Immigration, enforcement, and Catholics

Effectively, open borders are a bad idea. That’s true whether they result from explicit policy or from failure to enforce the law effectively.

The population of the world outside the United States is about 8 billion. Of that number, it appears that about a billion and a quarter would like to emigrate from their home countries, with around 230 million picking the United States as their top destination. A great many more would no doubt accept the United States as a second, third, or fourth choice.

It’s not clear what people would actually do if anyone with a ticket could hop on a plane and move here. Puerto Ricans have been able to do that as long as there have been plane tickets, and two-thirds of them now live on the mainland. It seems that open or largely open borders would bring far more immigrants here than the 50 million or so now present.

That would be disastrous for a variety of reasons. For one thing, it’s unlikely that the resulting aggregate of very different populations, without common memories and habits of cooperation to hold them together, could maintain an orderly political system involving extensive public participation. Such societies have not been common. They can exist most easily when people are generally comfortable, and the government does very little, as was long the case in America. Or if the society is united by a long history and deep cultural ties, as was the case in Western Europe until quite recently.

But when a great deal depends on control of the government, and the population is deeply divided culturally and historically, as in a multicultural society in which government often decides who gets what, they are fragile at best. That appears all the more true when the population includes numerous people from troubled regions with no tradition of free government.

Continual mass immigration also causes other problems. It stresses public services and brings in large numbers of people who compete with the less successful in the labor, housing, and other markets, reducing incomes and opportunities for citizens whose position is already difficult. And it disrupts the informal ties that connect people, foster mutual trust, and make them feel they are at home. Has it really helped America to create a situation in which people cannot say “Merry Christmas” without offending?

So it seems clear that restrictions that greatly limit immigration are needed for the common good. That remains true even though it is not intrinsically wrong for someone to try to better his situation by moving from one place to another. The harm arises when too many people try to do it.

We can only do what is possible. We cannot solve global poverty, war, and tyranny by moving the poor and oppressed to rich and peaceful countries. For one thing, those countries would have trouble remaining rich and peaceful if that were done on a large scale. For another, the prospects of the source countries would hardly be improved if all the honest, competent, and peaceably minded people moved to Iowa.

However, restrictions are useless unless generally and effectively enforced. That remains true even when those subject to them have sympathetic stories, which they often will in this case. But enforcement of law, especially against people who mostly lack local civic attachments and do not care much about penalties such as fines because they do not have money, often requires physical force. That never looks dignified or respectful and often looks bad, especially when activist organizations train people how to make it look bad, and journalists are sympathetic with the effort.

And sometimes the appearance of bad official conduct is accurate. But everything is often done badly, including law enforcement, especially when enforcement requires physical force and officers are constantly being harassed. When something necessary is done badly, we should all support practical improvements rather than oppose them as such.

But what could justify opposition to immigration enforcement as such? Christian opponents often resort to proof-texting. People point to Leviticus 19:34, “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born,” and to Deuteronomy 10:19: “You are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.” And they point out that the Holy Family were refugees, Jesus enjoins us to welcome the stranger, and the Good Samaritan demonstrated that the “neighbors” we should love as ourselves include the foreigner and the heretic.

But there were obvious limits. The Israelites were also enjoined to exterminate the people of the land, and Ezra and Nehemiah drove out foreign women married to Jews. More generally, our fellow citizens are also our neighbors, the kind of assistance we give to people in need is a matter of prudence, and we have a greater obligation to those more closely connected to us. So “welcoming the stranger” does not always mean adopting him as a member of the household, the Good Samaritan did not sacrifice his own people’s basic welfare to the foreigner, and the Holy Family did not move permanently to Rome and demand civic rights there.

However, most criticisms of immigration restrictions and their enforcement relate to secondary matters.

Border controls often induce illegal immigrants to run great risks to evade them. If so, the answer is immigration enforcement that eliminates the reward for doing so. Enticing people to immigrate illegally, often at the risk of their lives, by hit or miss internal enforcement that allows them to work in the shadows as virtual peons is disgraceful.

Some restrictionists vilify immigrants. But lying, vilification, and other forms of rhetorical injustice are pervasive in democratic politics. It is hard to get people moving, so politicians routinely simplify issues, personalize them, and present them in inflammatory ways. Everyone should avoid that, but few practical politicians do.

And vilification includes not only the vilification of immigrants but also the vilification of ICE agents and immigration restrictionists. It is worth recalling that during the BLM period, the most respectable people and institutions in America carried on a campaign of vilifying law enforcement, along with America and her people generally. The result was a huge jump in lawlessness that led to the deaths of thousands, most of them black.

And opponents of immigration enforcement often go beyond vilification. Harassing law enforcement officers in the performance of their duties is illegal and wrong. It promotes lawlessness on the one hand and increased use of force by the law on the other. Failure of local police to protect anyone, including federal agents, against such harassment and even against actual violence is doubly wrong.

Further, the refusal of state and local officials to cooperate with federal authorities is also wrong. Releasing illegal immigrants who have committed other crimes to the street rather than to federal authorities upon completion of their sentences means the federal authorities will have to pursue them on the street. That is likely to involve the use of force. Why would anyone want that?

A stronger argument against enforcement in some cases is fairness to illegal immigrants who have established orderly and productive lives here after being allowed to come and stay due to apparently intentional non-enforcement. In private law, there are a variety of doctrines—adverse possession, abandonment, acquiescence, laches, estoppel—that nullify a legal claim when the holder consistently fails to assert it, giving rise to reliance and a reasonable expectation that the situation will continue.

These doctrines rarely apply against the government, since the government is presumed to be guarding the public good rather than asserting a mere private interest. Even so, similar considerations are relevant to enforcement policy—but within the limits of prudence and concern for the common good.

As always in government, those things are needed. Thomas Aquinas had both, and he briefly discusses immigration in Summa Theologica. There, he affirms that nations have the right to require assimilation for at least a couple of generations before granting citizenship, and limit, delay, or even permanently deny it to those from less compatible backgrounds. These are examples of reasonable and prudent limits, and he would undoubtedly recognize others.

Why can’t Catholics agree on his approach as a basis for discussion, on the need for real limitations, and on the necessity of practical and effective enforcement?