SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: It’s these kinds of images that have defined Iraq over the past decade, as America’s 2003 invasion was followed by a long insurgency against U.S. forces. Brutal sectarian violence among Iraqis followed and continues to this day in the country.

At least 100,000 Iraqis have died in the conflicts. And fears of violence and religious persecution have led more than a million and a half Iraqis to flee their country, with most settling in other Middle Eastern nations.

Thousands of these Iraqi refugees have wound up on the very distant and unlikely shores of San Diego, California, a place better known for the tanned and toned southern California good life than its connection to turmoil in the Middle East.

(to Milheer El Anny and his wife Hebba): When did you get here, may I ask?

MILHEER EL ANNY: About 42 days ago.

GONZALEZ: You got to the United States only 42 days ago?

EL ANNY: Yeah. (laughs)

GONZALEZ: Iraqis Miheer El Anny, his wife Hebba, and young daughter Jumana are trying to adjust to their new life in the U.S. after leaving Iraq and then spending a year in Turkey as refugees.

EL ANNY: We left Iraq because there was a direct risk on our lives. It is very risky, especially for us because our lives are in danger. So, for the time being we can’t go back to Iraq.

GONZALEZ: We met the El Annys in the San Diego offices of Catholic Charities, a nonprofit group which helps new Iraqi refugees resettle in the community, regardless of their faith.

MIKE MCKAY: They are what we call the unintended consequences of the war.

GONZALEZ: Mike McKay is Catholic Charities’ Director of Refugee Services in San Diego. He says because of America’s long and controversial military involvement in Iraq, the U.S. has a moral obligation to help the Iraqis now here.

MCKAY: Just like we help the veterans who come home from the wars, and they have a lot of challenges, so also we have a responsibility and a need to help these folks as well.

GONZALEZ: In the early years of the Iraq War, the United States only accepted a trickle of Iraqi refugees. But that changed in 2007 when resettlement restrictions were loosened.

In the years since, more than 64,000 Iraqi refugees have been allowed in to the United States, with thousands of them coming to the San Diego area.

That migration has transformed some communities, like El Cajon, where a quarter of it’s 100,000 residents are now Iraqis, and where on some streets it’s easy to feel like you’re in the Middle East.

For the Iraqis who come to the United States, they’ve traded the violence and desperation of their own country for the relative peace and prosperity of the United States. But for many it can be like traveling between two worlds and that creates its own problems.

MUHAMMED: My name is Muhammed, and I’ve been in the United States since 2009 as a refugee.

GONZALEZ: Muhammed is like many in the Iraqi expatriate community when he requests that we don’t reveal his identity. He fears it could put family members back home at risk, either from militants or criminal gangs.

MUHAMMED: They kidnap one of your family, thinking that because you are living in America you are a millionaire or something and asking for a ransom. That happens many times.

GONZALEZ: Muhammed says he was forced to leave Iraq. He says just because he was an English teacher, militants thought he was working with the Americans. Many Iraqis who worked with the U.S. military or private contractors as translators have been killed.

MUHAMMED: They start targeting teachers, educated people. So we received a threat note to leave or you will be killed.

GONZALEZ: And why did so many Iraqis, like Muhammed, choose to come to San Diego? Well, many of them had family connections here because of an older, established Iraqi community that’s been in the city for years.

That’s especially true for Iraqi Christian Chaldeans, who have put down deep roots in San Diego.

Local Chaldean churches, along with mosques and groups like Catholic Charities and the International Rescue Committee offer aid and orientation to the Iraqi refugees.

INSTRUCTOR: …By using the three techniques at least. Apply online. What else? Networking.

That help often comes in the form of classroom instruction, where the newly arrived Iraqis learn survival skills for everyday life in America.

Erica Bouris is a resettlement manager for the International Rescue Committee in San Diego.

ERICA BOURIS: We provide cultural orientation. We help with housing and, you know, making sure that kids are immunized, kids enroll in school, those are the kinds of things that we are doing with folks in the first couple of months.

GONZALEZ: Really nitty-gritty things?

BOURIS: Very nitty-gritty things. Absolutely. Get your driver’s license. Do you know how to take the bus? We just saw in the class practicing how to write a check. Do you know how to pay your rent and pay your bills?

GONZALEZ: Some institutions which try to help the refugees, such as San Diego’s most prominent Iraqi Christian church, acknowledge providing assistance has stretched resources.

Father Michael Bazzi is the church’s pastor.

FATHER MICHAEL BAZZI: We used to have them coming to us a thousand, two thousand every year, three thousand every year, and lately, more than five thousand people. And I established here a committee to show them how to live as Americans here, and we have many committees that take them to the schools and to, you know, insert them into American society.

GONZALEZ: Although grateful to be here, many Iraqis complain that settling in the United States has been difficult, especially when it comes to jobs. According to Catholic Charities, only about a third of Iraqi refugees find employment during their first year in the United States. Anecdotally, the refugee agencies say long term unemployment or underemployment continues for most of the Iraqis. Muhammed blames the refugee resettlement process for many of the Iraqi community’s problems.

MUHAMMED: We didn’t get any orientation about life in America or even the law, so we were lost. It’s not about the person himself. It is about applications and system software that you have to fit in. It doesn’t matter what your life was. But for me no one can sit and talk to you.

GONZALEZ: Mike McKay of Catholic Charities empathizes with the Iraqis.

MCKAY: They have very conflicted feelings. They’re grateful about being out of harm’s way and have a chance to start a new life and seek the American Dream. But at the same time, not unlike the Hebrew people who left the slavery of Egypt, when they got in the desert, they said, “Oh, Lord, Moses, why did you bring us here? Take us back. Life is too hard in the desert.”

GONZALEZ: For the El Annys, freshly arrived in this country, the choices and freedoms America offers is both confusing and exciting.

EL ANNY: These 42 days, it’s like introducing for a new world because the system here is different than the system in the Middle East, especially the option things. Here in the United States, everything, there are options.

HEBBA: There are many options.

EL ANNY: Yeah. Many options. Everything, there are options.

GONZALEZ: A little fear at times, do you feel a little fear?

EL ANNY: Sometimes we feel fear. Yeah, sometimes. But, you know, with all the support we have, things will be fine, I think.

GONZALEZ: When we left Catholic Charities, the staff were preparing for new refugees from Iraq at the airport in the coming days.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in San Diego.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: Father Basil Doan is the pastor of two Catholic churches in this rural stretch of western Missouri. Several times a week, he makes the 50-mile round trip between his parishes along these quiet country roads.

FATHER BASIL DOAN: No traffic. Peaceful, yeah.

