The Catholic Church’s teaching on immigration is basically the church says there is a natural right to migrate but governments have a right to defend their borders so these two rights have to be balanced against each other what governments cannot do is adopt one of two extreme positions.
The first extreme would be open Borders or prohibiting all deportation in a previous episode of the council the Trent and in my book Confusion in the Kingdom I engage liberal Catholics who claim deportation is intrinsically evil or deportation can never be done so I won’t repeat my arguments against that false view here. The Vatican itself will Deport you if you illegally enter and remain in its territory Cardinal Fernandez the head of the DDF released a decree back in January requiring fines up to €25,000 and prison time up to four years for illegal entry and anyone convicted of this is forbidden from entering the Vatican for 15 years none of this would make sense if the church taught that people who choose to live in a country illegally must be allowed to remain there the church doesn’t teach that. Pope Francis himself even said that some people who seek asylum in countries need to be sent back to their home country,
“The migrant has to be received thereafter you see how you’re going to deal with them maybe you have to send them back I don’t know but each case ought to be considered humanely right.”
The biggest evidence that deportation is not intrinsically evil is that the pope and the Bishops who criticize Trump’s immigration policies don’t say this. They instead talk about the right to regulate borders and focus instead on the wrongness of mass deportations not just the act of deportation itself now the other prohibited extreme view would be closed Borders or treating migrants as pests rather than people. In some cases this attitude can lead to horrible suffering and death. In 1939, 900 refugees fleeing Nazi Germany boarded the MS St Louis thinking they would be allowed to enter Cuba. However, Cuba changed their immigration laws a few weeks earlier and denied them entry. Many other countries including the United States refused to take the refugees and so the ship returned to Europe. It is estimated that one quarter of the passengers were murdered in the Holocaust and the story of the ship has been retold in films like The Voyage of the Damned.
The rapid increase of migrants after World War II prompted Pope [Pius XII] to issue an Apostolic constitution on migration called Exul Familia Nazarethana named after the holy family’s flight into Egypt. The pope taught that in continuity with his predecessor Pope Leo XIII that people have a natural right to migrate. He said,
“The natural law itself no less than devotion to humanity urges that ways of migration be opened to these people.”
A country doesn’t have to accept every person who seeks to live there but Nations should do their best to accept as many true refugees as they can the church also teaches that there is a preferential option for the poor or as Pope Francis says,
“faith hope and love necessarily push us towards this preference for those most in need.”
This doesn’t mean there should be unlimited immigration because High rates of immigration could actually hurt the poor be they legal or illegal residents by driving down wages or driving up the price of goods that’s why the catechism says,
“the more prosperous nations are
obliged to the extent they are able to welcome the Foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected
that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.”1
Those who deny
the natural right to migrate often treat the right to private property or national sovereignty as being absolute rights, which they aren’t. The church teaches that “the goods of creation are destined for the whole human race,”2 which is also called the universal destination of goods.
The whole world was made for the whole human race, but the church recognizes that private property is a good way to distribute those goods among all people. This makes sense given that countries which protect private property rights tend to be more prosperous than countries that don’t protect private property rights but instead allow Anarchy communism or corrupt government kleptocracy to reign.
The right to private property is not absolute in the same way the right to life is absolute for example if someone is dying and they need my heart to live they can’t take my heart to save their own life. Grave necessity does not transform murder into moral killing. However, if a person is starving and steals a loaf of bread from my house that he needs to live, then he is allowed to do that in this case grave necessity.
As St Thomas aquinus argues in the Suma Theologia takes what would normally be stealing and makes it instead moral taking. It would be wrong to punish a person who took out of necessity, such as sentencing a starving man who stole a loaf of bread to 5 years in prison, but once again it has to be grave necessity. You can’t steal my bread just because you like sourdough, and you can’t illegally immigrate somewhere just because you prefer the lifestyle in that country.
As I note in my book, Can a Catholic be a Socialist, even though the right to private property is not absolute, that doesn’t mean the state can do anything it wants with our private property. Once again, we’re talking about a grave necessity, not mere preference. This is why the church condemns socialism and communism for violating the natural right to private property. The state can only reasonably limit the use of private property for the sake of the common good for example the state might use Anti-Trust laws to break up harmful monopolies or require intellectual property to enter the public domain after a certain time period. . .
Just as there is no absolute right to private property, there is no absolute right to migrate and no absolute right to shut out migrants. Pope Pius XII said,
the sovereignty of the state although it must be respected, cannot be exaggerated to the point that access to this land is for inadequate or unjustified reasons denied to needy and decent people from other nations provided of course that the public wealth considered very carefully does not forbid this.3
