How Should Catholics Respond to the Immigration Crisis?

Source: First Things

James Hankins January 30, 2025

The appointment of Cardinal Robert W. McElroy as Archbishop of Washington, D.C., has been widely interpreted in the press as an answer to the election of Donald Trump. Predictably, Cardinal McElroy is hailed in the New York Times as a Good Catholic because he has been known to speak out “on the inclusion of migrants, women and L.G.B.T.Q. people in the Catholic church.” The Bad Catholics include JD Vance, who has “advanced a hard-line anti-immigrant agenda,” and Brian Burch, whom President Trump nominated as ambassador to the Holy See, rewarding him for his help in harvesting the conservative Catholic vote.

I’m congenitally skeptical of characterizations such as these. Past experience suggests that news reports commonly exaggerate or massage statements from Catholic authorities so as to fit preferred political narratives. Many journalists seem to operate on the assumption that Catholic social teachings align comfortably with the soft, welfare-state liberalism they tend to prefer.

Sure enough, when I read the actual statements that were cited or linked by the Times, Cardinal McElroy’s views amounted to something less than a full-throated endorsement of the Democratic party’s immigration policies. The fullest statement of his views I could find were delivered in a speech in November 2016, just after President Trump was elected. He was not speaking as a representative of the “religious left” but as the bishop of San Diego. The future cardinal expressed firm support of Catholic teachings on abortion, religious freedom, and the family, all supposedly concerns of the “religious right,” but urged a non-partisan (dare one say “catholic”?) attitude that would support “all those who are suffering in our midst.”

The reality that young black men fear for their security when facing law enforcement, the sense of dispossession felt by young white men in the Rust Belt without a college education, the fear that police face every day trying to protect society, rampant patterns of sexual harassment and assault directed against women, the institutionalized patterns of poverty and ever increasing economic inequality in America—these are all wounds in our society which must be addressed.

McElroy even tried to be fair to President Trump, who had already backtracked somewhat from his campaign threat to begin mass deportations of any and all persons illegally in the country. McElroy urged dialogue with the new administration. What the bishop denounced with uncompromising fervor was the prospect of migrants and the undocumented community being forcibly removed en masse from their jobs, families, and churches: “We must label this policy proposal for what it is—an act of injustice which would stain our national honor in the same manner as the progressive dispossessions of the Native American peoples of the United States and the internment of the Japanese.”

The hyperbole is unfortunate. Interned Japanese were U.S. citizens, and Native Americans were here first, not people who entered the country only recently and without legal authorization. Nevertheless, McElroy’s opposition to mass deportations is not an application of Catholic social teaching with which the religious right (sit venia verbis) would necessarily disagree. If the mass deportation policy were carried out in ways suggested by a few of the president’s advisors—for instance, if the federal government used the National Guard to round up all 11 million undocumented immigrants (3.3 percent of the U.S. population), created hundreds of detention camps, ramped up deportation flights using military aircraft, broke up families, causing fear and extreme hardship within undocumented populations, and ended Temporary Protected Status for refugees from wars and natural disasters—it could hardly fail to be cruel and inhumane. These would be the actions of a police state, and Catholics and all Christians would surely be right to oppose them.

More sober voices in the new administration—like that of Tom Homan, President Trump’s new immigration “czar”—are suggesting that the administration will not be mounting the largest forceable deportation operation since World War II, but will instead be targeting violent criminals, security risks, and border-crossers who are evading their legal responsibility to report to the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) or to immigration courts. Homan is a lifelong Catholic, well informed about Catholic social teachings, who has sharply and publicly disagreed with Pope Francis’s loose cannon fire against the Trump administration’s deportation policies. Cardinal McElroy’s nightmare scenario is, one hopes, a remote one.

The issue before us now is no longer whether it was right to “break into our country” in the first place—it was not—but what is the most humane way to treat the huge number of persons now unlawfully present. Can an illegal act that previous administrations and some state governments left unpunished, and even tacitly encouraged, be turned to a good purpose? Can we find a common sense solution that benefits our country?

The Catholic Church teaches that all persons are equal in the sight of God and therefore have “an equal right to receive from the earth what is necessary for life.” This does not mean that citizens have fewer rights than immigrants and that the state has no obligation to prevent chaos at its border. It does not mean that the state may impose persons with temporary legal status on communities without those communities’ permission. It entails no moral obligation to take jobs away from citizens and give them to immigrants.

McElroy seems to recognize these nuances. He has been more careful with his language than the secular press—eager as always for controversy—would no doubt like. It is only “indiscriminate, massive deportation” of migrants that Cardinal McElroy has declared to be “incompatible with Catholic doctrine.” He linked that much-quoted statement with the stipulation (less often quoted) that “the Catholic Church teaches that a country has the right to control its borders.” The cardinal is not, in other words, an open-borders radical, either of the libertarian or globalist variety. He has not supported NGOs that facilitate illegal traffickers and lobby for open borders. In statements made since 2016, he has carefully distinguished between illegal aliens who commit serious crimes, whom he agrees should be deported; genuine asylum seekers, whom (along with most Americans) he thinks should be given refuge; and economic migrants. He has stopped short of claiming (falsely) that Catholic doctrine teaches that the U.S. government has a moral obligation to allow economic migrants who have illegally entered the country to remain here. He has not endorsed the policies of sanctuary cities. There is no reason to believe that he has embraced liberal internationalism’s vision of a borderless world.