VALENTE: To keep himself alert, he sometimes sings in his native language, Vietnamese. Foreign-born priests are becoming a familiar presence in many rural communities, and, increasingly, those priests are Vietnamese. Father Basil’s order, the Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix, has 500 seminarians in Ho Chi Minh City, the kind of numbers American orders haven’t seen since the 1950s. Seminaries and convents there can’t accommodate all of the men and women who want to enter religious life, so many end up here in America. Carthage, Missouri, a small, largely Protestant town, may seem like an unlikely site for the order’s U.S. headquarters. The Vietnamese priests moved here beginning in the mid-1970s because an American religious order was moving out due to declining numbers. At the time, Catholics were under threat in Vietnam, and priests had to go into hiding or flee. But somehow this congregation managed to survive.

FATHER JOHN TRAN (Vocation Director, Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix): We were born in 1952, so we’re very young, and we’re proud to say our founder is a Vietnamese priest. You know how most religious communities enter into Vietnam from other country, but we proudly say we are the one that was founded by a Vietnamese priest for the Vietnamese people.

VALENTE: In recent years, as Vietnam has opened to the West, Vietnamese Catholics have regained a measure of religious freedom. Even so, the government still restricts church activities, and in some areas Catholics are barred from holding government jobs, which helps explain the deep devotion of Vietnamese Catholics living in the United States. Thousands journey to Carthage each year for the Marian Days Festival, a four-day pilgrimage to give thanks to the Virgin Mary for the safety and freedom they feel they enjoy in America.

FATHER TRAN: It’s like a divine providence that we happened to be right in the middle of the United States. Everybody can come over here, you know, just the whole family gathering. But the second part is just the spiritual side of things, because through the year there’s all this hardship, working, and it’s just a week to come here just to pray and listen to conferences to nourish their spiritual side.

VALENTE: About 500 people came in 1978, the first year of the festival. Today, between fifty- and sixty-thousand people attend, making it one of the largest ethnic festivals in the U.S. The centerpiece of the pilgrimage is this statue of the Virgin Mary, one of only six like it in the world. Vietnamese mothers usually take the lead in passing on the faith, and this has translated into a deep devotion within the community to the Blessed Mother. Sister Maria Nguyen, a Benedictine sister from Kansas, says many families also credit Mary with helping them escape communism.

SISTER MARIA NGUYEN: They thank for all things that Mary and God have done for them for the past year. And, then they ask Mary to continue to journey, to be with them for this coming year, for the future.

VALENTE: The Marian Days Festival allows Vietnamese priests and sisters serving in America to reconnect with their culture. Asians and Asian Americans make up only four percent of the American Catholic Church, but account for 10 percent of vocations, most of them Vietnamese, leading one observer to call Vietnamese priests “the new Irish.” Father Basil’s story is typical. He says he first began thinking about the priesthood while serving in the South Vietnamese army.

FATHER BASIL: When I was in army, I felt that I am going to die. And then in my heart, I just, you know, maybe the God’s Holy Spirit inspire me and I just raise up my heart, my mind to God, and I pray. I pray and then God protect me and I escape from mine explosion. I heard the explosion, and I fell down, and I didn’t get any injury. My friend behind me got hit, and the other one got hit, too. And I think that’s a sign of God’s providence, that he wanted me to be a future priest. He protect me from harm.

VALENTE: Father Basil remained in Vietnam for four years after the fall of Saigon, trying to keep out of the eye of communist officials.

FATHER BASIL: Some people say, “You’re a very good person, maybe you can become a priest.” But in that time, in communist rule, nobody have to, have had to fulfill that dream.

VALENTE: This is the first time Father Basil has been in charge of predominantly American parishes, ones where most of the members are farmers or retirees. He says he has struggled mightily to improve his English.

FATHER BASIL: My first two years I feel lonely because I don’t understand English much. But now after four years, I understand English more and people know me more, understand me more, and I express English easier. One person said, “You know, Father, maybe you can speak Vietnamese with an American accent.”

VALENTE: The parish bookkeeper, Susan Costello, helps correct his grammar when he writes his Sunday homilies, and parish council members presented him with a ping-pong table, so he could take up a pastime many Americans enjoy.

DONNA FOURMAN (Parishioner): His speech when he got here wasn’t really good, but every week it gets better, until he gets excited, and then he talks too fast. But we just love him. And he’s always happy and smiling, until he gets up on that altar. And then he’s all business.

VALENTE: Without Father Basil, parishioners say they would probably see a priest only once a week, for Mass on Sundays, and would have to wait longer to schedule baptisms, funerals, and marriages. As it is, Father Basil is on call 24 hours a day for the people at both his parishes.

(to Father Basil) What are the challenges you’ve faced in terms of your parishioners?

FATHER BASIL: First of all, because I’m not American pastor, I’m Asian pastor. They to have to train the ear to understand my accent. But I think they accept me. I ask one of them, “Did you accept me because I’m a Vietnamese, different from your culture?” He said, “I accept you because you’re a priest. We need priests no matter the nationality.” The United States, they need priests, but good priests. Because I have background of my faith, my experience about my faith so I can share with them. And they share their faith with me, too.

VALENTE: But preserving religious traditions from Vietnam is also important to these first- and second-generation immigrants. The Marian Days Festival draws thousands of teens. This drum group traveled to Carthage from San Jose, California. Many youngsters accompany their grandparents, though they admit they are more likely to speak to them in English than Vietnamese.

ALISON PHAM (Drummer): I just like the environment, like being all together, getting to praise God as a group, especially uniting with other Vietnamese people because I know a lot of times, you know, people don’t—they lose their culture, and they don’t join together.

VALENTE: The priests in Carthage worry that the rate of vocations eventually will decline among Vietnamese families, as it has among Americans. Boys used to enroll in the seminary here during high school. That’s no longer the case, and it’s becoming more difficult to attract college-age men.

FATHER TRAN: Last year I didn’t get any. But this year I’m blessed enough to have five. So it’s just give and take.

VALENTE: Still, the congregation currently has 150 men in the U.S. studying to be priests or brothers—a number that would thrill any other seminary. Father Tran says he hopes the example of men like Father Basil, who seem to thrive as priests, will inspire other young people to try religious life.

FATHER BASIL: I live in wartime in my country. Here I feel peace. I feel peace in my heart and my mind.

VALENTE: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Judy Valente, in Carthage, Missouri.

BOB ABERNETHY: Several major decisions from the Supreme Court this week: Five of the nine justices voted to uphold President Obama’s health care law, saying the law’s individual mandate is legal. Religious groups were divided over the legislation. Some had called health care reform a moral imperative, while others worried the law would allow federally funded abortions. Faith communities had also lobbied hard around Arizona’s immigration law. On Monday, the court struck down three parts of that legislation, but it left in place the requirement that local police check the immigration status of people they believe could be in the country illegally. In another case, the justices ruled against mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles convicted of murder. They said courts should have discretion about imposing that punishment.

