Ramesh is right to note the absence of the word “Rubio” in Gerson’s column about the Hispanic vote. What caught my attention, though, is that Gerson’s column is a dry run for his testimony tomorrow as a Democratic witness at a hearing before Chuck Schumer’s Senate immigration subcommittee. Among the other witnesses are Cardinal McCarrick of Washington and Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, all of them discussing “Comprehensive Immigration Reform: Faith-Based Perspectives” — i.e., amnesty is a religious duty and support for enforcement of immigration laws is a sin.

In the absence of any dissenting voices at the hearing, a panel discussion I hosted yesterday will have to do (a video and transcript will be posted in a few days). The speakers were Fr. Dominique Peridans, an associate pastor at a Roman Catholic parish in Maryland, who wrote a piece on “Catholics, Immigration, and the Common Good“; James R. Edwards, Jr., an evangelical layman and CIS Fellow, who wrote “A Biblical Perspective on Immigration Policy“; and Stephen Steinlight, a CIS Senior Policy Analyst and former vice president of the National Conference of Christian and Jews, on “No ‘Progress by Pesach’: The Jewish Establishment’s Usurpation of American-Jewish Opinion on Immigration.”

They’re all worth reading, but this passage from Fr. Dominique’s piece sums up the issue:

The real lack of acknowledgement of the common good is manifested, for example, in the primacy given to the welfare of immigrants. Such a perspective obviously shifts the focus away from the more basic truths of the common good, and thus does a disservice to any clarification of the issue. There is an order in charity. As Thomas Aquinas states, “In matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow citizens.” In other words, the welfare of the community is a more immediate concern than that of immigrants — which, of course, does not mean that we should not be very sensitive to the latter. Such is the realism, however, of being part of a community.