Amidst an unparalleled refugee crisis in Europe in 1951, Pope Pius XII promulgated an apostolic constitution on immigration entitled Exsul Familia Nazarethana. In 2025, amidst a harsh and indiscriminate crackdown on refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and people who look like migrants, the US Bishops released a rare joint pastoral statement stating that American Catholics need to stand with these migrants. While there are differences between the texts, both are shaped by the fundamental principle of opening ourselves to migrants. We live in a time of an intense desire for closure, a desire that, alas, shapes many American Catholics; but just as Pius XII clearly taught that the “ways of migration be opened,” so too the American Bishops insist that the migrants here are not to be driven away and meaningful pathways of migration need to be opened to those beyond our borders.
Exsul Familia Nazarethana established much of the modern Church’s approach to immigration. In particular, the text clearly emphasizes the right of people to migrate and the obligation to welcome the migrant. This obligation is not unlimited in a way that would obliterate borders and thus negate sovereignty. But borders and sovereignty are not the emphasis; rather, in Church teaching from Pius to the US Bishops' statement, the emphasis is on opening the ways of migration. Importantly, sovereignty, while maintained, is partially put at the service of immigration. Thus, the Bishops recognize the “responsibility to regulate their borders” but this is connected not to closing off migration but to establishing “just and orderly immigration.” Doing so protects migrants, so they have “safe and legal pathways.” In other words, the most "restrictionist" moments in the Bishops’ statement is at the service of promoting migration. Just as with Pius XII and the whole of Church teaching, the point is to find a way to keep the pathways open in a way that benefits the society that receives and the migrants who are received.
But why? Why are those who want to close the pathways and deport migrants, while creating such a harsh environment that others self-deport, so wrong? Why is the current trajectory of American closure contrary to the Church’s teaching? To understand the Bishops' statement, I want to look to Pius XII's reasons that the ways of migration be opened even in times of mass migration when that migration strains the resources of the nation taking in migrants. There are three primary reasons Pius indicates. The first regarding “the right of people to migrate” is the “right is founded on the very nature of land.” Further, “the natural law itself, no less than devotion to humanity, urges that ways of migration be opened to these people.” The nature of the land, the natural law, and devotion to humanity require we keep open the ways of migration.
Each reason for keeping open the ways of migration requires a great deal of unpacking; I want to focus on a specific aspect of each. My approach to each of these does not exclude other reasons and takes Pius’s teaching as a launching pad to understand this openness and thus the Bishops' recent statement. Thus, we must understand that the nature of the land is expressive of the universal destination of goods, the natural law requires the promotion of the common good of virtue, especially misericordia, and devotion to humanity means a more expansive understanding of human piety and the centrality of human dignity. Grounded in this openness, we can understand why the Bishops are summoning us back to this openness in our current context.
The Nature of the Land and the Universal Destination of Goods
For Pius XII, the nature of the land is a foundational reason why the ways of migration should be left open. This is surprising in the context in which the land in question is ours, as it is in the sovereign territory of a people. In fact, many critiques of immigration appeal to the intimate connection between a people and a land as an argument for restricting immigration. And of course, this intimate connection to a place is an important part of human existence. I am from a place and living in a place. And yet, Pius sees the nature of land as calling us to open our land to those not from it. While framed in the language of a back-to-the-land sense, Pius’s contention is that if there is space for people, then we are obliged to open that space for them because:
The right of the family to a living space is recognized. When this happens, migration attains its natural scope . . . the more favorable distribution of men on the earth’s surface suitable to colonies of agricultural workers; that surface which God created and prepared for the use of all.
When families can migrate, the distribution of the land is more just, and thus the meaning or purpose of the earth is fulfilled. This is partially because such migration promotes the family, which is why the Church so strongly condemns family separation and why the Bishops seek “to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones.”
Certainly, Pius XII is concerned about the family, but the central question here is the family in relation to the telos of the land, which is the “use of all.” Migration is a right and just because it helps fulfill the nature of the land. It does so in a way that does not deny the particularity of a land to a people as a shared object of their love. But it requires us to be willing to share our land because all land is shared by all people. Pius appeals to the fundamentally teleological and participative nature of all things and thus of the earth. God as he states is “the Bountiful giver of every good gift,” and giving that gift gave the purposes of the gift and recipients of it. The earth and everything in it were given for the purpose of human flourishing and sustenance not of some but of all. Its purpose is human participation, which primarily takes the form of a people sharing in an area of this earth but also necessitates that that people welcome others to share in that land.