For more on the religious reaction to these decisions, Patricia Zapor of Catholic News Service is here, and so is Kim Lawton managing editor of this program. Welcome to you both.

PATRICIA ZAPOR (Catholic News Service): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: Pat, the health care decision: what do you hear?

ZAPOR: Well, I hear from some religious groups. Most mainstream religious groups are pleased with the outcome in general, although the Catholic bishops, for instance, cautioned that there are still a lot of parts of the health care law that are not quite perfect. It’s got issues for provision of contraceptives. It has not, what they consider inadequate protections for conscience for medical care providers. There are other things that they want to be addressed, but in general mainstream Christian groups are excited, because this is a way that the people who have been cut out of the health care system because they’re poor enough and they’re not rich enough might stand a chance of getting some decent health care.

KIM LAWTON: And a lot of the groups, Christian and Jewish groups and others, really lobbied hard to get this legislation passed as well so—

ZAPOR: Right. Some of them have been working at it for decades.

LAWTON: Yes. And so from them I’m hearing things like this is a victory for the common good and something that’s exercising the moral obligations to take care of people. But I’m also hearing a lot of concern from religious conservatives who see this as something terrible, the government reaching in violating peoples’ individual liberties. I’m hearing concerns about government funding of abortion and certainly the contraception mandate, which a lot of people feel does also violate religious liberty—the idea that religious groups have to provide free contraceptive services.

ABERNETHY: Even if they’re very strongly against contraception.

ZAPOR: Right, and that’s what the lawsuits were filed over

ABERNETHY: Summarize what that situation is now.

ZAPOR: Well, this is related to regulations from HHS and it’s actually at this point just proposed regulations from HHS about how the employer mandate, that employers provide health care plays out. And the Catholic Church and a bunch of churches, a bunch of religious groups in general, are worried that the way the possible provisions are currently written, they will be required to provide contraceptive coverage, which goes against their faith teachings, and they’ve sued over this. More than forty organizations filed lawsuits against the federal government challenging that a few weeks ago.

ABERNETHY: Go ahead.

LAWTON: Well, and there’s also—Well, I was just going to say, for some of the groups who support, who don’t oppose contraception, they’re worried about this notion of the government putting religious groups in different categories. So a worshiping institution would be exempt, but a faith based school would not or something like that.

ZAPOR: A hospital or school would not. And that’s another fight that they say has long since been settled, that religious organizations get to define themselves as religious organizations. The government doesn’t get to do that. That delves into First Amendment issues that nobody’s happy treading into.

LAWTON: And none of that was affected by this week’s decision.

ABERNETHY: Let me move on. Let me move on to the Arizona immigration decision. What have you heard about that in the way of reaction?

ZAPOR: Well, people are pleased with the parts that were overturned from the Arizona immigration law, the parts making it a state crime to be in the state illegally. The ruling was very clear in saying states don’t get to decide that this is a crime, and under federal law it is not. But they are worried about the provision, the “show me your papers” provision, that will allow law enforcement agencies to ask pretty much anyone who they think might possibly be in the country illegally for proof of residency, proof of legal status in the country.

ABERNETHY: But don’t they have to have some kind of other reason for stopping somebody, like speeding or something like that?

ZAPOR: That’s not clear, but they definitely have to have more than just “you look Latino.” There has to be more to it than that, and that was something that the ruling very narrowly said: We’re going to be watching this. You can’t be profiling people.

LAWTON: A lot of religious groups too are saying that this ruling—there was concern about this “show me your papers” provision, although some religious conservatives said, hey, it’s respect for the rule of law, and so there were some differences there. A lot of religious groups across the spectrum also said this shows the need for a federal immigration reform, comprehensive immigration reform at the federal level, and we’ve seen growing political activism on this, even from evangelicals who tend to be more politically conservative, but just saying that this shows that our country has an immigration problem that needs to be solved, and when you have these individual states coming up with differing laws, it makes the whole situation complicated.

ZAPOR: There was a large group of evangelical leaders who, a couple of weeks ago, came out with a statement just to that effect, and they reiterated that after this ruling.

ABERNETHY: Okay. Pat Zapor of Catholic News Service, Kim Lawton of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. Many thanks.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Religious groups held rallies and a 48-hour prayer vigil in front the Supreme Court this week as the justices heard oral arguments over Arizona’s controversial immigration law. At issue in the case is whether the state law infringes on the federal government’s authority to establish and enforce immigration policy. But several faith groups argue the law violates the dignity of immigrants and could result in racial profiling.

For more on this I am joined by Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and Patricia Zapor, a staff writer with Catholic News Service who’s been covering the faith community and immigration. Pat, it’s nice to have you back here again.

PATRICIA ZAPOR (Staff Writer, Catholic News Service): Thank you, it’s good to be back.

ABERNETHY: The Catholic bishops and many other religious leaders want a whole new kind of approach to immigration. What specifically, what exactly do they want?

ZAPOR: Well, that could take the whole program to explain. They want a comprehensive approach, something that gives people who are already here illegally the chance to legalize their status so that they can pull their families together, reunite torn-apart families, work legally, be able to go home to their home countries and visit their families there. They want a path for jobs. There’s a whole assortment of things.

ABERNETHY: Any likelihood that they might get those things any time soon?

ZAPOR: I think that’s probably very unlikely in an election year, although it might make for some good political demanding during this season.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly): One of the arguments this particular week, as the case was at the court, from the religious community was that some of the local laws could hinder their ministry. What were they talking about?

ZAPOR: Well, this came up most conspicuously in 2006 in a version of legislation that passed the House included a provision that would make it illegal for anybody to help people who are in the country illegally. Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles, then the archbishop, at that time told his priests that if this bill passes I am not going to expect you to follow through with that, to follow that law. It’s seen as an imposition on the rights of people of faith to take care of others.

ABERNETHY: People talk about the rights of other people, too, and what do the religious leaders say to those who say look, we’ve got laws, and laws need to be enforced and obeyed?

ZAPOR: Well, I think the religious leaders agree that states, government have a right to enforce their borders, but their arguments against the current immigration situation relate to the civil rights era, when Dr. Martin Luther King and bishops and priests and rabbis were at the forefront of arguments that the laws requiring segregation were inhumane, and they were unjust laws, that they had a right and an obligation to fight against those laws.

LAWTON: What are some of the theological and moral arguments that these religious leaders, really across a pretty broad spectrum, are making on this?

ZAPOR: Well, and they go back to the Old Testament and into the New Testament to calls to take care of the stranger, to take care of those people who have no rights in a society. They are throughout scriptures. That’s one of the main things that they go to.

ABERNETHY: There was some new data that came out this past week about the number of immigrants from Mexico going down for the first time in a long time. Does that change things at all?

