Catholic philosopher and prolific author Edward Feser recently penned an essay in Public Discourse, where he addressed the difficult subject of immigration laws in the United States and Catholic teaching. The subject is difficult in part because advocates and opponents alike of strict immigration reform rarely consider the fullness of Catholic teaching on immigration, as Feser points out. His essay, however, argues that:
When the entirety of the Church’s teaching is taken into account, it is clear that—within certain clearly defined boundaries—there can be reasonable disagreement about the contours of immigration policy among faithful Catholics.
Feser wants to demonstrate that the Church teaches both that nations ought to welcome immigrants, especially those forced to flee their native land due to harrowing conditions, and that those same nations have the right to place juridical limitations on immigration. Once all of the relevant principles are factored in, he argues, the virtue of prudence can guide us towards ethical decisions. Feser concludes, however, with a somewhat bizarre statement:
As to what prudence calls for, Catholics of good will can reasonably disagree.
That is, once the fullness of Church teaching on immigration is considered, reasonable Catholics can come to different conclusions regarding actually-existent policies and situations. A tacit but clear inference of Feser’s piece would seem to be that those Catholics who support the current administration’s draconian immigration policies may do so with an easy conscience.
In articulating such an understanding both of prudence and Church teaching regarding immigration, Feser virtually echoes Catholic scholar Paul Seaton, who also relativizes the act of the virtue of prudence as he writes of the “wide room for prudential considerations and the resultant difference of judgments among the faithful” concerning actually existing political realities within a given nation.
To be fair, Seaton for his part is careful to defend the autonomy of the nation state, and offers a powerful critique of the ideology, increasingly prevalent even within the Church, of “a sovereignly normative Humanity” to whose every whim and need all borders and boundaries must bend. Seaton relies on the work of the political French philosopher Pierre Manent, who also offered his own important response to the way Pope Francis reads the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Be that as it may, however, there is nonetheless a problem with both Feser’s and Seaton’s understanding of the virtue of prudence. Both thinkers manage to keep things just abstract enough so that it seems the judgement of prudence would give wide room for differing moral conclusions regarding actually existing public policy. This, however, cannot be.
In a wonderful response to Feser, Catholic philosopher Therese Cory points out Feser’s misleading characterization of prudence as dealing with the abstract and the theoretical. The virtue of prudence, she reminds us, deals with concrete particulars:
In short, it is meaningless to talk of the morality of “restrictive” versus “merciful” immigration policies. Prudential reasoning has an important role to play, yes—but that role is to illuminate the objective moral truth about specific immigration laws, policies, and enforcement activities.
It is puzzling, notes Cory, that a Thomistic philosopher such as Feser would relativize St. Thomas’ teaching on prudence, as if it were possible that an action could be both prudent as well as morally neutral. By contrast, she writes, “Thomistic prudence relates principles to particular actions.” Particular actions, of course, are either moral or immoral, prudent or imprudent. One is reminded of a statement by Josef Peiper in his classic The Four Cardinal Virtues, where he reminds us that for St. Thomas:
The work of art is true and real by its correspondence with the pattern of its prototype in the mind of the artist. In similar fashion, the free activity of man is good by its correspondence with the pattern of prudence. What is prudent and what is good are substantially one and the same; they differ only in their place in the logical succession of realization. For whatever is good must first have been prudent.
A question about concrete particulars can, then, be put to Feser: Given his articulation of Catholic principles regarding immigration, still, what ought to be done about the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living within the United States, the vast majority of whom are Hispanic and from traditionally Catholic countries? To phrase the question another way: are so-called “mass deportations” of undocumented (but otherwise guiltless) immigrants morally justifiable, or prudent? This question is most urgent, given the increasing threat of mass deportations of illegal immigrants from the United States.
The current article maintains that mass deportations can never be morally justifiable, and can never be prudent. To articulate why this is so, it is helpful to start with a 1995 message delivered by Pope John Paul II. Feser himself quotes from this very same papal message in his piece, but does so in a way that rather obscures John Paul’s teaching on illegal immigration.
We will begin, therefore, with John Paul’s 1995 message, and then turn to consider some aspects of membership as described by the philosopher Roger Scruton, in order to articulate more clearly the injustice of mass deportation.
