Questions for the Pope about immigration and dignity

Pope Francis’s “Letter to the Bishops of the United States of America”, released yesterday, raises certain questions for me. I enumerate them here.

The Letter’s fourth section is, in many ways, the heart of the letter. It is also the one about which I have major questions. Pope Francis writes:

The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality. At the same time, one must recognize the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival. That said, the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families… (§ 4)

First, while there is the obligatory acknowledgement of national sovereignty to regulate a country’s borders by immigration laws, that acknowledgement is sandwiched between preceding and following language that renders the theoretical concession nugatory. Is the Pope not saying sub rosa that while a country might sometimes regulate its immigration, its primary obligation is to welcome immigrants? And, when it comes to immigration, do the “reasons” immigrants decide to enter another country–legally or illegally–trump (in the names of “human dignity” and the “surpass[ing] value of the human person”) the country’s right to exclude or remove them?

Is the Pope saying that Catholic Social Teaching requires a state to have a default, pro-immigration legal structure absent other reasons to restrict them in any serious way? If so, what kind? And how compelling? Further, is he saying that the immigrants’ real or perceived threats should receive more weight than national immigration policies?

Under Francis’s criteria and his focus on the “poor,” may a state adopt an immigration policy that gives preference to skilled immigrants who actually contribute ab initio to the receiving country? If not, what “mix” of immigration preferences must a state adopt? Where in Catholic social teaching, which purportedly grounds this conclusion, are such ratios for practical policy prescriptions to be found?

Let me specifically focus in on this statement: “The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.”

I find this line ambiguous. Yes, I know that many people claim that illegal entry to the United States is not a crime but a “civil offense” akin to a parking ticket. Does someone have a “wrongly formed conscience” if he supports a “measure” that declares such illegal entry a criminal offense? Border Czar Tom Homan invokes 8 USC 1324, which makes facilitation of illegal immigration punishable by various terms of imprisonment. Imprisonment is clearly due to a criminal offense, not a civil offense.

So, is enforcing that law wrong? The Immigration and Nationality Act imposes various non-return exclusions for persons who cross the U.S. border illegally, especially when not at ports-of-entry. Are those bans immoral? If a legislator proposed a “measure” that would make clearly illegal border transit a criminal offense, would he lack a “rightly formed conscience?” Are all these potential caveats carve-outs from the theoretically conceded right of a nation to regulate its borders and immigration?

In § 6, the Pope takes issue (without naming him) with Vice President Vance’s invocation of the concept ordo amoris (the order of loves) as pertains to immigration. Francis says proper understanding of the concept comes from “constantly meditating on the parable of the Good Samaritan.”

I am not sure the papal response is not a straw man. The Parable of the Good Samaritan challenges us to expand our concept of “neighbor” to become all-inclusive. We are called to love all people. Vance’s exact words were:

But there’s this old-school concept—and I think a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

Is Vice President Vance, in fact, telling us not to love all people? Or is he telling us that when it comes to the limited resources needed to “effectuate” that “love,” there is an ordo amoris in how they are allocated?

Love is a spiritual good. Spiritual goods do not diminish upon division: one can love ever more inclusively without “subtracting” love from individual persons. But the deeds of love often involve material goods which do diminish upon division: one cannot give the same amount of material goods to sixteen people that one give can to eight.

As Francis apparently expects the ever more inclusive “love” he calls for regarding immigrants to translate into practical measures, that means a state must by their very nature apportion material goods: housing, social subsidies, transportation costs, increased social benefits expenses (including education), job opportunities. All those goods are limited, even in the most affluent country, and require allocation of resources and spending priorities whose decisions have an impact on one’s own citizens. Do those citizens have priority, under ordo amoris, to preference in the allocation of those finite resources?

I also want to question the use of symbols and history. The Pope begins his Letter by using the Old Testament event of the Exodus. How exactly does that event “fit” into Francis’s immigration narrative? The Hebrews departed Egypt not necessarily of their own accord (forty years of Sinai “grumbling” about “flesh pots” attests to that) but by Divine warrant. Arguably, also, the Exodus was not so much an “immigration” as a “going home” to the land Yahweh originally gave them: the Israelites wound up in Egypt as a result of famine-driven migration.

The Pope also invokes Pope Pius XII’s Exsul familia Nazarethana without, it seems, distinguishing the historical circumstances in which that apostolic constitution was written in 1952. When I studied theology under Jesuits, we were told to examine the historical context in which something–including papal documents–happened.

Exsul familia was written seven years after World War II. Displaced persons were still in detention camps, primarily in Germany. The millions of displaced persons were not roaming at will across Western Europe for seven years after the Second World War, and they were not roaming into Eastern Europe as a result of a hermetically sealed Iron Curtain. Exsul familia was written with a need to address the need for a permanent solution to a unique historical phenomenon created by political events. It was not written for a migratory population moving at will out of economic choices, much less because of “serious deterioration of the environment.”

What, then, is the hermeneutical principle by which we are to be sure that teaching designed for one situation is applicable to a different one?

Finally, I want to ask about the “human dignity” that drives this document. “Human dignity” has a sonorous ring to it. As I noted when, less than a year ago, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued Dignitas infinita, it is likely that the concept is intended better to link Catholic social teaching with contemporary secular human rights documents. That said, I also noted that the content and basis (including metaphysical basis) of “dignity” seems ambiguous and amorphous.

How do we know what “dignity” includes? What is the methodology by which we conclude something is implicated in “human dignity?” Are those implications of “human dignity” graduated, i.e., X involves human dignity “more” than Y?

These are real questions about which Catholic statesmen and people of good will require clarity. If they are matters of “human dignity,” they should be implicated by natural law—that is, in principles intelligible to every human being.

But it appears that the ambiguous nature of “dignity” as used in by Pope Francis presupposes papal instruction in whether particular cases implicate “dignity.” Yes, Catholic teaching has affirmed that the Church can speak authoritatively even in matters of natural law. That said, natural law ought normally to be able to speak for itself.

How does “dignity” immunize persons who choose to immigrate from the consequences (including deportation) of their violation of national law? Francis declares such enforcement to “damage the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness” (§ 4). How so? How does a state’s enforcement of its declared laws regarding illegal immigration, which a particular person knew themselves to be violating, constitute a “dignity” offense against them? Why does such enforcement, rather than their consciously chosen decision to live in violation of those laws, put “them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness?”

In response to this letter, the Archbishop of Chicago has called immigration our “preeminently urgent” question. If immigration is that serious, it would appear the theological and philosophical justifications behind the Pope’s prescriptions should be able to respond persuasively to questions about what exactly they entail.