ZAPOR: Not really, because there are a lot of people who are in the country illegally, to begin with, and that hasn’t particularly—doesn’t reflect a slowing of migration from Central America, from South America. Just because the situation in Mexico is changing doesn’t really change the whole picture all that much.

ABERNETHY: Situation changing? What? Better job opportunities?

ZAPOR: In Mexico, yes. Mexico’s economy has improved, there’s a lower birthrate, an assortment of factors involved in that.

ABERNETHY: Pat Zapor of Catholic News Service, many thanks.

ZAPOR: Thank you.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Every day, hundreds of people gather in a makeshift worship center on the outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.They profess their Judaism in prayers, pictures, and words. They’re hoping to be heard most immediately by authorities in Israel, which they call the Promised Land. Many left spartan farm lives in the rural north of this ancient east African nation and moved to the city years ago in hopes that they, like thousands before them, would be taken to Israel.

Ethiopian Jew: Our members are suffering. They are destitute. They don’t have places to sleep.

Ethiopian Jew: I come to follow God’s word. He said, as I disperse you I shall bring you together. Because of that I want to go back to the Jewish home.

DE SAM LAZARO: Their pleas have fallen mostly on skeptical ears even though more than 75,000 Ethiopians, including many relatives of these people, were accepted in recent years into Israel.Their acceptance into Israeli society, however, has been difficult. Many in Israel’s religious leadership have questioned whether the Ethiopians are truly Jewish. Many were subjected to conversion rituals upon their arrival in Israel. In recent years, Ethiopians, particularly in the second generation, have taken to street protests.

Ethiopian Jewish Demonstrator: I think what we are looking here today is thousands of Ethiopians saying here to the Israeli society: no to discrimination, no for racism. All of us we came here to Israel to be equal with Israeli society.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Ethiopian Jewish tradition dates back hundreds of years—many believe more than 2,000 years.

MESFIN ASSEFA (Scholar-Activist): The origin of Ethiopian Jews dates back to biblical times when the Queen of Sheba or Magda first went to visit King Solomon, and she returned bearing a child conceived during this visit. The young prince, later King Melenik, went to Israel to meet his father when he was 20, and he returned to Ethiopia accompanied by 1000 members from each of the tribes of Israel.

DE SAM LAZARO: Other migrations followed from ancient Israel, he says, but this account has a number skeptics.

GETACHEW HAILE: It’s more of a legend than historical truth.

DE SAM LAZARO: Getachew Haile, a religion historian now in Minnesota, says there’s no evidence of any trail linking Ethiopia directly with ancient Israel.

GETACHEW HAILE: We have Greek inscriptions, Arabic inscriptions. There is nothing in the sort of Hebrew inscriptions.

DE SAM LAZARO: More likely, he says, Jews came here from the Arabian Peninsula or Yemen centuries later and settled amid certain isolated populations, helping convert them from the Orthodox Christianity that predominated.

HAILE: One possibility, this is a theory, is that some people might have migrated from over the Red Sea, come into Ethiopia, and converted them. The other is within the Ethiopian community, within the Christian community, who rejected Christianity.

DE SAM LAZARO: Through the ages, he says, some Ethiopian kings enforced a rigid conformance to the predominant Orthodox Christianity. Those outside this system, called falasha or foreigners have been marginalized.

HAILE: They are considered outcasts, and I have no doubt that they have been treated like that within the Ethiopian Christians.

DE SAM LAZARO: Thanks in large part to this persecution, the so-called falasha became Ethiopia’s poorest people, and this has complicated the transition for many who went to Israel from medieval poverty to a First World economy. Still, for the Ethiopians it is a huge improvement in the standard of living. Mengistu Kebede, who’d returned to Addis Ababa on vacation recently to visit family, gave us some perspective. It was a difficult adjustment to life in Israel, he says, but well worth it.

MENGISTU KEBEDE: It’s significantly better. Everybody wears shoes, they get enough pay for work, their clothes there are nice. Everything is much better.

DE SAM LAZARO: As part of earlier groups who were airlifted amid Ethiopia’s famine and civil war in the 1980s and ’90s, Kebede received a relatively warm welcome under Israel’s law of return. Today, however, the issue of economic motivation has clouded the politics of migration.

ASSEFA: I understand that there’s a perception that people coming from poor countries, from Africa, are coming for the economic benefits. But the issue is it’s the national law of Israel as well as the religious law to allow all Jews to return to Israel. It’s what God promised. As far as we know, all who have applied are bona fide Jews, and while there are advantages, the true motivation is a religious one.

DE SAM LAZARO: Amid the social, political, and economic challenges involving Ethiopian migration, Israel’s government has restricted the number it will allow in. In 2010 the government, in a move that it said should absorb all remaining Jews in Ethiopia, authorized visas for 8,000 new migrants. They’ll be allowed in in phases through 2016. Most of these worshipers did not make the cut. Deliverance to the Promised Land for these people, whose numbers are estimated in the low thousands, could take years, if it happens at all.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: For decades, religious organizations such as the National Council of Churches, the Catholic bishops, and others have been working with labor organizers to try to improve conditions for farm workers, and there’s been some success, most recently in the tomato fields of south Florida, where immigrants harvest nearly all the winter tomatoes this country grows. Our report is from Saul Gonzales in Immokalee, Florida.

SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: Florida may be better known for its oranges, but it’s tomatoes that rule in the farm fields surrounding the small town of Immokalee. In fact, during the winter months, nearly all of America’s domestically grown tomatoes, still green when they are picked, come from this part of south Florida, and it’s a large and poor immigrant workforce that’s essential in getting that crop from plant to plate.

Tomato harvesting is still very much a “by hand” work? There is no machine that exists that does this?

STEVE MCHAN: That is correct.

GONZALEZ: Steve McHan is harvesting manager for Pacific Tomato Growers, a major producer in Florida.

MCHAN: The production volume from here is somewhere around 1,200 to 1,400 boxes per acre, and we pack 25-pound boxes is what we’re averaging.

GONZALEZ: So it’s industrial scale?

MCHAN: Industrial scale, correct.

GONZALEZ: However, Florida’s tomato industry is a business that’s long been accused of exploiting its workforce through overwork, underpay, and mistreatment. That’s turned these fields into the frontlines of a high profile national campaign to improve the lives of farmworkers.

JORDAN BUCKLEY: People who work in agriculture are among the least paid, least protected workers in the whole country.

GONZALEZ: Jordan Buckley and his colleagues are with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, CIW, and the Interfaith Action Network, which works with faith groups to help farmworkers.

BRIGITTE GYNTHER: For people of faith, for us this is a moral issue. You know, how the people who pick our food our treated.

GONZALEZ: Now to understand the plight of farmworkers you have to know something about their place in America’s industrial food economy.