John Paul’s 1995 speech is noteworthy both in regard to the specific topic of illegal immigration, and also for the unambiguous theological footing upon which he grounds the Church’s response. He is clear that illegal immigration should be prevented, especially in view of the rampant exploitation of the human person that so often both causes and accompanies this phenomenon. Given, however, the reality of high numbers of undocumented immigrants within certain countries, what should the response of the Church be? The pope was clear:
The Church considers the problem of illegal migrants from the standpoint of Christ, who died to gather together the dispersed children of God (cf. Jn 11:52), to rehabilitate the marginalized and to bring close those who are distant, in order to integrate all within a communion that is not based on ethnic, cultural or social membership, but on the common desire to accept God's word and to seek justice. "God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him" (Acts 10:34-35).
Here, the Polish Pope appeals to “communion” as the fundamental reality of the Church. In the pope’s mind it is the very nature of the Church that conditions the response to undocumented migrants:
In the Church no one is a stranger, and the Church is not foreign to anyone, anywhere. As a sacrament of unity and thus a sign and a binding force for the whole human race, the Church is the place where illegal immigrants are also recognized and accepted as brothers and sisters. It is the task of the various Dioceses actively to ensure that these people, who are obliged to live outside the safety net of civil society, may find a sense of brotherhood in the Christian community.
John Paul II’s reflection on the communion of the Church provides a key starting point. The theological reality expressed by the communion of the Church has an important parallel in the political reality expressed by the communion among the members of society. This can be seen by turning to another thinker who also thought deeply about communion—membership, as he called it—namely, the philosopher Roger Scruton.
In his delightful book, How to be a Conservative, Scruton cautions against the tendency, increasingly pervasive in modernity, to think that all our moral obligations and responsibilities are such because they have been freely chosen by individual rational agents. Scruton traces this strand of thought to the political philosophers of the Enlightenment and their theory of a social contract:
Theorists of the social contract write as though it presupposes only the first-person singular of free rational choice. In fact, it presupposes a first-person plural, in which the burdens of belonging have already been assumed.
Before ever a social contract can be agreed upon, however, there is already present a collective, a “we,” the ones making the agreement. From this presupposed “we” flows our most important obligations and responsibilities, which include such things as our obligations to family, to parents, to our friends and to our community, and to God, obligations which are unchosen because they are given. They arise spontaneously, as it were, in our dealings with one another. Scruton looks specifically to the founding document of the United States to illustrate his point:
Even in the American case, in which a decision was made to adopt a constitution and make a jurisdiction ab initio, it is nevertheless true that a first-person plural was involved in the very making. This is confessed to in the document itself. “We the people . . .” Which people? Why, us; we who already belong, whose historic tie is now to be transcribed into law. We can make sense of the social contract only on the assumption of some such pre-contractual “we.”
It is the presence of this pre-contractual “we,” the preexisting communion that already binds us together, that helps us think about the current situation concerning immigration in the United States and the threat of mass deportation.
America, like any other nation, has both the right and the obligation to maintain its borders in security and justice. This is something the Bishops of the United States have called for time and again. But it is important to point out that a supposed secure border, achieved at the expense of the bonds that hold society together, will, in fact, undermine the nation. This comes to a head when there is talk of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. “Mass” deportation means without any concern for the deported individual’s circumstance, story, history. Mass deportation of a set purpose ignores the personal dignity of the people deported. But that is not Christian. And it is not American, either. The law of the land ought always to reflect God’s law. Christians know of a higher law than the law of the land and so, traditionally, do Americans, who form one nation under God.
It is to be hoped that the rhetoric surrounding mass deportation is hyperbole. It is to be further hoped that such rhetoric will encourage self-deportation, especially of criminal and trafficking organizations and members. It is also true, however, that such rhetoric has an element that is anti-American, since it threatens the ties that bind our society together. The ties that form society come about, notes Scruton, when we are present bodily to one another:
Through face-to-face interaction. It is in the family, in local clubs and societies, in school, workplace, church, team, regiment and university that people learn to interact as free beings, taking responsibility for their actions and accounting to their neighbors. When society is organized from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society too.
