He knows nothing about U.S. immigration policy.
He knows nothing about U.S. immigration policy.
O f all the people you’d consult about U.S. immigration policy, the bishop of Rome is pretty far down the list.
Although he has more of a right to pontificate than most, the pope, like everyone else these days, has opinions on things he knows nothing about, and feels compelled to share them publicly.
On an Italian TV program the other day, Francis called mass deportations “a disgrace.”
The pope said such removals would make “the poor wretches who have nothing pay the bill.” He added, “This won’t do! This is not the way to solve things. That’s not how things are resolved.”
Perhaps the merciful thing to do is to pass over this comment in silence, as Francis is an 88-year-old man who has entered the Joe Biden phase of his pontificate. Since he occupies such an exalted seat, though, people still take his pronouncements seriously.
He is clearly reacting to the shock factor of the phrase “mass deportations.” As a practical matter, that is going to mean “lots more deportations than we had been doing,” rather than the swift deportation of millions of illegal immigrants.
That aside, since the pope gives every indication of being an open-borders zealot and he is not checking X and the right-wing media for information that might run counter to his longstanding presumptions, he’s clearly never thought about the downsides of the mass illegal influx into the United States that has occurred in recent years.
The chaos, the criminality, and the deaths that have come with the surge of illegal entries — that’s just the price of doing business, incidental aspects of an inherently righteous movement of people.
On the other hand, the return of people who have violated U.S. laws to their countries of origin, carried out in a professional manner in keeping with all sorts of rule and regulations? That’s an outrage.
Francis is right that many of these people are poor and vulnerable — “wretches,” as he calls them — but who made them that way? There would be fewer migrants in the first place if their home countries embraced the rule of law and market economics. Perhaps the pope could lend his moral authority to promoting those great social goods rather than browbeating the United States into taking in everyone who, understandably, finds their current homes so intolerable.
A better Latin America would be a benefit to everyone — to would-be migrants who could stay home rather than brave the trek to the United States and perhaps get deported right back home again; to the populations of those countries who aren’t going to leave; and to us.
Our only offense here is creating a gigantic magnet for immigrants in the form of an extraordinarily alluring place to live, where individuals are valued, laws are enforced, and people who work hard can make a living for themselves and perhaps much more than that. If the pope weren’t reflexively anti-American, he might more fully realize this.
Tom Homan, Trump’s no-nonsense border czar, enjoyably clapped back at the pope by noting the Vatican’s own walls.
When you walk around the outside of those walls in Rome, say, looking for a good gelato place nearby, you might feel awed, might feel the weight of time, or might feel a sense of permanence, but you definitely don’t feel welcomed.
Walls are about protection, and therefore about exclusion.
For about a thousand years, the papacy cared about its own borders quite a bit and maneuvered to preserve and expand them — sometimes quite successfully. If you offered serious assistance in this project, you stood a chance of getting crowned emperor, as Charlemagne could attest.
Despite what you might conclude from listening to Francis, Catholic teaching accepts borders at the same time that it champions the rights of immigrants. These two priorities are in tension and require a prudential balancing. Of course, immigrants should be treated humanely, and there should be a purely humanitarian element — accepting refugees, etc. — to U.S. immigration policy.
By any reasonable standard, though, the United States is remarkably open-handed to newcomers. We welcome more than a million legal immigrants every year, most of them without caring the least whether they bring work skills or other important attributes.
There is no reason that, on top of this, we have to accept huge numbers of illegal immigrants who are abusing our asylum system and making it unworkable for those who have legitimate claims. We’d be fully within our rights to send back, immediately, every single illegal immigrant who came here over the last several years. Since we have limited capacity, we are focusing first on criminals who have broken laws in addition to their immigration-related offenses.
If you talk to immigrants or the children of immigrants, you will find, at least in my experience, that most of them abhor how illegal immigrants are coming into the country today. Their own experience of playing by the rules — which requires considerable waiting and effort — informs their dim view of people who jump the line and very often lie about their situations to get into the United States.
The pro-immigrant supreme pontiff might consider their views, too — that is if he were interested in bringing to this issue anything but warmed-over bromides undeservedly sheathed in the moral authority of his office.