BUCKLEY: They are some of the poorest workers here in our country, and yet not for a lack of hard work. It’s not some dearth of industriousness. In fact, the reason is because the increasing consolidation of purchasing among retailors. So where you have the fast food and food service and supermarkets squeezing their suppliers and demanding ever cheaper costs for their tomatoes, that’s resulted in growers squeezing their farmworkers, and that’s why farmworkers haven’t seen a real wage increase in upwards of three decades.

GONZALEZ: Florida’s tomato workers are usually paid by how much they pick, traditionally getting about 45 to 50 cents for every 32-pound bucket they fill. That means to make a day’s minimum wage, each worker has to pick two-and-a-half-tons of tomatoes a day. What does that kind of work pay mean for the daily lives of farmworkers and their families? Twenty-eight-year-old Darinal Sales struggles to support his wife and two girls on what he makes in the fields. Because four other farmworkers live in the same dilapidated trailer, his whole family shares one small room.

GONZALEZ: Ustedes viven aqui?

DARINAL SALES: It’s because of the situation at work that we live like this. Our pay just doesn’t last and allow us to live in better way.

GONZALEZ: Immokalee is a town full of young men from Mexico, Central America, and Haiti, many undocumented, who have come here to scratch out a better life for themselves by harvesting Florida’s tomato crops. Some of them end up victims of the industry’s worst abuses, including incidents of modern day slavery.

BUCKLEY: There have also now been nine federally prosecuted slavery operations in just the last 14 years here in Florida agriculture.

GONZALEZ: Slavery?

BUCKLEY: Yeah, literal slavery. Right here on Third and Boston we go down four blocks. That’s the site where workers were locked in the back of a cargo truck, literally shackled. We saw bruises on their wrists where they had been literally restrained by their employers.

GONZALEZ: Yet despite the dangers and pay, farmhands are eager to work. To see how eager, you’ve got to get up very early. Every morning in the pre-dawn hours this parking lot in downtown Immokalee becomes a giant open-air labor market. Hundreds of farmworkers come here looking to make contact with labor bosses. If they’re lucky they’ll be picked for another hard day of work in the tomato fields. The men and women selected are the ones boarding buses that take them to the fields. It’s in this parking lot that we met Aurelia Hinajosa, who’s worked in Immokalee’s tomato fields for nearly 30 years.

AURELIA HINAJOSA: Americans really like their vegetables and fruits, and who is going to pick it? The people born in this country have better kinds of work, and they’re not going to go to the fields.

GONZALEZ: But things are slowly starting to get better for Florida’s tomato field workers. Last year, after more than a decade of patient organizing work, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers reached a landmark agreement with growers and corporate tomato buyers like McDonalds and Burger King. The agreement gives farmworkers a penny more for every pound of tomatoes they pick. Now that doesn’t sound like much, but that one cent increase translates into an additional 32 cents for every bucket picked by workers. That in turn will boost each farmhand’s pay by about $5,000 a year.

BUCKLEY: We are basically on the threshold of entering into this new industry in having rights protected and their being this consensus among buyers that we demand humane labor conditions in our supply chain.

GONZALEZ: The agreement has also made some in Florida’s powerful tomato industry question their past actions and attitudes.

SARAH GOLDBERGER: Historically, it has not been the poster child for good behavior and good treatment of its workers.

GONZALEZ: You admit to that?

GOLDBERGER: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Sarah Goldberger is a spokesperson for Pacific Tomato Growers. She says the agreement between workers and the tomato industry has replaced tension with cooperation.

GOLDBERGER: It has been so non-adversarial. It is a pleasure, quite honestly.

GONZALEZ: That’s a big change?

GOLDBERGER: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Other changes in the fields, like this one owned by Pacific Tomato, include greater access to drinking water and more rest periods, regular bathroom breaks, and a zero tolerance for verbal abuse and sexual harassment by field bosses. Now that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and it allies have an agreement, they’re spreading the word about it. The small community radio station they run in Immokalee regularly tells workers listening about their rights, pay, and future organizing plans.

Radio (In Spanish): The campaign to improve the work conditions and pay in the state of Florida.

GONZALEZ: Worker advocate and former field hand Lucas Benitez met us at the early morning labor gathering to talk about how important these changes are to the men and women who pick America’s tomato crop.

LUCAS BENITEZ: That’s what we want, work with dignity. Where every worker, every person who goes to the fields feels pride in being part of the agricultural industry that is putting food on millions of tables every day and that the worker is getting paid enough to put food on the table of his own home.

GONZALEZ: However the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and its allies in religious and faith groups say they have much work left to do. That includes a new national campaign focused on  supermarket chains which have declined to  participate in the penny-per-pound pay agreement.

BUCKLEY: There are three principal sectors of tomato retail: fast food, food service, and supermarkets, and now the leaders of the fast food industry are on board. The leaders of the food service industry are on board. All that remains are the supermarkets.

GONZALEZ: To keep pressure on the stores and to make sure gains are protected, farmworkers regularly reach out to religious leaders and congregations.

And so I’m joined by Darinal and Oscar from the CIW.

GONZALEZ: This morning, Jordan and workers from Immokalee, including Darinal Sales, are addressing a Presbyterian church in Naples, Florida. These speaking engagements are part of a sustained campaign to get people of faith thinking about their fairness and justice when they sit down to eat. Brigitte Gynther of Interfaith Action has been working in Immokalee for eight years on behalf of workers.

GYNTHER: You know, there are many times when we say grace we are grateful for the food on our plates. But where did that food travel? Who picked it? How did it get to us? And that is something we don’t often think about. But I think as people of faith we are called to think about the connections between us and the people who toil in the fields day in and day out to put food our plates.

GONZALEZ: For the men and women who pick Florida’s tomatoes their most important harvest has been some measure of justice and respect.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Saul Gonzalez in Immokalee, Florida.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Like many church leaders in Alabama, Father Tom Ackerman of the Catholic Diocese of Birmingham was caught off guard by the toughness of the state’s new immigration bill.

FATHER TOM ACKERMAN: I think there was some surprise about how extreme it was and how really sort of vicious it was, particularly some of the vicious rhetoric: “We want to affect every aspect of their lives. I’ll do everything short of shooting them.” These are senators and representatives saying these things.

SEVERSON: Here’s what Mayor Lindsey Lyons of Albertville, Alabama had to say about the bill’s critics.

MAYOR LINDSEY LYONS: When they say that we’re cruel or heartless or however they want to word it, you know, the fact of the matter is, we have rights. We have rights to protect our citizens, and what is wrong with coming up with solutions to protect our citizens, to protect our jobs. and to protect our quality of life?

