The Church and Immigration Sanity

Let’s start with a thought experiment. A foreign-looking family knocks on the door one evening and asks for a place to stay. I’ve never seen them before. They look hungry. They need shelter. I have a Christian duty to help them; the content of Luke 2 sticks in my brain and conscience. At the same time, I know nothing about them. My resources are limited. Crime is on the upswing. And my first duty is providing for, and protecting, my own family in an uncertain time.

So what do I do?

Imaginary personal encounters make bad national policy. But like parents with a family, a nation’s first duty is to its own citizens. Their security and welfare matter. Thus, borders also matter. So does immigration law, especially in a nation created ex nihilo and held together not by ethnicity, religion, or even language, but by respect for the law and the actions that flow from it.

One can reasonably criticize the Trump administration’s current deportation efforts as too broad and too blunt. Along with arresting gang members, traffickers, murderers, and rapists, they sweep up innocent, undocumented immigrants who pose no criminal threat, and many of whom contribute as much to this country as they gain from it. But those same ugly removal efforts were inevitable. They were made so by a catastrophic border collapse under the Biden administration, and the failure by both of our political parties over the past two decades to produce workable immigration reform. Undocumented immigrants possess a God-given dignity that cannot be rescinded. But their presence here, under the law, is nonetheless illegal. Which is why the Obama administration, in its own time, deported 2.7 million of them—notably without the current hysterics from the political left.

To their credit, the Catholic and other Christian churches in this country have done heroic work for decades in offering material support and legal counsel to immigrants, documented and otherwise. I saw this firsthand in twenty-seven years of diocesan staff service. The Church resources allotted to social ministry, including immigration services, typically dwarfed other pro-life efforts. The current administration’s defunding of some of those legitimate services has ironically made the immigration crisis worse. But in serving the needs and championing the rights of new immigrants, church leaders have often been seen as downplaying or ignoring the just concerns of their own people. And most of their people are not reactionary nativists or right-wing bigots but ordinary men and women, often with families, worried—rightly—about crime, the financial stability of their public institutions, and social cohesion.

Acknowledging those honest concerns, as one border state bishop told me privately, has too often been inadequate; an unconvincing “throwaway line” for too many bishops and church workers dealing with the immigration issue.

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