North America Integration in America edited by Alvaro Manoel and Michelle Riconscente The American Church is facing the highest concentration of Hispanic immigration in the world. Traces spoke with Mario Paredes, Director of Hispanic American Business Development for Merrill Lynch, and the former Director, for 25 years, of the Nort heast Hispanic Catholic Center of U.S. Bishops. He spoke to the CL North American National Diaconia in response to the Vatican document Ecclesia in America. Here, an interview with Traces. What does it mean for you, a Catholic man, to face the issue of Hispanic immigration? As a citizen of the country, it is my obligation to be sure that we have an adequate, safe way of inviting people to live and work in the United States, to develop their lives, and to share in the wealth of our country. As a Christian, my perspective is that the law of the land must conform to the personal integrity of a human being, to respect all the rights of the human person who wants to immigrate, searching for the betterment of life and better opportunities, or of the person who is fleeing catastrophe or political turmoil in another country. The response to the question of migration from the “citizen” viewpoint of a nation is not the same response as that from the Christian viewpoint. Yet, if we are good Christian citizens, our response must be the same, meaning that we look for a solution to this challenge consonant with the guiding principles of the Gospel, which are very simple: respect for the individual, respect for the human person, and respect for the sanctity of that creature that comes from God. What do you think about the issues of assimilation and integration? At the beginning of the establishment of the United States, what we had was a very predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon migration that allowed this country to develop marked by that ethnicity, by the English language and by mainly Protestant extractions or traditions. This was not a problem until the early 1900s, when new waves of migrations began to come to the United States. Catholics began to arrive in this country, Irish Catholics first and then other Catholics from Europe. The differences lie in the fact that the Catholic tradition was a very communal experience that was in direct opposition to the very individualistic way of life that the Protestant tradition developed. So, from then on, we have had this great tension: “What should we do if we are all Protestant and people of other faiths come to this country? What should we do if our conception of wealth (it is God’s blessing) is contrary to the conception of wealth of other people, who think it has to be part of a community development and a work that requires certain ethics and principles?” Those tensions arrived from the moment that the dominant group began to be challenged by the new presence. And so the Catholic experience in the mid-1900s began to articulate a discourse that has to do with integration. Integration is the healthy way of responding to this situation in a modern society where there are waves of migration moving back and forth. The approach today to the phenomenon of migration is integration. By building and designing the process of integration, you allow people to maintain their identity, their roots, their language, their tradition, and at the same time you challenge them to be part of the larger community, to be integrated into the common culture, which is the duty of everyone who wants to be part of a given society that they chose to live in. The criteria characteristic of the corporate world can easily be at odds with Christian criteria. Have you seen those tensions at play through your position at work? Merrill Lynch recruited me to develop the U.S. Hispanic market. I was given the responsibility to recruit new personnel for the firm, to train this personnel in the firm, and to retain the personnel in the firm. The firm understands very well that I am part of the Catholic Church. They understand that my work experience is directly connected with the Catholic world and they know that Hispanics in the U.S. are predominantly Catholic, so for them it is an asset, for them it is something that adds value to their marketing initiatives if they have someone with my credentials. The corporate world as I see it in these past 4-5 years has begun to realize that the only way to make sense in today’s business world is by understanding what diversity is all about in society. When an entrepreneur looks at a man, he looks at a labor force, an input into the production function. When we as Christians look at a man, we look at an individual person who has a destiny that is beyond everything we can imagine. So we suspect that the way that you look at this new market, at the new immigrants in the U.S., is not the same as the majority in the financial industry. There are very clear differences with regard to the Hispanic market in the financial industry and the dominant culture. The dominant culture is very business-oriented and pragmatic; very utilitarian. On the other hand, the Hispanic community is very community-oriented, family-oriented, and has no sense of pragmatism. While wealth in the dominant culture is something to be treasured, something to be developed and kept for the individual, in the Hispanic culture wealth is something to be spent, shared, used. In the U.S., we have 40 million Hispanics. Of those 40 million there are 3 million Hispanics who are wealthy. It is their duty to develop their wealth, to preserve their wealth, and to share their wealth with their families and with the future of their families. So a firm like ours, with an understanding of the Hispanic market, develops marketing approaches and offers services and financial products designed to share wealth with the family. That is where the difference lies. So I have trained 500 financial bilingual advisors who come from the Hispanic experience, and I send them around the country to those people who have the capacity to develop wealth for their families, to advise them on how to preserve family-owned businesses and how to pass the family-owned businesses on to the future generation. We are very successful because our clear understanding is that we have to touch the life of that individual who really cares for his family, his extended family, and has in mind that he has to pass this wealth on to future generations.