The Bishops' Borders -

Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles recently proposed that Catholics begin the Lenten season by fasting and praying to defeat a bill just passed by the House of Representatives to tighten up the enforcement of immigration control and border security. It sounded like a new sort of progressive penance for recalcitrant pre-Vatican II Catholics — but the cardinal was apparently in earnest. He warned his archdiocese that “hysterical” anti-immigrant sentiment was sweeping the nation, argued that the House bill was tantamount to “punishing people who help immigrants,” suggested that it could mean the Church would have to ask for documentation before serving communion at the altar rail, called for “humane” reform of immigration law more or less identical with the McCain-Kennedy bill (amnesty, guest workers, more family-reunification visas, etc.), announced that he would instruct his priests to ignore and even defy the rules if they became law, and declared that he himself would go to prison if necessary to make the point.

There were a number of oddities about this heroic defiance of impending tyranny. To begin with, nobody was asking Cardinal Mahony to report any illegal aliens at the altar rail or even at the soup kitchen. Yes, the bill at that legislative stage was impermissibly broad (partly as a result of Democratic votes aiming to discredit it), but everyone knew that it would be amended at later stages. The provisions that provoked Cardinal Mahony were aimed at organized gangs of people-smugglers (sometimes known as “coyotes” or, in Asia, “snakeheads”) rather than at nuns and social workers. Nor were these aspects of the legislation very new. It has been against the law for decades for people to assist the smuggling and hiding of illegal aliens — and yet comparatively few cardinals have been dragged off to prison during this period. Maybe the cops, notoriously respectful of the cloth, have been turning a blind eye.

Not only was the cardinal safe, he really ought to have felt safe — since, according to one of the bill’s co-sponsors, Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.), “no one has ever, ever gone after any church or religious organization for that. And we’ve told that to the Catholic Conference.” Mahony’s martyrdom had been indefinitely postponed. Even if the cardinal had been facing a real threat, it would still have been somewhat unseemly for him to strike a pose of civil disobedience and to urge the sheltering of fugitives from the law — urgings he repeated in a New York Times op-ed — at a time when the American Catholic Church was only just recovering from the sexual-abuse scandal. At the very least, in the worldly-wise words of Rick Blaine in Casablanca, “It’s poor salesmanship.”

IN THE DEMOCRATS’ POCKET? Why, then, did Cardinal Mahony strike such a defiant pose when he was facing nothing worse than a conference call with other bishops and some legislative staffers? A partly charitable explanation is that he spoke without ever asking his fellow bishops, “Hey, do the Republicans really intend to lock us all up?” That would be the “tabloid” defense: too good to check. Another possible explanation is that Mahony — along with the other Catholic bishops and, even more, the clerical bureaucracy servicing them — was desperately keen to find an issue on which he could pronounce “Thou art anathema” to Republicans. Many bishops are abortion-weary and really dislike being seen as the political allies of George W. Bush and the Party of Greed. It’s not their fault: The Democrats keep forcing them into this position. But it irks them. And they look for other issues on which they can flaunt their liberalism.

Mahony himself had already ventured into this territory in 1994, when he warned Catholics that supporting Proposition 187 — limiting public services for illegal immigrants — was a grave social sin. This warning had seemingly little effect. Californian Catholics — one-third of whom are Hispanic — opposed 187 by a bare majority of 51 percent to 49 percent. But non-Hispanic white Catholics favored it by 58 percent to 42 percent, which was 187’s margin of victory statewide.

Maybe the cardinal reckoned that, this time, he needed to add a little drama in order to make an impact. If so, he has succeeded — but not necessarily to his advantage. For as well as raising the question of immigration reform, he has reopened the perennial topic of the proper limits of the Catholic Church’s teaching authority. A regular comedy is played out whenever this topic arises. Liberal Catholics and the secular media generally favor the idea that the faithful should ignore the instructions of the Pope and the bishops. They are especially delighted that many Catholics flout Church teaching on sexual questions, which conduct they interpret as the maturing of previously superstitious Irish, Italian, and Polish peasants. At the same time, when the bishops denounce capitalism or America’s Cold War nuclear strategy — or, better yet, when the Pope calls for the abolition of capital punishment or declares the Iraq War to be an unjust one — the same liberals feel obscurely that conservative Catholics have a duty to follow the teachings of the Church. Such distinctions as what kind of teaching on what kind of authority on what kind of issues weigh only slightly with them. They are cafeteria Catholics on gay marriage and table d’hôte Catholics on capital punishment. Unfortunately, they cannot articulate a general principle that justifies their coming down on their preferred side in these different cases.