Reading McElroy’s statements, however, I was struck by the presence of some unspoken assumptions I have encountered in my own parish: that immigration to America is an unalloyed good for the immigrant, and that to refuse entry to “this blessed land” (McElroy’s words) could only be interpreted as a failure of charity. This attitude strikes me as insufficiently Catholic and excessively American. It assumes that an individual’s desire for a better life, whatever the damage done to his or her family and home country, is always laudable and must be honored by people of faith. It assumes that American life, including its political system, is always and in every respect better than the life an immigrant leaves behind, even if he or she is leaving a country that is overwhelmingly Christian. Pride in our own country’s wealth and freedom can lead some to overlook the part of Catholic social teaching that establishes limits on the right to migrate—for example, the moral duty to obey the laws of the host country—and duties the citizens of other lands might have to stay in their own countries and seek to improve conditions there.

Immigration can be a double-edge sword. Yes, immigrants find economic opportunity and constitutional rights, but many immigrant communities in America, especially ones from Catholic countries, feel that their children are more endangered in their faith and morals in American schools than they would be in their home countries—and the vast majority can only afford public education. Being permanently cut off from their home countries weakens the bonds of affection that tie immigrants to a more traditional culture. The American churches that try to welcome them often condescend to older religious traditions, regarding them as something to be overcome. That only increases immigrants’ sense of alienation. Yet even amid the moral chaos of “this blessed land,” many immigrants strive to preserve their faith and that of their children. Native Catholics who have found themselves in Spanish- or Portuguese-language masses in this country are often surprised, as I have been, by the large, family-oriented and fervently devout immigrant communities they encounter there. Surely our country wants workers such as these?

How should Catholics in public life respond to the moral challenges posed by mass migration? What might count as a Catholic, a Christian, immigration policy? Toward what ends might the new archbishop direct his activist energies, assuming (as we must all hope) that his nightmare scenario of mass deportations is averted by good sense or political expediency? This is obviously a theologically complicated issue that I have no qualifications to discuss. I do have one suggestion, however.

Two decades ago, in January 2004, President Bush proposed a temporary worker program that would allow migrant laborers to come to the U.S. and work legally for a period of time, if offered a job by a U.S. employer. Immigrants unlawfully present in the U.S. could apply for a temporary worker card and would be able “to travel back and forth between their home and the United States without fear of being denied re-entry.” It would supplement the more restrictive H2A and H2B guest worker programs (for agricultural and non-agricultural workers) introduced in 1952 and 1986 respectively, which did not apply to illegals. Bush’s program was well conceived, though limited in scope, and might under normal circumstances have found some bi-partisan support. In the event, electoral calculations and other partisan consideration killed the proposal.

Yet the idea of temporary permits remains an attractive one, and one, perhaps, whose time has come. In our current circumstances it is a policy that Christians could endorse—and one that would avoid contentious issues of deportation and border control. Practical wisdom and humanity both dictate that some way be found to end the stateless limbo in which millions of our fellow Christians live. If we take off the table the politically divisive issue of a “path to citizenship” for illegals, and the question of whether those unlawfully present in the country can “jump the line” ahead of those applying for citizenship lawfully, we can begin to apply common sense and seek a solution that is best for everyone.

It would be a charitable act to issue illegal immigrants with temporary or permanent work permits. Instead of living in fear of the federal government, which deported over three million unlawful residents under President Obama—who still holds the record among U.S. presidents for removal of illegals—they would have reason to be grateful to our country and to the new administration. To adopt such a policy would instantly discredit the many voices who, intentionally or not, are presently inducing panic in undocumented communities. Although it is not true that non-citizens vote in detectable numbers in federal elections, the suspicion that they do so, or that the previous administration promoted illegal immigration for that purpose, would be greatly reduced by regularizing the status of unlawfully present workers. Legislation to create a temporary worker program might also contain provisions requiring states to stamp “non-voter” on driver’s licenses issued to non-citizens. The measure would surely reduce partisan bitterness over immigration policy, at least in the long run.

Under a guest worker program, economic migrants might be given the right to visit families in their countries of origin, to travel abroad, to return to the U.S. and to their jobs, and to apply in due course for citizenship. A flexible work permit program could solve in a humane fashion many problems with undocumented workers, whose unlawful status frequently drives them into the underground economy. It would benefit our economy as well as those of their countries of origin if their status were regularized. Above all, a guest worker program would allow families to remain whole and to draw strength from the religions of their native lands. It is often being said these days that America needs a religious revival to rebuild its lost Christian civilization. Since by reliable estimates{target_blank} some 83 percent of immigrants unlawfully present in the U.S. are Christians, maybe we just need to start looking in the right places.

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