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FaithAction International House grew out of a vision Mark Sills received while sitting in a church on a hill in Costa Rica where he had gone to learn Spanish when he was 50 years old. The resulting nearly 12-year-old effort to build community and reduce tensions has won the nonprofit national awards and distinctions. FaithAction, which hosts multicultural gatherings and provides training statewide in multicultural crisis intervention, is perhaps better known outside its community than in it. Sills, an ordained minister, recently spoke with reporter Nancy McLaughlin about people close to his heart — immigrants.

Q. Facilities are being built for immigrants who are found to be in this country illegally. How do you feel about that?

A. I think we are moving dangerously close to mistakes of the past, where we build concentration camps to hold people who are politically unpopular. It's important to use the word 'detainee' ... because they have not committed a crime according to United States law.

Q. The Bible tells Christians to love thy neighbor and to obey the laws and leaders in authority. How can Christians do both when it comes to illegal immigrants?

A. There are two or three verses in the Bible that speak about our obligation to obey those in authority and there are 123 verses speaking to our obligation to show hospitality and justice to immigrants. The entire story of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is a story of migrants. Even Jesus was a refugee as his family fled to Egypt at a time of persecution — where they lived, by the way, as undocumented immigrants .

This point of view is not unique to Christians. Hebrew worship begins by reminding Jews of their heritage as wanderers. And Islam also stresses the importance of welcoming strangers and showing them genuine hospitality. This is not an accident since all three faiths grow out of the experiences of Abraham and Sarah, whom God sent to be immigrants in a strange land .

Q. What about the arguments that illegal immigrants come and tie up our legal systems and health care resources?

A. Certainly, undocumented immigrants in a society create certain costs to the society. Recent studies by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discovered that the Latino immigrant in North Carolina generated far more benefits to the state than costs to the state. Other studies have shown that the presence of immigrants creates more jobs than the jobs they ta ke. Contrary to much of the discussion in the popular media and especially from people like Lou Dobbs on CNN, for example, the crime rate among immigrants is much lower than the crime rate in the population as a whole.

Q.

Put us in the shoes of an illegal immigrant here.

A. Let's consider a farmer from C hiapas in south Mexico who can no longer support his wife and three children because American corn growers are selling corn in Mexico for less than he can afford to grow it, thanks to NAFTA. Out of work and with no employment opportunities where he lives, he has no choice but to take his family and go where he can feed his children.

With no possibility of getting legal permission to immigrate to the U.S., his only choice is to literally risk the lives of his family to cross the desert and enter the country illegally. With little formal education and work experience limited to farming, he will likely find work as a day laborer in the U.S. earning in one hour more than he could earn in a day in Mexico, even if he could find work there.

Q.

What happens then?

A. Often times, day laborers will work for an unscrupulous employer who promises pay at the end of the week and either pay is much less than promised or nothing, with the employer saying to the worker, 'If you complain I'll get you deported.'

With low wages and unsteady employment, this family will probably rent housing with another family, doubled up or tripled up, to save expenses.

If injured on a job, there will be no workman's compensation to cover medical expenses.

Because he probably doesn't understand banking or distrusts banks he probably keeps money in his home, making him an easy target for robbers, and if robbed, he will probably be afraid to call the police for fear they will detain him and deport him instead of trying to find the person who robbed him.

Q. What are the prospects for immigrant children who don't have the documentation to enter a public university after high school (and where a private education is too expensive to consider)?

A. Even if they turn out to be brilliant students they usually cannot go to college. Congress has been discussing for several years legislation that is known as the 'Dream Act,' which in essence would allow a child of an undocumented family who has graduated from a U.S. high school with good grades and good behavior to continue his or her education and be treated like any other in-state student at a state-run university.

I certainly hope that our North Carolina delegation would support that legislation, including a provision that would allow such students, upon graduation from college, to become legal permanent residents of the United States.

Q.

How good are you at Spanish?

A. I have enough fluency that I've been able to serve as interim pastor in a Spanish-speaking church for the last six months, but I still often get lost in conversation where lots of slang expressions and other casual speech is being used.

Q. Give us a view of what goes on at FaithAction International Hous e.

A. Much of our work is focused on people learning about one another and giving them the tools they need for cross-cultural communication.

We teach mostly professionals in social work, health care, law enforcement to work with people from major immigrant communities, such as Latinos, southeast Asians and sub-Sahara Africans. We also provide opportunities for immigrants and refugees to learn English while learning about ways to live more productively in the U.S. and within American culture, and we provide opportunity for Americans to learn other languages, such as Spanish or Arabic.

We also sponsor a Girl Scout troop that caters to immigrants and refugee girls from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, as well as a number of American girls. On the service side, FaithAction International House provides an immigrant assistance center where refugees or immigrants with problems can come to seek guidance and support in solving their problems.

Q.

You're a small organization — how do you do all that?

A. We have three people in our core staff, two AmeriCorp volunteers and a host of volunteers who serve as immigration advocates, and together we are able to help a large number of immigrants and refugees. Through the third quarter of this year, we have served 1,500 people. We are primarily funded by individuals who share our visions of a united community of many cultures. We also are supported by religious congregations and occasionally we receive grants from found ations.

Q.

What's your personal dedication to this community?

A. I came to Greensboro in 1963 to go to college here. I received an outstanding education at Greensboro College, which made graduate school at Duke and at American University relatively easy. I saw how the community can care for its most needy members during my years as director of Greensboro Urban Ministry and I recognize the incredible history of this community — from its earliest days with involvement with the Underground Railroad, the hospitality shown to Jewish people arriving here up to modern times with the resettlement of refugees from southeastern Asia — and I believe that Greensboro has the potential for being a community that the rest of the world can look to as an example.