Pius is appealing to the universal destination of goods. To turn to the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, “God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favoring anyone.” Rather than a Lockean account where nature is ownerless before it is transformed into property by our labor, such that it is mine and in no way yours, the Catholic understanding of nature is that it is foundationally ours prior to becoming private property. That foundational nature is never obliterated or abrogated. Rather, my ownership becomes a kind of stewardship for my benefit and yours.
The Lockean understanding depends on denying the land's teleology. Before my private ownership, it was a waste and so structurally pointless. But for Pius and the Catholic tradition, the land has always been good (and thus not a waste prior to human endeavor) and has always had a telos. The goodness of the land and the point of its being is “the universal destination of the earth’s goods," such that “the earth, by reason of its fruitfulness and its capacity to satisfy human needs, is God’s first gift for the sustenance of human life.” For Pius, the land is a point because it is a gift from the bountiful giver. We do not get to determine the point of our land, God does. And that point is the sustenance of all.
From the earth come all the goods which “are absolutely indispensable if man is to feed himself, grow, communicate, associate with others, and attain the highest purpose to which he is called.” These goods are essential for the human person and thus “each person must have access to the level of well-being necessary for his full development.” The denial of access is the denial of life and thus violates the natural law’s imperative to sustain life, but also cuts off the telos of the land. For the Compendium, “the right to the common use of goods is the ‘first principle of the whole ethical and social order.’” We always start from things being-in-common. If we do not, we lose this first principle and thus cannot build our ethics and social order rightly.
This does not eliminate the reality of private property, which “is in its essence only an instrument for respecting the principle of the universal destination of goods.” But it does mean that such property is “not an end but a means” in that it is a means towards the universal destination of goods and thus essentially marked by its social characteristics. What is true of the privately owned is true of the collectively owned. What has been marked out as ours over time by our shared laborers and our shared loves does not become cut off from the rest of humanity. Just as my home is for me so that I can be for others, so too our land is for us while still being for others.
This is truer of the commonly owned, since the commonly owned, as an expression of a perfect society, is more capable of sustaining the many and less prone to depletion. We can think of the imperfect society of the family as imperfect in part because it cannot take too many in. For instance, I have three bedrooms and one bathroom, and six people in my house with no real capacity to expand. We have neither the room nor the money to double our housing, and certainly no ability to create jobs in our home. A polity is different and generally has room for more employment possibilities for them, too. The point is that reception into a political community is of a different order than reception into a household because the former has the great capacity for growth and more directly benefits from that growth.
America is for Americans, but America, like other countries, is also for others because the nature of its land is a common gift to and for all. This is intensified by the preferential option for the poor (and our wealth) because “the principle of the universal destination of goods requires that the poor, the marginalized and in all cases those whose living conditions interfere with their proper growth should be the focus of particular concern.” In other words, when considering the nature of the land and the universal destination of goods, the impoverished should be the focus; the principle “applies equally to our social responsibilities and hence to our manner of living, and to the logical decisions to made concerning the ownership and use of goods.” As the Compendium teaches, this has a “worldwide dimension” which requires the universal destination and the preferential option to “embrace the immense multitudes of the hungry, the needy, the homeless . . . and those without hope of a better future.” Thus, the US Bishops remind us that “the priority of the Lord . . . is for those who are most vulnerable: the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the stranger.” The Lord’s priorities must be our priorities when we think about our nation. This land is our land, but to those poor beyond our borders, it is, in a real way, your land too.
Natural Law and the Common Good
The common good is usually cited as a reason to restrict immigration. I will set aside the economic evidence that immigration is a consistent net positive for one’s economic and cultural good. I am more interested in a more important common good that the law should promote, our virtue. The law, as Aquinas explains, “is chiefly ordained to the common good” and “the proper effect of law is to lead its subjects to their proper virtue: and since virtue is 'that which makes its subject good,' it follows that the proper effect of law is to make those to whom it is given, good, either simply or in some particular respect.” The common good of a human society is the integral flourishing of the human person which is most importantly their being virtuous, and I take it that law can help make us more virtuous.