SEVERSON: The solution the legislature came up with has caused quite a commotion. A federal judge temporarily blocked the enactment of House Bill 56 because of several lawsuits filed by four Alabama bishops of different denominations, the Justice Department, the ACLU, civil rights groups, joined by county sheriffs and 16 foreign governments. But some of the loudest protests came from church leaders like Pastor Angie Wright of the Beloved Community United Church of Christ.

PASTOR ANGIE WRIGHT: If I have ten undocumented persons in my church for an English-as-a-second-language class, or for worship, or vacation bible school. and I know that they’re undocumented, I can go to prison for 10 years and pay a $15,000 fine.

SEVERSON: In a nutshell, the bill, as it stands now, criminalizes working, renting, having false papers, shielding, harboring, hiring. and transporting undocumented immigrants. It also deprives them of most local public benefits. As it was intended, it punishes just about every aspect of illegal immigration.

FATHER ACKERMAN: The reason why we’ve filed this suit is because we want to keep the government out of our business. The government is trying to tell us what we can or can’t do in terms of works of mercy, works of charity, which are fundamental to our faith.

REPRESENTATIVE DAN WILLIAMS: Coming up on the left is where most of the Hispanics worked in town. This was the poultry processing plant.

SEVERSON: Representative Dan Williams was Mayor of Athens, Alabama for 18 years until he ran for the legislature 3 years ago. He supports House Bill 56.

REP. DAN WILLIAMS: The vast majority of people, when I was running for this office, the number one or two issue with them was illegal aliens. That’s it. Illegal aliens: “You need to do something about them. We want something done about them.”

SEVERSON: Williams was elected with the first Republican sweep of both houses in the legislature and the governorship in Alabama history. The new legislators quickly hammered out an immigration law, one that terrifies Janeth, an undocumented mother of two from Mexico who has been in the US for more than ten years. She’s a cashier in a store. Her husband works in construction.

JANETH ( with translator Helen Rivas): It’s terrorizing. Ever since they passed this law we don’t go out. We don’t go to restaurants, we don’t go to the park. We see a patrol car, and it terrifies us to think they may stop.

SEVERSON: She and her husband are buying their home at a very high mortgage rate. The new bill would allow the bank or anyone they have a contract with to cancel the contract, and they would have no recourse.

JANETH: I came here because my family didn’t even have any way to eat. To get this we’ve worked day and night, three jobs. If I have to leave here, one day to the next, if this law goes into effect I’m going to have to leave my house, my car. We’re going to arrive back home in our home countries in worse shape.

PASTOR ANGIE WRIGHT: Why make criminals out of people who have been our neighbors and our brothers and sisters and really are not causing any problems for any of us?

SEVERSON: An Alabama criminal justice survey found that violent crime in the state is down 10 percent over last year and below the national average. Property crime is also down. But Albertville Mayor Lyons says those statistics don’t hold up in his town.

MAYOR LINDSEY LYONS: When you have people coming from other countries that’s never driven a car before, and they start driving here with no insurance, no driver’s license, etc, causing multiple, many accidents.

SEVERSON: But, he says, that wasn’t the worst of it.

MAYOR LINDSEY LYONS: Because invariably you’re going to have the underlying current of crime and criminals come in with an influx of illegal immigrants, and that all is based on prostitution and brothels, your drug activity and your drug gangs, which have been present here in Albertville. That’s like it is in any community where you have the immigrant issue.

SEVERSON: He says hundreds of illegal immigrants moved in after Albertville-based poultry companies advertised in Mexico looking for cheap labor.

MAYOR LINDSEY LYONS: We had probably with our large two poultry plants here 2500 employment. They were vast all white and black American citizens, okay, and as the years went on and they were able to conduct business with the illegal alien population, well that just dwindled down, dwindled down, dwindled down.

SEVERSON: The Pew Hispanic Center estimates there are between 85,000 and 120,000 undocumented immigrants in Alabama, comprising a little less than 4 percent of the workforce. The state’s unemployment rate is above the national average at about 10 percent.

FATHER ACKERMAN: We have high unemployment not because the Hispanic immigrants are here. We have high unemployment because the housing market went bust, and we had a credit crisis. The immigrants have nothing to do with the high unemployment here. I think it’s primarily politicians preying on the fear of people. When economic times get tough, people often look for scapegoats.

REP. DAN WILLIAMS: You know, I go back “it’s the economy stupid,” that’s what it always is and people can say what they want to, but when you got a job and you’re making some money and your family is doing alright, you don’t have problems. But when my children lose their jobs, and I start having to help my children and my grandchildren, and maybe if I lose my job, I’m concerned about a guy who’s illegal coming here working. He’s doing okay and I’m not.

SEVERSON: The legislation authorizes police to demand papers from people they stop who they suspect are undocumented, something opponents say will lead to racial profiling. That’s already happening, according to Father Ackerman.

FATHER ACKERMAN: One of our priests actually has been stopped several times, pulled over. And then once they see that he has a collar on, “Oh, Father, go ahead.”

SEVERSON: Religious leaders are concerned that they will be breaking the law if they transport members they know are illegal to church.

FATHER ACKERMAN: If we’re transporting illegal immigrants, that’s a violation of this law, and those vehicles can be confiscated.

SEVERSON: Representative Williams says he thinks religious leaders’ opposition to the bill is overblown.

REP. DAN WILLIAMS: I don’t think you’re going to see policemen stopping the church buses to see if there’s somebody with brown skin riding to Sunday School.

FATHER ACKERMAN: If that wasn’t going to happen then they should have written that into the law. I’m talking about how the law is written, not how they expect it to be applied.

SEVERSON: Williams says he and his Republican colleagues have been called racists and that it’s unfair.

REP. DAN WILLIAMS: People still look at Alabama, and they see those grainy films from the 1960s and the police dogs and the water hoses in Birmingham. Well, Alabama is not like that anymore, but they’re trying to bring this back, that that’s what we are.

Speaker at rally: I myself overwhelmingly love this country.

SEVERSON: The young man speaking here, Victor, was brought here by his parents when he was a toddler. Victor is undocumented and part of a group of high school kids calling themselves Dreamers, who have been very vocal against the law because they’re the one’s who will likely suffer the most if they or their parents are deported. This is Jose. He’s undocumented. He says his dream was to become a teacher or a doctor.

JOSE: I came here at the age of 3. In all honesty, Mexico, it seems like a foreign world to me, and with all the problems it has now it’s frightening, the thought of having to go back there.

SEVERSON: Eduardo has his papers, unlike many of his friends.

EDUARDO: I’m mostly sad because I’ve got papers and then my friends, most of them are going to have to go back to their country or whatever, and I’m here lucky, being able to have the education and all the benefits they can’t.

REP. DAN WILLIAMS: You know, we’re all trying to get along. We’re all trying to raise our children, our grand children and everything. It’s just, you got that “illegal” word there that makes a difference.

