If you are an easily distracted Mass-goer like me, you spend a hunk of the time you should be praying watching your fellow Catholics as they go up for Communion and return to their pews. On the first Sunday after Christmas, I was a lector and thus had, so to speak, a front row seat. Since my parish uses its pre-conciliar altar rail, I could, from my perch, view virtually the entire congregation. My wandering mind could not help but notice the racial and ethnic diversity of God’s people on that particular day. While the neighborhood used to be predominantly Irish and Italian, the demographics now include a healthy mix of people from South and Central America, Africa, and Asia. 

The ongoing story of Catholic immigration in the United States was present in a single congregation. Watching it all, I felt grateful to be part of a Church that gives a sacramental expression of the unity of the human family. As my mind slipped down to the realm of politics, I thought of the intrinsic potencies of the Catholic Church to address the knotty issue of immigration. I feel bad, of course, for thinking about politics when I should have been praying, but, in my defense, I am far from the only one bringing the question into Church at Christmas time.

Since a main purpose of this newsletter is to alert its readers on what to read, I will briefly survey a number of recent and not so recent publications on a Catholic response to the problem of immigration that are worth notice. I begin with the “Special Pastoral Message on Immigration” of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Such special messages are relatively rare and made only in times of extreme need. The “grave concerns” that occasioned the message are found in the opening paragraph: “A climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement,” “vilification of immigrants,” and “the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care.” 

A further motivation is the bishops’ love for the country and the “enormous contributions” immigrants have made to its “peace and prosperity.” After asserting the “fundamental dignity of all persons, including immigrants,” the bishops demand “meaningful reform of the nation’s immigration laws and procedures.” Such reform is possible since “human dignity and national security are not in conflict.” The responsibility of nations “to regulate their borders and establish a just and orderly immigration system for the sake of the common good” is acknowledged, although the emphasis is on how such systems benefit the immigrant. The statement closes with a pledge by the American bishops to stand with “our immigrant brothers and sisters” in their suffering and a rejection of “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.”

It is hard to know what to say about this statement. Clearly, the bishops, collectively and singularly, have a responsibility to make clear the Church’s solidarity with those who are suffering injustice, especially given that a disproportionate number of those being detained or deported are Catholic. The bishops are also on very solid ground when pressing the Trump administration on the lack of the sacraments in its detention centers, and whether the means of enforcement are suitably respectful of the dignity of those being arrested. Finally, the bishops would be remiss if they did not challenge some of the demeaning and hostile rhetoric coming from the White House. 

That said, the statement seems strangely distant from the political debate about what to do about the upsurge of illegal immigration under the Biden administration, estimated by the government to be more than ten million persons. Indeed, no effort is made to engage the question of legality beyond advocating for “meaningful immigration reform.” In this, the bishops’ statement compares unfavorably to the longer and more nuanced “Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope” issued in 2003 by the bishops’ conferences of both the United States and Mexico. 

Even as an ad hoc response, I submit that Pope Leo, in his statement of support for the bishops, did a better job placing the issue within its proper political context in that he acknowledged both the fact of illegal migration and that “every country has the right to determine who and how and when people enter.” It is possible Leo sensed that an overly moralistic statement has little chance of affecting political discourse on what is, without question, a highly complex matter of public policy.

For those interested in the theological and magisterial background of the bishops’ statement, I suggest Terrence Sweeney’s Opening the Ways of Migration: From Pius XII to the US Bishops' Special Message. The essay begins with Pius XII’s 1952 Apostolic Constitution, Exsul Familia Nazarethana, which, Sweeney notes, established a good deal of modern Catholicism’s approach to immigration. It established the right of people to migrate when their homeland is no longer safe or capable of providing economic sustenance. That right was coupled with an obligation on the part of more stable and wealthy countries to welcome and integrate those who come to them seeking security and survival. Pius does not deny the need for borders or national sovereignty, but his emphasis is clearly on the needs of the migrants.

While the pope spends a good deal of time on listing the various ways that the Catholic Church has supported migrants, Sweeney focuses on Pius’ argument that “the right of people to migrate” derives from Catholic teaching that God created land “primarily for the good of all.” The claims of states, therefore, “cannot be exaggerated to the point that access to this land is, for inadequate or unjustified reasons, denied to needy and decent people from other nations, provided of course, that the public wealth, considered very carefully, does not forbid this.” These words, interestingly enough, come originally from a 1948 letter the pope wrote to the bishops of the United States, clearly meant to activate them to work for greater leniency in American immigration policy. 

For Sweeney, Pius’ teaching signals the distance between a Catholic understanding of land and that found in modern liberal thought. In the “Lockean account where nature is ownerless before it is transformed into property by our labor, such that it is mine and in no way yours, the Catholic understanding of nature is that it is foundationally ours prior to becoming private property. That foundational nature is never obliterated or abrogated. Rather, my ownership becomes a kind of stewardship for my benefit and yours.” The consequence is that while American land is for American citizens, it is also for all others, with a special claim by those in greater need of it. To substantiate the point, Sweeney notes how the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church connects the issue of migration with the “worldwide dimension” of the “preferential option for the poor.” 

