South of the Border

President Trump’s relationship with the two popes who have sat on St. Peter’s throne has been tenuous at best since he first became president. Their main bone of contention has been immigration. Not since the artificial birth control debate has an issue so divided the Catholic population in this country. While the Church admits that countries have a sovereign right to control their respective borders with regard to immigration, it seems to favor a lax enforcement of these rights. 

I believe that over the last decade, the Church has reduced its statements on America’s sovereign rights to marshal its borders to mere lip service. I think that at least with Mexico, the United States’ right to control its borders has been seriously jeopardized.

Our Immigration rules and regulations date back to the Page Act of 1875. Immigrants, who applied for citizenship have always had a detailed set of rules and regulations they needed to follow. I have met many people who were proud to be naturalized citizens after going through the 5–7-year process before finally being sworn in as naturalized citizens of the United States.   

So unpopular have their leftwing policies been, the country has apparently switched its loyalties from the Democratic Party to Republicans and Independents. As a result, the Democrats have needed a new source of voters. Consequently, our immigration laws have been virtually ignored to the extent that the entry gates were open to anyone who could come here, much to the detriment of the American voting population.        

Over 10 years ago, the Bishop of St. Louis promulgated a letter on immigration that was to be read at every Mass on that weekend. I remember posing a rhetorical question to the poor priest who had to carry out the Bishop’s order in our parish that evening. I asked him if there were any difference between undocumented and illegal? This odd phrase had been at the core of the Bishop’s message. 

Unsurprisingly, he never answered my question because to have said yes, he would have had to quickly make up some sort of fallacy because there is no difference. To say no would have uncovered the true essence of the Bishop’s message. 

I doubt if anyone in the pews had ever heard the term, undocumented immigrants. It is a euphemism, designed to disguise the dark truth of the message. I despise euphemisms because at their core they are lies. In this case, I think the message was concocted to obscure the dark truth behind the prelatic message to the bishop’s diocesan flock. In truth, the Church was trying to sell American Catholics the false logic of an illegal immigration policy. 

Euphemisms are generally used to lessen the severity or soften the blow of some serious or even a painful event. Dying or death has many, such as passed away, gone to their heavenly home, or no longer with us. Downsized or between jobs is a subtle way of saying one had been fired. There is also economical for cheap and past-due or late payment for an outstanding bill. The Church does not want to admit they are aiding and abetting the breaking of the law, so they say undocumented.

It is easy to lose respect for a business, organization and especially a church which has to rely on euphemisms to promote their teachings. Catholic parishioners demand far more from their Church than secular businesses because they serve as God’s witness and it is against His divine nature to be complicit in a verbal legerdemain. 

As I mentioned in my introduction, few issues in American life have been as polarizing and harmful to the body politic and Church unity than immigration. According to Father Christopher Trummer, S.T.L., the topic stirs deep and often conflicting emotions, such concern for our national sovereignty and legal order, vs. compassion for migrants and refugees, a longing for justice and anxiety about social and economic changes, as well.

Father Trummer asserts that there are three major principles of the Church on immigration which need to be integrated. The first is the dignity of the human being, followed by the right to migrate, which is balanced by a nation’s sovereign right to promulgate laws governing the process of immigration to their respective countries. 

It was the Obama and Biden administrations which threw all caution and sanity to the wind with their Open Borders immigration policy. I cannot repeat often enough what social and moral harm their policy of opening the floodgates and nearly obliterating the border between the United States and Mexico. Most importantly it has inundated our country with increased incidence of murder, sexual assaults, robberies, physical violence, and disrespect for our police officers.

It is estimated that just under seven million illegals came into this country during the Democratic Open-Border campaign. As soon as the voters returned Trump to the White House, he erased much of Biden’s policy with 210 Executive Orders in the first years of his second administration. These Executive Orders effectively clamped down on Biden’s illegal immigration while ramping up deportation. Unfortunately, Trump’s policies did not resonate well with most of the churches. This included the Evangelicals one of the president’s fiercest supporters who condemned the president’s actions. 

The benighted in this country were cowed into believing our immigration policies had been done for humanitarian reasons. In truth humanity had little to do with their motives. The demographics of the Democratic Party had been declining for over a decade. They were losing the elderly, the young and millions in the middle class. They desperately needed to find new and pliable segments of voters ripe for initiation into the Democratic Party in order to return them to the seat of power in our government. What better new voters than immigrants, fresh off the beaches.

President Trump inherited the Democratic border chaos during his second administration. He tried desperately to turn back the clock and return millions of refugees to their native lands. In most cases Trump was not telling these people they could never become citizens but stressing that they had to follow the rules. In other words, they needed to go to the back of the line and wait their legal turn.

While mass deportations may seem harsh to many, we must not forget that these immigrants had willfully violated our immigration laws to the extent that chaos ruled our borders in the face of thousands overrunning our beaches every day. 

It is unfortunate that both Popes Francis and Leo have chastised the president for deporting millions of these illegals. I believe the deportations were necessitated by the fact that the Biden administration had allowed several million illegal aliens to cross our borders during the period of 2020-2024. Few had ever been properly or fully vetted. Consequently, these policies encouraged a strong criminal element to sneak in and terrorize our citizens in our border states.  

The Church was basically silent during this period of our history. I do not remember any criticism of this irresponsible policy from the Catholic leaders in this country. I never heard them distinguish between illegal and legal with regard to these immigrants. This sounds as if they were neutering the right of the United States to regulate its borders out of some humanitarian and political principles. I also never heard a single word about how the Biden policies caused such evils as increased trafficking of children and the sexual abuse that accompanied mass migrations, which was harmful to most of these people. 

As justification, the Left offers the lame argument that under certain circumstances there are some conditions where illegal immigration can be sanctioned. These include countries where the persons are unable to provide for themselves or their families in their countries of origins, legal paths are closed or unfairly restrictive and finally where crossing a border illegally is the only available means to secure basic human goods, such as food, safety, and shelter. 

Unfortunately, these are very subjective reasons and can be susceptible to serious abuse when literally invading a country as generous as the United States has been over the course of most of its history. While the right to migrate is real, it is not absolute and must be balanced by the host country’s viability to welcome and absorb millions of new arrivals. Consequently, when Trump slammed the doors on new immigrants, the churches balked.

If this is not bad enough, there is another, more opaque side to our immigration story. I am talking about the millions of federal dollars which have flooded the coffers of many immigrant and political organizations. I will try to employ the old adage of follow the money to give more substance to this controversial issue in my second installment, The Dark Side of the Immigration Debate.