SEVERSON: The judge who stayed the enactment of the law says she will issue her decision by September 29^th. Regardless of the outcome, it is likely to be appealed.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Birmingham, Alabama.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: It was a huge surprise when the legislature of one of the most conservative states passed one of the more liberal immigration laws in the country. That legislation will most likely be preempted by federal law, but the bigger surprise was how it angered so many members of Utah’s predominate faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormons or LDS, even though it was the church that pushed through the legislation. This is Utah state senator Curt Bramble, a Republican and Mormon who helped craft the bill.

SENATOR CURT BRAMBLE: Personally I have not seen the LDS church lobby any issue harder than they’re activity on House Bill 116, the immigration legislation.

RON MORTENSEN: I jokingly said, you know, they may as well just pitched a tent in the back halls.

SEVERSON: Ron Mortensen is a career foreign service officer and a former Mormon missionary. He founded the Utah Coalition on Illegal Immigration and he’s not too happy with his church.

MORTENSEN: The church lobbyists had full access where normal people can’t go, in the back halls and through all the back alleyways and they were there full time this session.

SEVERSON: And the result was legislation that would allow undocumented immigrant families to continue living and working in the state, providing, among other things, they have no criminal record and pay a fine for being in the country illegally.

Originally the legislature was only going to pass an enforcement bill similar to the controversial one in Arizona until a compact of churches and the chamber of commerce asked for an additional bill with a more compassionate approach.

Critics like Representative Chris Herrod, a Republican and former missionary, say the bill was forced on the legislature.

REP. CHRIS HERROD: I’ve never in 5 years seen a bill pass in the fashion that that was passed.

SEVERSON: Because of the church?

REP. HERROD: Well, some could argue that but again that doesn’t make it right.

SEVERSON: Tim Chambless is a professor with the Hinkley Institute Of Political Science at the University of Utah.

PROFESSOR TIM CHAMBLESS: We do know that the Utah State Legislature is unique because about 91 percent of the 104 members of the Utah State Legislature self-identify as LDS.  And each member, almost each member would say they’re a good church member. They’re a member of the Republican party and their a good church member and they’re very divided on this issue.

SEVERSON: At first is was not widely known how hard the church had lobbied for the guest worker law. So why did it? The church says it was the Christian thing to do, that the bedrock moral issue is how we treat each other as children of God. Quin Monson is a political science professor at Brigham Young University.

PROFESSOR QUIN MONSON: There is an approach that the church has been supporting that allows people to square themselves with the law—it’s allowing people to live without fear, to stay with their families, to pay a fine and come out of the shadows.

SEVERSON: But in the view of the legislation’s opponents, it provides amnesty for law breakers, and goes squarely against one of the church’s 13 Articles of Faith, number 12.

MORTENSEN: It basically says we honor, obey and sustain the law of the land and that’s something that all the children learn when they’re growing up and especially the older generation. It was something that was drummed into you and that was just like one of the Ten Commandments, and so when people see people not complying with the law, that makes them nervous and raises questions.

SEVERSON: Ron Mortensen doesn’t argue with the compassion of his church, but he thinks the bigger reason for the legislation is that the church has grown far beyond U.S. borders.

MORTENSEN: In my opinion, the church has become a worldwide church and its interests now extend far beyond Utah, and it has to meet the expectations of its worldwide audience and a very large audience in Latin America.

SEVERSON: The church has over 14 million members worldwide, with more than half residing outside the United States.

MONSON: The population of Mormons in Mexico is hundreds of thousands if not over a million. There are at least a dozen temples of the church in Mexico and hundreds of chapels, so it’s a big population and it’s big all throughout Latin America.

CHAMBLESS: The church is concerned that anything that hurts its missionary effort is going to be something that maybe the church would not support.

MONSON: Utah is very cleanly connected with the church in a lot of people’s mind, outside of Utah and outside of the United States. And so if Utah is enacting some draconian restrictive immigration law, you can sort of imagine the reaction and then the blame that might be placed on the church for allowing it to happen. I can see that that might have been a motivating factor in getting involved and asking the legislature to dial it back.

MORTENSEN: There’s been pretty credible stories about withholding visas for missionaries in order to bring pressure on the church, so they’re playing in a very international arena. It’s no longer what’s necessarily good for Utah or even the United States, it’s what’s good for us worldwide.

SEVERSON: Mortensen says it might surprise some members to learn that the church sends undocumented members that live in the U.S. on stateside missions.

MORTENSEN: It’s long been the policy of the church to allow undocumented members to have temple recommends and to hold the priesthood, and it’s up to the bishops to decide if they’re worthy of that or not.

SEVERSON: Undocumented missionaries have been deported, and recently two minor church officials and their families were expelled from the country because they were here illegally. The church says it discourages members from entering any country without legal documentation.

For those who argue that a guest worker law violates federal law, others like Senator Curt Bramble, refer to a higher law, and uses the church’s harboring of runaway slaves as an example.

SENATOR BRAMBLE: During the 1860s, before the Civil War, members of the church that harbored slaves because slavery was immoral, was a violation of the law. We can talk throughout the history of mankind where laws that are on the books or laws that someone is demanding you follow result in an outcome that in and of itself is a violation of a higher law.

SEVERSON: Mortensen says the church’s view of the law may be changing because he thinks the church itself is changing.

MORTENSEN: The LDS church seems to be moving towards more of a social justice position and away from conservatism where it’s traditionally been.

SEVERSON: The pushback against the immigration law has been so public, delegates to the state Republican convention narrowly passed a resolution demanding that the law be repealed. Professor Quin Monson has done a study about how influential church endorsements can be with the membership, and he says as more members know how strongly the church feels about a guest worker provision, the tide may turn.

MONSON: When the church comes out and officially endorses a position and it’s united and the membership knows about it, then you see people shifting their position and this is even true when the issue pushes the membership in a direction that they might not otherwise want to go.

MORTENSEN: This is really a very, very divisive issue and I never have—on other issues—I never have heard people say, well, I’m going to stop paying fast offerings or I’m going to withhold some of my contributions or I’m really questioning my testimony, and I’m having people say that to me on this particular issue.

SEVERSON: Opponents say they’ll try to derail the guest worker law during the next legislative session although it seems unlikely they will succeed. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Salt Lake City.

DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: One iconic image of the Paris that tourists come to see is Notre Dame Cathedral, a centuries-old symbol of Roman Catholicism in France. But inside this Catholic church in Paris, the sparse congregation reflects a wider truth: Christianity is on the wane across Western Europe, and nowhere is its decline more visible than in France.

REV. MICHEL BRIERE: The eldest daughter of the Church, that’s what we were called. Today, saying you believe in a religion takes a real identification of faith. Today, the number has really diminished.