Migration fulfills the natural law because it preserves life, fosters families, realizes the nature of the land, and supports our common utility. I want to emphasize that opening the ways of migration fulfills the natural law because it advances the common good by helping us (the recipient country) become more virtuous as a community. In Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals, he makes the claim that any community will always have a relationship to the stranger. There is always somebody outside our "us." The outside might be physically away (a foreigner in their own land) or physically present (a foreigner in our land). Now there can be several different formulations of the us-them relationship; the one I am concerned about is with the "them" in need who wish to come or who have come here. While there might be reasons welcoming the rich foreigner to buy entry into our country is good or bad, it is clearly not obligatory.
For MacIntyre, the question of the foreigner-in-need is a question of misericordia, which is the virtue moved with concern towards those in need. Misericordia is shown to those within one’s community, but it “has regard to urgent and extreme need without respect of persons. It is the kind and scale of the need that dictates what must be done, not whose need it is.” This virtue is not about what kind of person faces us but only that this person is in need. It thus “extends beyond communal obligations.” Since this virtue regards need it cannot be limited to just "us" since, of course, need is not unique to "us" and often might be more intense in "them." In fact, “extreme and urgent necessity on the part of another in itself provides a stronger reason for action than even claims based upon the closest of family ties.” The urgent need of the "them" provides a stronger obligation than even to our own "us." Now this need, for MacIntyre, might not always be so extreme, but even then, “it still may on occasion be rightly judged to outweigh the claims of familial or even other immediate social ties.” A standard ordo amoris must be reoriented when faced with urgent need and may still be reoriented when faced with non-urgent need.
Though misericordia extends beyond us, it “is itself crucial to communal life.” In other words, the need to show misericordia to strangers is not only for their good but also our good. Why? His specific argument is grounded by his recentering of dependence. Because we are all at various points in need, we are all at various points in our lives in need of misericordia. If my society lacks this virtue, every member of the "us" is in danger of being neglected in our need. Thus, he writes, “What each of us needs to know in our communal relationships is that the attention given to our urgent and extreme needs . . . will be proportionate to the need and not the relationship. But we can rely on this only from those for whom misericordia is one of the virtues.” Our society needs to have the mercy to help those in need. To reject the foreigner is to lose or not have this necessary social virtue. Thus, we should not be surprised that a country with little interest in helping the foreigner in need is often a country with little interest in helping the citizen in need. Lacking misericordia for them, we lack it for us. Cutting off the migrant, we cut off the food stamp recipient.
The intimate relationship between misericordia for them and misericordia for us depends on the reality that the "us-them" distinction is less foundational than the us reality of all of us. Misericordia shows me that the distress of the stranger is my distress; thus, for MacIntyre, “to understand another’s distress as our own is to recognize that other as neighbor.” To realize the virtue of misericordia is to realize a merciful love that does not only extend beyond my borders but fundamentally relativizes them, for “to recognize another as brother or friend is to recognize one’s relationship to them as being of the same kind as one’s relationship to the members of one’s own community.” This virtue, so essential to any society of dependent rational animals, “extends one’s communal relationship so as to include those others within those relationships.” Because of it, we are required to care not only about “us” but about “them” because we and them are “us.”
To close the ways of migration is to fail to cultivate the virtue of misericordia. If our laws and our people do this, we fail to achieve the common good. Virtue, which excels any material possession in its importance, is worth pursuing even if it were to lower the shared economic forecast. We ought to care about our growth in virtue. To open the ways of migration is an act of the virtue of misericordia. It makes us better persons and a better people and thus fulfills the nature of the law.
Devotion to Humanity
We are to keep open the ways for migrants due to devotion to humanity or humanum genus pietas. It is striking that Pius uses pietas. Piety is a form of justice that Aquinas explains is owed “chiefly to parents and country, after God.” As owed to “one's country” it “includes homage to all our fellow-citizens and to all the friends of our country.” For Pius, though, there is a kind of piety for humanity, and so one that extends also to the foreigner. In other words, where we might have expected piety to point to reasons we can close the ways of migration, Pius teaches that the humanum genus pietas means we must keep open those ways.