Sweeney makes his arguments over and against a “restrictionist” immigration policy. He “sets aside” the question of whether immigration is an economic plus for the country, but cites a source claiming that it is. Such insouciance is curious since the Church’s championing of openness to migration is always combined with the responsibility of a nation’s leadership to make prudential decisions based on an assessment of the common good for their own citizens. If it is the case that immigration always benefits the receiving nation, the political question vanishes and is replaced by a simple moral choice. I say this not to disparage Sweeney’s essay, which deserves serious consideration, but only to point out that more need be said. What is missing here, as with the bishops’ message, is actual engagement with the issue. 

Supporters of Trump’s immigration goals (if not all its methods), many of them committed Catholics, view the question in light of a prior real-life problem, that is, the presence of millions of people who have entered, or remain in, the country without permission and without the vetting that any responsible government should carry out. Add to that the complications related to the existence of sanctuary cities and activists who hound immigration enforcement officials. It’s a right mess, and the solution, if one exists, abides firmly within the realm of prudence, and prudence in political questions requires one to enter into the thick of things.

It is for this reason that I suggest readers take a look (or a second look) at Matthew Schmitz’s 2019 First Things essay, “Immigration Idealism, “ along with Peter Leithart’s spirited response. Schmitz’s main thesis, as the title indicates, is that the discussion over whether large-scale immigration is a problem has been hampered by a kind of idealism that abstracts from the vagaries of the real world. The fact that this idealism is found disproportionately amongst the elite is not surprising, he argues, since unfettered immigration tends to improve the life of those of the upper classes but constitutes a serious challenge to the working class. Here Schmitz relies on the work of Harvard economist George Borjas, who has documented the negative impact immigration has on those lower down the economic scale. 

Schmitz’s real interest, however, is the cultural divide between opponents and supporters of porous borders: “One side prizes national identity and citizenship; the other, mobility and openness.” Documenting his own journey away from immigration idealism, Schmitz notes that as a younger man he was so cocksure that immigration-anxiety was based in bigotry that he had “failed to notice that support for migration is characterized in no small part by contempt” for “working-class Americans as violent, hateful, and incompetent.” This attitude can be found in pop culture phenomena such as Hamilton, pundits, and in the mouths of Democratic and Republican politicians extolling immigrants over the native born.

A major contributor to this attitude is, for Schmitz, a kind of liberal Christianity that eschews the concrete trade-offs inherent in public policy for an elevated rhetoric of inclusion more fit for a Church than a nation. In addition to the religious justifications employed by Angela Merkel and Tony Blair, Schmitz mentions Pope Francis’ often-repeated claim that “a bridge is better than a wall.” It certainly sounds like something Jesus might say, and in many aspects of life it is undoubtedly true. It also falls woefully short of rational politics. One is reminded of John Courtney Murray’s famous rejection of any straight line between the Beatitudes and a responsible foreign policy in a world wracked by sin and limited in possibilities (“Morality and Foreign Policy”). Schmitz, for his part, draws a comparison with Reinhold Niebuhr’s well-known criticism of the pacifism adopted by many Christian leaders after the First World War:

“Faced with a historic surge of migration, Christian leaders have misread the gospel and misjudged human affairs. They have done so with the best of intentions. Just as Niebuhr’s contemporaries were correct to say that Christians must be peacemakers, today’s churchmen are right to say that we must welcome the stranger. Each theme is inescapable in Scripture and demands the Christian’s obedience to the point of pain. But obedience is never so simple as renouncing violence or refusing to defend national boundaries. In an imperfect world, peace must be protected by strength of arms, and welcoming the stranger entails preserving the society that might welcome him.”

Schmitz notes with approval that Pope Francis himself undermined any strict moral bifurcation between bridges and walls when he allowed the need for national leaders to determine how many can be let in without damaging the common good. There are times, clearly, when a wall is better than a bridge. 

A realist approach to immigration makes a sharp distinction between what is appropriate for a Church and a nation. Schmitz writes, “It will recognize that whereas the Church welcomes all comers, no nation can. It will insist that migration policy give preference to those who share the history, culture, and creed of the welcoming nation. It will recognize that those who are, by reason of history and belief, hostile to the host culture cannot really aspire to join it.” 

It is this point that Peter Leithart challenges. Might not some of what Schmitz labels “idealism” simply be “an effort to be faithful to the rhetoric and substance of Scripture”? Leithart recalls the divine command to “treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt” (Lev. 19:33-34). While the United States is not a church, it is a job of the Church to call the nation in which she dwells to “goods that transcend national interest.” If taken too far, the realism championed by Schmitz runs the risk of subordinating “the church’s witness to the needs of civil order.”

I suspect that a proper Christian response to the question of immigration lies within the distance separating Sweeney, Schmitz, and Leithart. It is impossible to deny the charge that some of the Trump administration’s tactics and language efface the basic dignity of illegal migrants. The present course is not politically sustainable. 

At the same time, the policies of the previous president were widely rejected by the American people, including many devout Catholics of various ethnicities. The Catholic Church, therefore, is well positioned to contribute to something better than what we have now. That will require speaking from within the world as it actually exists and acknowledging the inevitable trade-offs that even the most pious motives cannot transcend. It will mean engendering an empathy that is catholic in its reach, inclusive of the needs of citizens as well as migrants. As my experience last Sunday shows, what we need is ready at hand.