POTTER: Twenty years ago, about 80 percent of French people described themselves as Catholic. Today, it’s just over half and less than 5 percent—most of them older—regularly go to Mass. Father Briere blames a growing culture of consumerism and a Catholic hierarchy that he says has been too rigid, failing to draw young people into the Church. That’s true across Europe, but France is a special case, a country where religion is widely seen as a source of trouble. If France had an official religion it would be laicite or secularism, a principle that’s enshrined in this country’s constitution and reflects its history of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, as well as the French Revolution, that basically booted the Catholic Church from power.

That history lives on in French movies and classrooms, where students are taught in gory detail about a 16^th-century massacre, when thousands of Protestants [Huguenots] were slaughtered by the Catholic forces of the King. And that history still lies on public display in Paris. These are the bones of Catholic priests killed and mutilated by a revolutionary mob in 1792—small wonder that the French concept of separation of church and state is strikingly different from that in the US, says Jocelyne Cesari, a French political scientist and research fellow at Harvard.

PROFESSOR JOCELYNE CESARI (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University): There is this idea that the state has a responsibility in France to control and regulate religion that otherwise can lead to civil war.

POTTER: That control extends to the churches themselves, including Notre Dame, which all became state property 100 years ago, along with existing synagogues. Another example: in France, for a marriage to be legal it has to take place at a city hall. Church weddings are ceremonial but not official, and the wall between church and state doesn’t end there.

CESARI: In the French case it means also restraining or limiting as much as possible the public manifestation or expression of religious groups. In other words, in France it’s better if you act civilly with no religious affiliation. It’s seen as more legitimate, while in America it’s quite the opposite.

POTTER: But the idea that religion should be kept private has collided with the reality that France has changed. Islam is now the country’s second biggest religion. France has the largest Muslim population in Europe—almost five million, twice as many as in the United States, according to recent estimates. Many are the French-born children and grandchildren of Muslim immigrants from former colonies like Algeria, who moved to France after independence in the 1960s.

M’HAMMED HENICHE (Union of Muslim Associations): Those who practice today are not the same as those who practiced before. They were people who came from their homelands, immigrants, so they tried to be as quiet as possible. Today, these are French people who never set foot in the Middle East or Africa. They were born here, grew up here, and they are practicing Muslims and they are reclaiming their religion. They see themselves as French and Muslim. Why would they hide their religion?

POTTER: They may not want to hide it, but in some cases they’re being forced to. Over the past decade, the French government has clamped down on the display of religious symbols. Since 2004, students have not been allowed to wear headscarves, large crosses, or skullcaps in public schools. The result: new Muslim schools like this one, where every girl in this 11^th-grade class wears a headscarf. “We come because we can wear it,” one of them says.

This year the government went further, banning the niqab or full-face veil not just in schools but in all public places. The law affects a tiny minority of Muslims—only a few hundred women wear it in France—but those who do were outraged.

WOMAN: When I hear France—liberty, equality, fraternity—it’s a big lie. I feel like I’m in a dictatorship.

VERONIQUE RIEFFEL (Islamic Cultures institute): The ban is a very bad thing because, you know, every Muslim, even men and even women who don’t wear the niqab, feel concerned, you know, feel rejected by this ban.

POTTER: But the vast majority in France approved of the ban—80 percent, according to public opinion polls.

WOMAN: Look, I think secularism is indispensable. It’s a protection so everyone has peace, believers and non-believers, and so all these religious, fanatic excesses are regrettable, appalling. I’m very much a feminist. I hate the idea of the veil.

POTTER: Despite the new laws, a very public display of religion takes place every Friday in this Paris neighborhood. Two streets are closed to traffic so thousands of Muslim men can pray outside a mosque that’s much too small to hold them all, largely because of property costs. France has just 2,000 prayer rooms and a few dozen full-sized mosques. While the community solicits donations to build new ones, the local government allows this public exercise of religion, to the annoyance of some non-Muslims. There are other chinks in the wall of secularism. Religious schools can receive state funding. Most national holidays come from the Catholic Church calendar, and once a year Catholics from all over flood the streets of Paris as they leave on a three-day, 75-mile pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Chartres.

OLIVIER BOBINEAU (Paris Institute of Political Studies): But people don’t like it. They don’t like it, even Catholics. The pilgrimage to Chartres? Those are fundamentalists , traditionalists. Our culture erases religion. We’re here but we don’t show ourselves.

POTTER: Olivier Bobineau teaches the sociology of religion and lives it himself. He’s a Catholic who wears a small cross on a chain that he keeps hidden most of the time. But one night, at a meeting with high government officials…

(speaking to Bobineau): … so you leaned forward, you could see it, and somebody said..

BOBINEAU: Be careful.

POTTER: … put that away.

BOBINEAU: Yeah. Today it’s unimaginable to go against the state, against the public space, and to show a cross, a skullcap, a veil. It’s impossible. It’s wanting to destroy the state. That’s what the French feel. The majority of French people do not think it’s possible to be French and Muslim. Most French people think you can’t be a citizen and believe in God. We are the most atheist people in the world. Why? Because when you are a believer, in France people think you have lost your freedom, your reason, okay?

POTTER: The French also remember the violence that broke out across the country a few years ago. For two weeks, young Muslims angry about unemployment and discrimination took to the streets and burned thousands of cars, and that anger has not entirely subsided.

HENICHE: We are a little anxious. I have to tell the truth. We are anxious. You sense it among the faithful because the faithful are returning to the mosque. Maybe that’s a positive thing. It’s pushing Muslims to return to the mosque. They sense a threat, that the days ahead won’t be better days for us.

POTTER: The tension comes down to a fundamental disconnect, with French Catholics seeing Islam through their own secular prism.

CESARI: What they are expecting from Muslims is this kind of very loose connection with no particular affiliation to Islamic organization, with no particular desire to dress differently or to eat differently, but okay, you can be buried as a Muslim or you can marry in your—you can have a religious ceremony in your mosque. This would be okay.

POTTER: Underlying the debate over Muslim dress is the question of security after 9/11.

BOBINEAU: People say that’s what religion is. It’s violence. Look at the news, the Twin Towers, bin Laden. The news reinforces the illusion that this is a war of civilizations.

HENICHE: We think we have work to do to convince the French people, to show them that Muslims are patriots, and the proof and history is with us.

POTTER: The Great Mosque of Paris is one piece of that history, built by the French government in the 1920s to honor Muslim soldiers who fought and died in World War I. At this cemetery outside Paris, the only all-Islamic burial ground in France, each grave represents a Muslim family’s decision to call France home. The new generation sees itself as both Muslim and French, no matter how uncomfortable that makes their secular countrymen.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Paris.