Immigration Restriction is the Catholic Position
Permissive policies only abet the tragedy of mass migration
By Emile Doak, Executive Director of Chelsea Academic Foundation in Front Royal, Virginia
What are we to make of our Catholic vice president’s moral defense of immigration restriction? Immigration policy, unlike pre-political issues involving the nature of life and family, is an appropriately political issue. It therefore falls within the realm of a prudential judgment for the Catholic statesman weighing competing goods. So let’s properly adjust the scales for our current moment.
First, to address one misunderstanding: We are not a nation of immigrants. The very notion is preposterous (to what, then, are these immigrants immigrating?). The political communities that became these United States were established by settlers, and those settlements were outposts of Western civilization in the New World. This is why John Jay observed that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people.” We are a nation of Americans.
Granted, this “one united people” has always contained shades of variation. This is to be expected in a country so vast. Most notable in the country’s colonial days was the Catholic presence in Maryland. Jesuit missionaries were among the first settlers in that territory, establishing an English Catholic presence from the earliest days of our country—and complicating the narrative that Catholicism is a foreign import brought by immigration.
The Catholic presence in America certainly grew during the waves of Eastern and Southern European immigration in the late 19th century. Perhaps because of our Christian heritage, the United States has always been the most generous country in the world when it comes to welcoming immigrants. But the history of U.S. immigration policy is one of ebbs and flows. Our generosity has always been balanced by a healthy concern for the social cohesion of communities already here.
This can be seen through a survey of the foreign-born proportion of the country’s population throughout history. The influx of immigration in the late 19th century produced a spike in the foreign-born population in the U.S., topping out around a then-record peak of over 14% into the early 20th century. In response, restrictive immigration laws were enacted, culminating with the Immigration Act of 1924. The foreign-born population drastically declined thereafter, hitting a record low of below 5% in the late 1960s. Only when that number had dipped did Americans feel the country could accommodate more new arrivals, and adopted a more permissive immigration policy through the Hart-Celler Act.
Thus, we can see that Americans are ready to extend Christian charity toward migrants seeking to become part of our country—when the assimilation necessary to do so is possible. But the historic narrative also shows that there’s something about the 14% foreign-born number where social cohesion starts to fall apart, assimilation breaks down, and Americans sense a need to pause new arrivals for the sake of the common good.
In 2024, the U.S. foreign-born population topped 15%—higher than at any time in our nation’s history. And this number is almost certainly an underestimate, given the difficulty of (and resistance to) counting illegal immigrants. Unsurprisingly, social cohesion is breaking down, especially among the native-born communities at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. It’s no wonder a majority of Americans not only want a reduction in immigration but also favor deportations.
So given this background, what is the American Catholic statesman to do about immigration policy in the Year of Our Lord 2025?
As is typical, Pope Benedict XVI offers some much-needed clarity on the issue. Speaking before the World Day of Migrants and Refugees in 2012, the late pontiff laid out the competing goods at the heart of the immigration debate: the right to migrate, and the state’s right to regulate migration through policies dictated by the general requirements of the common good. But importantly, he also reaffirmed a prior right, one that’s all the more relevant given to the socioeconomic pressures of our modern day:
In the current social and political context, however, even before the right to migrate, there is need to reaffirm the right not to emigrate, that is, to remain in one’s homeland; as Blessed John Paul II stated: “It is a basic human right to live in one’s own country. However this right becomes effective only if the factors that urge people to emigrate are constantly kept under control.”
Pope Benedict is channeling a deeply Christian theme: the longing for home. While St. Paul reminds us that this world is not our permanent home, the yearning for a sense of place—both secular and heavenly—is rooted in Christian anthropology. Far from the liberal notion of man as a deracinated individual, Christianity recognizes man’s relational nature. Humanity is a network of shared lives and loves, rooted in particular places, and properly oriented toward the One who ultimately provides us that permanent home.
This is why Vice President Vance’s description of ordo amoris is obviously correct, both theologically and rationally—but of course, for a faith built on the essential relationship between fides and ratio, those adverbs are redundant.
In this light, it’s Vance’s Catholic critics who misunderstand the faith. Mass migration is a tragic thing. When, as Pope Benedict writes, men choose an “ordeal undertaken for the sake of survival, where men and women appear more as victims than as agents responsible for the decision to migrate,” it’s a dire symptom that their home country has failed them. Given the choice, it’s no mystery whether the migrant would rather live in a stable and prosperous version of his home country than as a new arrival in a foreign land. One need only observe the hundreds of migrants currently waving Mexican flags in the streets of Los Angeles for an answer.
To adopt permissive immigration policies—up to and including coaching illegal immigrants to evade immigration authorities, as Catholic Charities has shamefully done—is to abet the tragedy of mass migration. By providing a specious magnet for desperate would-be emigrants, it denies the limits imposed by our fallen nature, illustrated by the inability of prosperous countries to absorb countless new arrivals with no detriment to the common good of those already there. It adopts a liberal framework that seeks to undermine the unchosen attachments that are necessary for our flourishing. When these nonprofits do so, they adopt an anthropology that is anything but Catholic.
(Curiously, the liberals doing so are often the same people who malign the Bukele regime in El Salvador, which has drastically improved the conditions that once led to the mass emigration of Salvadorans to the United States.)
But it must be noted that permissive immigration policies do not disrupt only the right for emigrants to live in their own country. If we do not significantly curtail immigration at this current moment, we will also be depriving Americans of their homeland. For if we allow the volume of new arrivals to exceed our capacity to assimilate them into a culture that is recognizably American, one that reflects the customs and way of life that has developed in this land for centuries now, we’ll render Americans homeless in their own country.
We already see the beginnings of this, with native-born Americans moving out of the towns of their childhood that have been overrun by recent arrivals, in search of a familiar culture that is navigable in their native language. Look at Stockton, California. Liberals may disparage these Americans. But their decision to relocate for the familiar simply reflects a Christian longing for home.
Our immigration policy has been plagued by a misplaced notion of charity for far too long. In our current moment, real charity falls on the side of strict restriction and swift deportation. Anything less is a violation of the right to remain in one’s homeland, a disservice to the common good, and a desertion of duty of the Catholic statesman.