Part of the reason for this expansive piety is that Christianity means that all of humanity is a family. Aquinas writes that the honor “due to our parents includes the honor given to all our kindred, since our kinfolk are those who descend from the same parents.” The familial connection to parents means piety is owed to brothers, sisters, and cousins. In light of this, it is notable that Augustine writes in The City of God that God’s intention in having all of humanity descend from Adam and Eve was so that “the unity of human society and the bonds of human sympathy would be more emphatically brought home to man, if humans were bound together not merely by likeness in nature but also by the feeling of kinship.” The Genesis account brings home the radical sociality of the human person while also grounding the truth that there is only one race: humanity. Devotion is owed to all humanity because all humanity is a family.
Beyond this fundamental kinship across borders, Pius’s devotion to humanity bespeaks a deep sense of human dignity. Human dignity is the most important theological development of the modern Church. Pius had an important role in this development and its theocentric nature. In his 1942 Christmas Message, "The Internal Order of States and People," he references dignity several times, noting “the external source of dignity: God.” Grounded in that theocentric account of dignity, he extols young people who are “fighting for the eternal laws of God, for the dignity of the human person, and for the attainment of its destiny.” Those who desire peace, he teaches, must give “back to the human person the dignity given to it by God from the very beginning.”
This understanding of dignity is central in Church teaching, as shown in The Compendium. There we learn that “the whole of the Church’s social doctrine develops from the principle that affirms the inviolable dignity of the human person.” While some would like to dismiss the idea of human dignity, the Compendium makes a striking claim that “a just society can become a reality only when it is based on the respect of the transcendent dignity of the human person.” Just as our society would be deficient in the common good if it lacked misericordia and neglected the stranger, we would fail to be a just society if we neglected the dignity of the human person.
But it is also significant that the Church consistently appeals to dignity regarding questions of immigration. As Dignitas Infinita clarifies, “Receiving migrants is an important and meaningful way of defending ‘the inalienable dignity of each human person.’” Likewise, the US bishops clearly stated that the Church “exhorts nations to recognize the fundamental dignity of all persons, including immigrants.” To neglect or deny the stranger in need is to fail to recognize and defend their dignity. But why would turning the stranger away violate their dignity? This is not just a question of how we close the ways of migration. Clearly family separation, indefinite detention, deportation to countries the migrants know nothing about, or sending them to other country’s concentration camps are all grave evils. But the question is not only about how we deport them or turn them away but about whether we should close the ways. And why would opening them be a way to defend that dignity?
Here we must consider the migrant’s need. The wealthy person able to purchase a Gold Card is not having their dignity denied if we do not sell entrance into this country. Instead, what matters is that the migrant’s need obstructs their ability to fulfill the integral development of their human dignity. The father whose children are killed for not joining a gang, who flees with his remaining children. The Haitian who takes a boat from Haiti to South America to then walk 1500 miles in grave danger to cross a hostile border. The Venezuelan suffering Communist oppression for their faith walking that same route so he can worship in freedom. Closing the way of migration to them denies them their dignity because in so doing we conspire with want and injustice to make their integral development impossible. As the US Bishops state, “The Church’s teaching regarding immigration rests on the foundational concern for the human person, as created in the image and likeness of God.” The image of God is suffering, wounded, hungry, and persecuted in so many who come to our borders. To open the ways of migration is to open the way of integral human development of those whose dignity is denied. This keeping open upholds the reality of our being one human family and of the intrinsic dignity of the poor stranger in our country and at our borders.
Conclusion
Where for Pius, the fundamental question was whether we will keep open the ways of migration, the question now is whether we will be open to the migrants who are already here, next door to us. The Bishops statement ends with powerful words to those immigrants next door. “To our immigrant brothers and sisters, we stand with you in your suffering, since, when one member suffers, all suffer (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:26). You are not alone!” That solidarity with all who are in this land, who need our compassion, and who are members of our human family is the reason the bishops “oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.”
The open ways required of us require finding ways “to welcome, protect, promote, and integrate” the migrant as Pope Francis and now Pope Leo have called us to do. When they do, when Bless Pius XII did, as the US Bishops are now doing, we are faced with the question of whether we will answer that call. Will we live out the Church’s teaching and stand with the migrant? Or will we turn away the stranger, break the telos of the land, reject the natural law, and disregard devotion to humanity? The question and thus the task are ours. I pray American Catholics will pass the test.
EDITORIAL NOTE: A version of this essay was delivered as a paper on a panel on Philosophy and Immigration at the 2025 American Catholic Philosophical Association. The panel was sponsored by The Mother Cabrini Institute on Immigration at Villanova University
