Immigration and Catholic Social Services

Compassion definitely involves providing for basic needs, it doesn't involve false hope

via Joint Chiefs of Staff / Flickr

A colleague when I worked in a homeless shelter once told me that we were there to uphold the sacred rites of hospitality. It’s a wise thing to say in a few senses. It’s the right attitude to bring to the work.

It’s also, if I can make a pessimistic assumption, a way to steel oneself psychologically, dealing, day in and day out, with what can seem like an intractable and endless problem.

Some of the reasons for which it is intractable and endless it will do little good to assign any kind of blame. If you don’t approach the work with the awareness that it could, through no fault of your own, be you at some point, you won’t do a good job.

There are secondary causes for which it is possible to assign blame, but you can do nothing about. For instance, the next town over, which is wealthier, refuses to build a shelter and displaces its homeless people instead. In these cases, perhaps, you can assign to yourself the good karma of upholding the sacred duty, and bad karma to the town next door.

Generally these duties entail food, shelter, and protection—three of the seven corporal works of mercy, depending on how you count it. When traveling in a safe country these days the latter is assumed, but the ancient Greeks appointed proxenoi to see to it. Where it is implicated for homeless guests, or clients as they are usually called today, is with respect to search warrants, because they are sometimes sought by police. As someone extending hospitality, you don’t have a right to obstruct a lawful search, but you do have a duty to protect those in your charge from lawless force.

All of that preface is to be clear that religious duties respecting hospitality have very little to do with immigration per se, a subject which everyone is talking about because Vice President J.D. Vance called out the Catholic bishops on Face the Nation yesterday.

Litigating a claim to citizenship, legal status, or asylum is not a corporal work of mercy, but that doesn’t mean the Church should not be involved. The same is true of adoption: the big problem of Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s war on Catholic adoption, is it makes human trafficking more likely, not less.

In general statements by the bishops about immigration tend to focus on the immorality of deportation, they have been condemning the possibility of mass deportations by the Trump administration. To deport a person is only immoral if that person has nowhere to go, repatriation is not immoral at all.

For a long time the immigration debate has been characterized by a lot of wishful thinking strung together with the assumption of lawlessness. Democrats sort of assumed that the dissenters could be browbeaten or fooled. Various immigration advocates at the border will coach illegal border-crossers to say the magic words to claim asylum, then they are let go, only to disappear. The assumption by Democrats, who do see a political advantage in this, is that eventually, by fudging census numbers and calling their opponents racist, they can obtain a majority sufficient for a mass amnesty, and wave a magic wand over the whole situation. This latest election should have been a bit of a wake-up call that the American people aren’t fooled. There’s a bit from Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets:

For never till in quite recent generations was such a scandalous blasphemy quietly set forth among the sons of Adam; never before did the creature called man believe generally in his heart that lies were the rule in this Earth; that in deliberate long-established lying could there be help or salvation for him, could there be at length other than hindrance and destruction for him. O Heavyside, my solid friend, this is the sorrow of sorrows: what on earth can become of us till this accursed enchantment, the general summary and consecration of delusions, be cast forth from the heart and life of one and all! Cast forth it will be; it must, or we are tending, at all moments, whitherward I do not like to name.

To a large extent Democrats are responsible for this situation because of their assumption that swamping the country would give them a permanent majority. Biden’s immigration policy led to the largest surge in U.S. history, and it was driven largely by trying to undo everything Trump did in his first term. If you’re OK with this, you’re on the side of progress, if you have reservations, you might be doing a white nationalist Replacement Theory. I think we’ve had enough of this kind of idiocy.

The Church is involved with immigration at all levels in various ways. Most of what it does is unobjectionable, and it’s better for the Church to have a hand in it than not. The USCCB does lobby for increased funding for the refugee resettlement program, but people who go through it have already been granted some kind of legal status, and to the extent that churches offer these people a community to land in, it’s better. There’s an interesting question whether it’s a good use of Catholic legal aid to get involved with obviously spurious asylum claims, which many are.

Likewise, I would also make a distinction between attorneys who make their bones litigating actual immigration cases, and those who advocate for labor and various other kinds of rights for workers with illegal or ambiguous status. In general there are more sophisticated ways to deal with this problem than taking it out on the immigrants themselves, labor trafficking laws are a great one. One of the problems with some immigration attorneys who aren’t with the Church is there’s an incentive for their legal status to remain ambiguous so that employers might exploit them.

Nobody thinks the U.S. has a duty to extend citizenship to the entire world. And yet, under Democratic presidencies, there is the de facto assumption that someday it would be. That is the situation the bishops might consider how the Church might be helpful in unwinding. If deportation is immoral and repatriation is not, the Church is well positioned with its international network to give deportees a soft landing on the other side, just as they do with refugees here. If they can leaven the transition going one way, they can leaven it going the other.

There is one thing Vice President Vance failed to point out, which implicates the bishops in a rather more profound way related to the structure of our republic, and will reflect badly upon them. In 2020, President Trump directed that the undocumented counted in the census be excluded from the apportionment of House seats. Two of the bishops chairing committees in the USCCB cried foul:

Counting the undocumented in the Census and then denying them and the states in which they reside their rightful representation in Congress is counter to the Constitution and a grave injustice. Furthermore, such a policy makes people feel invisible and not valued as human beings.

I don’t think that most people are really troubled by Catholic involvement in social services for migrants. I think it’s mostly good. But a statement like this is sentimental nonsense with very dangerous implications, it’s the logic of the three-fifths compromise.

To the extent that the Constitution, when it was written, contemplates a permanent class of non-citizens, we’re talking about slaves. Southern States, wishing to increase their power in Congress, wanted slaves counted in the census for purposes of congressional apportionment. The anti-slavery position was not that failing to count slaves in congressional apportionment might hurt their feelings or make them feel invisible. That would have increased the power of the slave states. The anti-slavery position was that congressional apportionment should be based on the number of citizens residing in a given state. I tend to think that the Catholic identification with the Democratic Party is overstated, but this is maybe one respect in which it dies hard. The Republican point of view, as has been the point of view of virtually all republics that have ever existed, is that permanent classes of non-citizens are bad and destabilizing.