Francis Maier, a senior fellow of Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, penned an Oct. 22 op-ed exploring various aspects of the immigration and deportation debate and describing how Christians should engage with it.
Maier explained that a Christian must both protect his own family and care for strangers in need. According to Maier, these obligations — which are not mutually exclusive — can provide insights to how a nation approaches the immigration-deportation issue.
“[L]ike parents with a family, a nation’s first duty is to its own citizens,” Maier wrote in the op-ed for First Things. “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.”
He said that it is reasonable to criticize the Trump administration’s approach to deporting illegal immigrants 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,” he noted.
However, he argued, these deportation efforts were inevitable due to the Biden administration’s oversight of the border collapse and both political parties’ failure to create sustainable immigration reform in the past 20 years.
Continuing, Maier stressed that undocumented immigrants have an immutable dignity from God. He praised the Church’s efforts in immigration ministry, such as offering material support and legal counsel, and argued that the current administration’s defunding of some of those services has worsened the immigration crisis.
“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,” Maier continued. “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.”
Maier also said that a senior border state church staffer, whom he did not name, commented to him: “I don’t like Trump’s approach; it’s long on muscle and short on explaining why these measures are necessary. But [Pope] Leo and the bishops refuse to make distinctions about immigrants; they’re prioritizing the needs of the undocumented over the legitimate concerns of the faithful who built the Church in this country.”
Reflecting on how Christians move forward with all of these aspects in mind, Maier pointed to a recent article about immigration by Father Christopher Trummer in The Catholic Times, the Springfield diocese’s newspaper.
Fr. Trummer presented “a moral framework that neither oversimplifies nor ignores the complexity of immigration,” according to Maier. The priest stressed that the dignity of every human being, regardless of legal status or nationality, must be respected. Immigrants should not be seen as statistics but as beloved persons, who have a right to migrate when their life, livelihood, or dignity is in need of protection, Fr. Trummer explained.
However, the right to migrate is not absolute, and the Church affirms that nations have the right and duty to regulate immigration, through securing borders and ensuring cultural and economic life, for the sake of the common good, according to Fr. Trummer.
“While the right to migrate is real, it must be balanced with a nation’s capacity to welcome and integrate new arrivals,” he wrote. “Finding this balance is the real crux of the debate.”
Fr. Trummer also noted that the Church does not teach that deportation is intrinsically evil, and the state has a right to enforce immigration laws. Maier noted that “deportation becomes morally problematic when it is applied without justice and restraint” or without proportionality, as Fr. Trummer argued.
Maier noted that Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Fr. Trummer’s bishop, also wrote this month in The Catholic Times, “when migrants are undocumented, they are vulnerable to unscrupulous employers who pay them below minimum [wage], threatening to call immigration authorities if they complain. The best way for immigrants to thrive in our country is to come here legally.”
Concluding, Maier noted that expanding that path for migrants is a weighty undertaking that necessitates “serious immigration reform, along with the prudence and spirit of compromise to see it through.”
“Our leaders in Washington — both political and ecclesial — might profitably give Springfield a call,” he wrote. “Not for policy details, but some training in common sense. That would at least be a start.”
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