Steve Skojec

John Zmirak has a very thought provoking piece on Catholics and illegal immigration today at Inside Catholic. I recommend it.

For my part, I wrote out my thoughts on this a while ago with the thought of getting them published, but never found the right venue (read: nobody was buying). I’ll offer them here, where my ill-formed columns go to die:

“Government threatens to deport nun,” the ominous headline reads. The story was featured on the website of KTBS 3, the ABC television affiliate in Shreveport Louisiana and picked up by The Drudge Report:.

Sister Cristina Angelini has been called the heart and soul of Shreveport’s Renzi Center, an early child development center run by the Catholic church.

But the federal government might be getting ready to tear that heart out. In a country where there are millions of illegal aliens — and a shortage of Catholic sisters — the feds are threatening to make her leave and return to her native Italy.

Sister Angelini’s story is, on the surface, unfortunate. She’s a Catholic nun doing good work and it sounds as though she’s fallen victim to the inscrutable bureaucracy of the U.S. government.

But what if it was different? What if Sister Angelini hadn’t applied to extend her visa? What if she had come to the U.S. illegally, but with the intention of doing charitable work, and INS had shown up at her door? Should Catholics support her immediate deportation?

Absolutely.

Illegal immigration, long unchecked, is reaching crisis proportions. Other than life issues, illegal immigration is arguably the most significant and complex challenge confronting our nation today. It affects us economically. It impacts our national security. It undermines our tax structure and subsequently our government-funded social programs. It influences the quality of medical care. It brings an influx of previously eradicated communicable diseases (and introduces new ones). It increases crime. It changes the landscape of employment. It affects nearly every aspect of our daily lives, from the foods we eat to the services we receive to the cost of doing business.

I lived in Arizona from 2004 to 2006. While there, I was told that an estimated 4,000 illegals crossed its border into the U.S. every day. It wasn’t just an issue, it was an epidemic, and one that threatened to compromise our state and our country as we knew it. During the 2004 Presidential election, a measure known as Proposition 200 was introduced to the ballot. Passed overwhelmingly, Prop. 200 required proof of citizenship before individuals could register to vote or apply for public benefits. It also required state employees to report any known violators or face legal penalties. I’m proud to have been a part of a common sense majority that voted for much needed legislation of this kind.

And yet, the Bishops of Arizona – including the respectable Bishop Olmsted of Phoenix, a friend to traditional Catholics like me – unanimously opposed the legislation. Saying that the measure was “largely a symbolic issue” and that it would “do nothing to solve the complex immigration issues facing our state”, the Bishops’ statement eventually takes their concerns to the level of the absurd:

…Federal law already requires that emergency health and education be provided to all, including undocumented immigrants. Under Proposition 200, this situation will not be changed. An undocumented child, however, who has the right to attend elementary school, will almost certainly be unable to obtain a library card under this initiative because it is a public benefit. Similarly, the use of public parks for family celebrations and picnics could well be prohibited for people who do not first prove their citizenship.

Library cards? Public parks? When did the Catholic Church concern itself with such trivialities in the face of a larger and more grievous problem? The Arizona bishops cited the Holy Father’s remarks in the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation entitled, “The Church in America,” noting that “attention must be called to the rights of migrants and their families and to respect for their human dignity, even in cases of non-legal immigration.” These words were somehow twisted by the bishops into a hand-wringing campaign over legislation that simply denied illegal immigrants and their families the tax-derived benefits of living in this nation as citizens – benefits to which they are not legally entitled. (Proposition 200 has since survived multiple lawsuits from both sides of the issue, with others still pending.)

The prevalence of Catholic opposition to immigration legislation is mind-boggling. The USCCB sponsored Justice For Immigrants campaign for immigration reform seeks changes that will, if accomplished, undermine our national sovereignty. While the U.S. bishops never explicitly condone the act of illegal immigration itself, they advance positions that will do nothing to reduce the incentive for those coming or penalize those already here. The campaign calls for amnesty for illegals already in the U.S., abandonment of “the border “blockade” enforcement strategy”, and “restoration of due process protections for immigrants”.

Essentially, it seems the Catholic Bishops want us to keep the problem we have, make provisions for bringing in more problems we don’t, keep the borders open to facilitate the process, and perhaps most puzzlingly, reinstate a “due process” that, if actually followed, would result in most of the illegals being sent home under current U.S. Law.

To make matters worse, reports have been surfacing in recent years that the Mexican Military is making armed incursions across the U.S. border, bring narcotics with them. The issue isn’t simply that Mexican soldiers are stepping across a fence somewhere deliver small quantities of drugs to American dealers. According to some reports, heavily armed soldiers escorted by military assault vehicles are brazenly entering the United States, at times opening fire on U.S. border agents. Is there any question that they are emboldened by our failure to act?

How can the bishops fail to see that this needs to stop? By some estimates, 12-20 million illegal immigrants already reside in the U.S. (By contrast, New York City has a population of only 8.25 million.) Despite citations made by immigration advocates indicating the Church’s positions on compassion toward migrants and refugees, nothing in Catholic Social Teaching requires that a nation must compromise its very sovereignty, security, economy, and stability to accommodate an unmitigated influx of immigration, legal or otherwise. American Catholics need to recognize that the charity that must be shown to all men, respecting in every case the dignity of the human person, does not preclude the obligation that citizens have to enact sensible legislation aimed at defending their homeland from threats foreign and domestic.

Catholics comprise the single largest religious block in America. Catholics who adhere to Church teaching are, by and large, conservative in their political beliefs. These Catholics are confronted on the one hand with an instinctive and common sense need to address immigration as an issue of paramount importance. On the other hand, they are opposed by their bishops, who refuse to endorse efforts to address the crisis, and in some cases work actively against them.

Rather than obstructing the process, we need leadership from our bishops, particularly in the border states where the danger is greatest, to find equitable solutions that deny neither the dignity of the immigrant nor the sovereign rights of the United States and its people.

Time is running out.