Jewish Funds for Justice offers opportunities to travel to the Mexico-Arizona border and to learn firsthand about immigration issues and about the lives of immigrants.

In February 2007, rabbis from around the country spent three days on the Mexico-Arizona border meeting migrants and talking to people working on immigration policy and offering direct services to migrants and potential migrants.  Highlights of the trip included:

• Studying the history of American immigration policy with a Tucson-based immigration lawyer


• Learning about the Tucson Jewish Community Relations Council’s efforts to set up a water station in the Arizona desert


• Hearing the stories of migrants who tried, and failed, to cross into the United States, and who were in the process of considering whether to try again, to look for jobs in the Mexican border town of Nogales, or to return to their home states


• Meeting a woman who, every day, delivers six hundred sandwiches to migrants who have been returned across the border.  To make these sandwiches, this woman uses her own money and whatever money she can gather from her neighbors


• Seeing a social service center in Nogales that daily serves hot meals to more than two hundred children, while also offering child care and professional development classes for adults


• Speaking with the director of a microcredit program, which helps residents of Nogales to start their own businesses and thereby to develop a long-term means of supporting their families


• Struggling with Jewish texts that offer a complex portrait of the place of immigrants in Jewish law and history

 

BorderLinks is a bi-national non-profit organization that offers experiential educational seminars along the border focusing on the issues of global economics and immigration.  Click here for more information about BorderLinks. 

Please contact Amy Schrager, Program Director for Service and Learning Travel Programs, for more information.