Consider, for example, those enrolled in DACA. Whatever dubious legal justification there may have been for the program’s inception, it cannot be doubted that this program has benefited not only those enrolled immigrants but also American society in incalculable ways. Those enrolled in DACA have gone on to become teachers and nurses, they have served in our nation’s military, they have gone to college, they have served in police departments, and in these as well as a myriad of other ways they have helped to shape our local communities and so, society itself. How could the impact of, say, a single devoted teacher on her students even be calculated? In this way, our society is shaped by the relationships that people form among themselves, by living together.
The same could be said also for those immigrants who live here without documentation. For who is it that builds our houses, or roads, or shopping centers? Who is it that cleans our hotels, or hospitals, or homes? Who is it that labors in our fields, picking citrus, tomatoes, or strawberries? Who is it that works in our poultry factories? Who cooks in our restaurants? In these ways also, immigrants, documented or otherwise, help to form the relations of membership upon which society depends. Scruton considers immigrants to America:
Even when there arises, as in America, an idea of “elective nationality,” so that newcomers may choose to belong, what is chosen is precisely not a contract but a bond of membership, whose obligations and privileges transcend anything that could be contained in a defeasible agreement.
There cannot be a society without this experience of membership. For it is this that enables me to regard the interests and needs of strangers as my concern; that enables me to recognize the authority of decisions and laws that I must obey, even though they are not directly in my interest; that gives me a criterion to distinguish those who are entitled to the benefit of the sacrifices that my membership calls from me, from those who are interloping.
Are undocumented immigrants interlopers? Yes and no. An interloper is someone who is present where not invited or considered not to belong. Certainly, a case could be made that undocumented immigrants, by definition, are interlopers in our society. But, looked at from the perspective of membership, of communion, things get more complicated.
As intimated above, America has come to rely on immigrant labor in many sectors of society, and this, while not an entitlement to full membership, nonetheless places immigrants already within a certain (albeit tenuous) relationship to the “we” of society. Harvard historian James Hankins has suggested a fair and reasonable solution to the problem of the illegal status of so many migrants in the form of a temporary worker permit. In addition, American law provides for the ability to claim asylum, something that parallels the teaching of the Church upholding the right of the human person to immigrate, especially when threatened by war, poverty, or violence. Further, how to adjudicate between members of a single family, some of whom may be undocumented?
At the risk of making too fine a distinction, perhaps a difference could be noted between an interloper and a freeloader. An interloper is present but not invited. A freeloader takes advantage of societal benefits without giving in return. By and large, undocumented immigrants are not freeloaders, since in addition to the various ways their labor is demanded in society, they also pay taxes, their children can and often do volunteer for military or law enforcement service, and they accomplish many other things that contribute to the common good of society, such as the raising a family. Of course, there are immigrants who are freeloaders as well, but it should be noted that the ranks of the freeloaders by no means excludes many citizens.
America has a vested interest, then, to care for immigrants. In seeking a just and charitable solution to illegal immigration, the Church is an asset to the United States. As John Paul II insisted, the Church is the place where even the undocumented are made to stand in the light of the sonship of the children of God. In practical terms, the Church in the United States can and ought to help keep youth, both immigrant and citizen, off the streets. The Church can and ought to help immigrants learn English whenever possible, and work to better their education, from which comes so many of the benefits of integration into American society.
But above all, the Church is in the business of the salvation of souls. The Church is charged to preach the Gospel, the power of God unto salvation, in its fullness, and to make the sacraments available to the faithful. The Gospel comes to us in our own language, and so, in the vast majority of the dioceses of the United States, this means that priests of the Church need competency in Spanish as well as English, so that the Church (in the words of John Paul II quoted above) not be foreign to anyone, anywhere. In his address, the Polish Pope reminded the Church and the world that, “Man, particularly if he is weak, defenseless, driven to the margins of society, is a sacrament of Christ's presence (cf. Mt 25:40, 45).” In remaining faithful to the presence of Christ in the most vulnerable, the Church also calls on America to keep with care the injunction of the Lord God given in Deuteronomy:
When thou cuttest down thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow: that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands (Dt 24:19).