THE PROPER SPHERES Well, I am no theologian, as the old vaudeville song has it, but the essential distinction is simple to the point of being commonsensical. For Catholics, the Church is an authoritative guide on matters of faith or morals. Abortion is a very clear violation of a right to life that the Church believes should be protected. And though some liberal Catholics such as Garry Wills would disagree, the Catholic Church’s prohibition of it is binding on a Catholic conscience. But Catholic social doctrine is a mixture of moral principles and practical considerations. And on the practicalities, others — secular experts of various kinds — are likely to be better guides than theologians or even bishops.

Thus a Catholic is obliged to give prayerful consideration to the advice of his bishop on justly rewarding workers. If, however, Milton Friedman demonstrates that the method recommended by the bishops is likely to result not in higher standards of living but in higher rates of unemployment, the same Catholic should look for different ways of advancing the same principle; in seeking these other ways, moreover, he is bound to ensure that they meet the moral criteria defined by the Church.

My old journalistic mentor, the late T. E. Utley, a conservative High Anglican, summed up this argument by concluding that on most political issues a wide range of solutions (doubtless excluding fascist and Communist ones) would meet Christian criteria. The average Christian-in-the-pew should therefore consider not, “What are the answers a Christian should give?” but rather, “What are the questions a Christian should ask?” That being so, political debate could well encompass fiercely partisan battles by groups of Christians offering opposed policies, all rooted in Christian questions but reaching different conclusions about the empirical evidence. In his recent first encyclical, the new Pope seems to agree with my old friend, suggesting that Christian laymen should play the main role in politics — advancing policies — while the Church seeks to illumine the debate and enlighten the minds of legislators by offering perspectives based on reason and charity.

C. S. Lewis made the same point in Mere Christianity (I am grateful to James Fulford for the reference) with his usual vividness: “The clergy are those particular people within the whole Church who have been specially trained and set aside to look after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live forever: and we are asking them to do a quite different job for which they have not been trained [when we call on them to provide political leadership]. The job is really on us, on the laymen. The application of Christian principles, say, to trade unionism and education, must come from Christian trade unionists and Christian schoolmasters; just as Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists — not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time.” This was strikingly confirmed a few years ago when the Catholic bishops issued a statement on the economy, replete with learned digressions on taxes, growth rates, income distribution, and much else. An enterprising journalist telephoned around and asked them what a marginal tax rate was. Most had no idea. Or, as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus commented: “To put it gently, they did not know what they were talking about.” That is undesirable when instructing the faithful.

BEYOND THEIR PROVINCE Now, do the Catholic bishops today know what they are talking about on immigration? It is not only Cardinal Mahony who has been acting prophetic. In 2003, the Catholic bishops of the U.S. and Mexico put out a joint pastoral letter on immigration: “Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope.” This was a comprehensive application of Catholic social principles to the question of immigration — and particularly of Mexican immigration to the U.S. To support this statement, a full-fledged political campaign — “Justice for Immigrants: A Journey of Hope” — has been launched complete with website. And the first thing to be said about these various efforts is that they are an extremely useful reminder of most of the moral principles that should guide, or at least inform, all people of good will in considering this matter.

Unfortunately, other things also need to be said. For practical purposes the original document and its supporting material amount to an endorsement of the most extreme proposals to open the borders and deregulate immigration. In supporting such proposals down to quite detailed legislative and administrative points — for instance, ensuring that remittances to Mexico go to certain community projects — the bishops surely cross the border between the proper roles of the clergy and laity as outlined above. Indeed, it crosses the border in both directions since, in addition to the Catholic clergy’s dictating detailed reforms of immigration law, it is perfectly clear that Catholic doctrine has been sharply influenced by contemporary secular-liberal ideas on economic and cultural questions, notably by multiculturalism. And sometimes the different policy prescriptions clash, as when the document calls on the U.S. both to abandon border strategies that force migrants to seek dangerous routes (i.e., loosen border control) and to take action to regulate human trafficking across the border more rigorously.

THE FACTS, PLEASE Nor are all of the facts on which the bishops base their appeal entirely reliable. A note here to aspiring investigative journalists: Always go to the section of a document headlined “Myths.” These are almost always inconvenient truths, the “corrections” of which turn out to be themselves more mythical than the supposed myths. So it is here. The document’s evidence that immigrants do not depress the labor market is taken from a 1994 study and takes no account of the massive economic research since done, notably by Harvard’s George Borjas, showing indisputably that immigration has depressed wages for lower-income Americans and driven millions of them, especially black Americans, out of the labor market altogether. Similarly, its claim that immigrants pay more in taxes than they derive in social benefits is based on a study that assumed the immigrants derived no benefits from such expenditures as those on road building, defense, libraries, parks, infrastructure, and all the other public goods government provides. If the same assumption is applied to native-born Americans, they too pay more in taxes than they derive in social benefits. Somebody in outer space is presumably paying for our towns and cities. One statistic, however, is broadly accurate (though also slightly out of date): “The net benefit of immigration to the U.S. [actually to native-born Americans] is nearly $10 billion annually.” That sounds large, but it is trivial in an economy worth $12.8 trillion last year. Bill Gates’s inheritance tax will give us as much.

