Now Is the Time to Fix Immigration
Caroline MolloyWith the border secure, the time is ripe for comprehensive immigration reform for the first time in forty years. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops offers our legislators an outline of a balanced path forward, protecting our nation and its citizens while respecting the dignity of each human person.
Today’s immigration debates tend toward a simplistic binary: standing with immigrants—including the undocumented—or supporting law enforcement efforts to remove noncitizens with no legal status. The U.S. bishops take a more nuanced stance in their Special Message, affirming the duty of a nation to control immigration while recognizing the human cost of “indiscriminate mass deportation,” which ensnares noncitizens brought here as children, those married to U.S. citizens, and those who have developed significant ties to the country.
The bishops apply two bedrock principles of Catholic social teaching: solidarity and subsidiarity. Solidarity recognizes that each of us, created in the image and likeness of God, possesses inherent dignity. Even those illegally in the United States have a claim to dignity and respect. Indiscriminate mass deportation violates the principle of solidarity because it treats the undocumented as a monolithic whole without distinguishing individual claims for remaining within our political community. Subsidiarity recognizes that human beings flourish in community, including the political community.
Deeply influenced by natural law, legal scholars applied these principles as nation-states emerged centuries ago. Every human being, they said, has a right to emigrate—leave his or her country—if the conditions for human flourishing are absent in his or her homeland. And, every country has a qualified right to control its borders, including excluding potential immigrants. Countries, however, have a duty to accept some immigrants if they can be incorporated into the economic and social fabric of the nation without undue hardship on its citizens.
These principles apply Catholic teaching on the universal destination of goods. Gifted by the Creator, the goods of the world are for the benefit of all. The common good, however, is achieved in the particular. Parents, for example, contribute to the common good by feeding, forming, and educating their children. Justice requires, however, that they share their surplus in some fashion with the broader community.
The same applies to the nation-state. The United States contributes to the common good of the world by creating an environment where its citizens can flourish. Our excess, in justice not charity, should be shared with others in need through foreign aid or by providing immigration opportunities. What is needed for the nation to flourish and what is surplus is a matter of prudential judgment on which reasonable people can disagree.
Forty-four years ago, University of Notre Dame president Rev. Theodore Hesburgh chaired the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, which led to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Sympathizing with “the plight of illegal aliens,” Hesburgh also considered the cost to “Americans whose wages and standards are depressed by their presence”; the undocumented themselves who often risk life to enter illegally only to face exploitation by employers; and those noncitizens “waiting patiently in line” for years to enter the United States legally.
Democrats and Republicans alike sought to “close the back door on illegal immigration so that the front door on legal immigration may remain open.” Congress attempted to close the back door with sanctions for employers who hired undocumented labor. It also reformed legal immigration and provided a path to citizenship for most of the 4.5 million undocumented immigrants then residing within our borders.