While the bishops may speak with authority on moral principles, they would be well advised — when they turn to their practical application — to take a back seat to such secular experts as Borjas. Or perhaps to the British academic duo — Cambridge economist Robert Rowthorn and Oxford demographer David Coleman — who concluded in their recent survey of immigration research: “The claim that U.S. prosperity has been driven by immigration, as opposed to driving it, appears to lack any academic support.”

But are the bishops entirely reliable even when they outline the moral principles that should guide us on immigration? At times the Journey to Hope campaign seems as disingenuous as . . . well, as Bill Clinton. It asserts that the Catholic Church is opposed to illegal immigration and supports border security, yet its practical proposals almost without exception would undermine such border control and facilitate illegal immigration. And while asserting that one principle that guides the bishops is the right of sovereign nations to control their borders, their current position is the culmination of a long journey towards reducing that right to a footnote.

It seems to have been forgotten that until about 30 years ago the right of the migrant to immigrate and the right of the nation to regulate immigration were held in something like equal tension by the U.S. Church. As David Simcox pointed out in The Social Contract magazine, prominent Catholics quite happily promoted severe controls on immigration without provoking any suspicion that they were going against Catholic doctrine. Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, for instance, was chairman of the 1979 Special Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policies that proposed employer sanctions and an immigration ceiling more than a third lower than today’s.

This drift of official U.S. Catholic thought seems to have been the result of several factors, not all of them strictly moral or religious: the Universal Church’s long-held skepticism towards the nation-state; the upsurge of refugee and asylum problems following wars in the 1990s; what Simcox calls “cornucopian” economics, or the belief that immigration makes the receiving country better off without impoverishing the sending country; and, above all perhaps, a certain Roman insouciance towards the cultural basis of nationhood.

Catholic bishops often sound uncomfortably close to libertarians in treating the nation not as a community centered around certain moral and political principles but as simply a place where strangers meet and work. What is most obviously missing from their pastoral statements is any sense that the American people are a people whose traditions, language, culture, political principles, and “mystic chords of memory” are legitimate objects of love and preservation. An earlier generation of American bishops understood this very well, but like their fellows in the secular liberal intelligentsia, the present bishops are tone deaf on this. That is changing in Europe, where the establishment of large Muslim communities (together with the secular fundamentalism of European governments) is alerting the Church to the religious and cultural foundations of nation and civilization. Catholic immigrants pose a challenge about which the bishops will understandably be less worried — one that in sufficient proportions might weaken a national identity even as it strengthens a religious one — but which they should treat seriously, especially at a time when large demonstrations of illegal immigrants are waving Mexican flags and denying the legitimacy of America’s borders.

An immigration policy inspired by such legitimate concerns would presumably aim at lower and more assimilable immigration levels. It would be accompanied by domestic policies that move away from multiculturalism towards assimilation. It would seek to ensure a more “diverse” mix of immigrants, since immigrants from several nations and cultures encourage voluntary adoption of the new nation’s language, culture, and practices, while single-source immigration from a different culture tends to encourage a divisive biculturalism. In order to achieve these objects, it would have to tolerate a fair level of regulation. And, in all these matters, it should naturally be conducted in a spirit of charity and understanding — towards immigrants, of course, but even towards bishops.

"2241 ...Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants'duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens."
Catholic Catechism, courtesy of Zetman

Many years ago when the Soviet Union had their Niles knives at the throat of the United States, the US Catholic Bishops came out with a statement telling the USA to completely disarm. Naturally everyone laughed at them. HaHaHa! Even the European Bishops came running out and said "NO Don't listen to them, Don't disarm." The only reason I brought this up is because the Bishops act kind of goofy sometimes.

In 2003, the Catholic bishops of the U.S. and Mexico put out a joint pastoral letter on immigration: “Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope.” This was a comprehensive application of Catholic social principles to the question of immigration — and particularly of Mexican immigration to the U.S. To support this statement, a full-fledged political campaign — “Justice for Immigrants: A Journey of Hope” — has been launched complete with website. And the first thing to be said about these various efforts is that they are an extremely useful reminder of most of the moral principles that should guide, or at least inform, all people of good will in considering this matter.

I have read most of the threads here about immigration, and I have followed the discussion on talk radio, especially the discussion on Laura Ingraham's show, since she proclaims herself a faithful Catholic. I seldom see even the slightest reference to the "moral principles" I read in (a) the Catechism, (b) the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, or (c) the pastoral letter "Strangers No Longer." Mostly what I hear or read is something like, "It's none of the church's ***damn business! Revoke their tax exemption!" The simple truth is that conservative Catholics don't like what the Church teaches about immigration, so they badmouth it and/or ignore it. As I see it, they are just Cafeteria Catholics with a conservative political preference.

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