A Catholic guide to migration ethics in the Trump era
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detail of “Angels Unawares,” a sculpture by Canadian Timothy Schmalz in
St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican. The sculpture depicts a boat with
140 figures of migrants from various historical periods and various
nations. (CNS photo/Lola Gomez)On day one of his new term, President-elect Donald J. Trump has pledged to enact sweeping changes that will directly endanger migrants and refugees.
He plans to launch “the largest mass deportation program in American history,” halt refugee resettlement, revoke humanitarian parole grants and end birthright citizenship. His agenda thereafter also includes ending family-based immigration, completing the construction of the border wall, invoking the Alien Enemies Act (a wartime authority that allows the president to detain and deport the natives and citizens of an “enemy nation” without a hearing) and implementing ideological vetting for admission to the United States (to “keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America,” according to the Republican Party’s 2024 platform).
From a Catholic perspective, these plans raise deep moral concerns about undermining human dignity and the right to seek asylum, harming family unity and the common good, and risking a police state. They invite (further) demonization of racial, ethnic and religious minorities, a structural sin that has harmed human dignity and solidarity as well as malformed our collective imagination on immigration and national identity alike.
How might Catholic imagination help to clarify our vision amid the seductions of extremism and polarization? How might we bridge the internalized borders that divide us in the face of new threats?
The year after the installation of the magnificent “Angels Unawares” sculpture in St. Peter’s Square in 2019, Boston College hosted a replica of the work, by the Canadian artist Timothy P. Schmalz. Featuring immigrants from across time and locations forging ahead on a common ship, it evoked for me Pope Francis’ first journey outside Rome after his election.
On that trip, he celebrated Mass on the Italian island of Lampedusa, which has become a safe haven for migrants seeking passage from North Africa to Europe. Prior to making any public statement, he blessed a wreath of flowers and tossed it into the sea, commemorating the estimated 20,000 African migrants who had died over the previous 25 years trying to reach a new life in Europe.
The pope celebrated Mass within sight of the “graveyard of wrecks,” where fishing boats carrying asylum seekers end up after they drift ashore. Other reminders that Lampedusa is synonymous with dangerous attempts to reach Europe abounded: The altar was built over a small boat; the lectern and the chalice were carved from the wood of shipwrecks. Pope Francis lamented in his homily our indifference to the plight of these vulnerable brothers and sisters and prayed for the grace to weep over our anesthesia of the heart.
In the encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” Pope Francis again draws attention to these broader forces affecting so many on the move today; he expands the migration question to consider the impact of populist discourse, neoliberal economics and virulent individualism. This scope offers a welcome reorientation to discussions that often focus on nation-states’ rights or border crossers alone—much like his attentiveness to sinful indifference did on Lampedusa.
These broader emphases reveal how barriers to reception are not limited to matters of border fortification and refugee policies alone, but also include pervasive tendencies toward isolationism and populist ideologies. Recent years have witnessed a rise in nativist populism, fueled in part by anxieties about the impact of globalization. As we have seen in the U.S. context, these trends continue to play out via an opportunistic politics of exclusion. We may encounter these tendencies in our churches and families as well.
Dominant frameworks
Our immigration debates have long been framed by narratives emphasizing security threats and social costs, despite rhetoric about liberty and hospitality. At the same time, studies regularly indicate that higher rates of immigration correlate with lower rates of violent and property crime. The rule of law rightly occupies a privileged place in the United States, yet the lack of accountability that marks Border Patrol procedures and the denial of due process to immigrant detainees belie this rationale.
Another populist script casts newcomers as economic threats, a perception historically fueled in times of economic downturn. In fact, studies show that immigrant laborers provide a net benefit to the U.S. economy and have helped to increase jobs in recent years; all the while, the detention industry has profited from irregular migrants, further confounding the frame of economic threat. The multibillion-dollar transnational “immigrant industrial complex” raises serious questions about the financial stakes in the broken immigration system, as well as diminished public oversight and accountability. Stock prices for CoreCivic and Geo Group, two private prison companies, soared after Mr. Trump’s re-election. Estimates suggest his mass deportation plan would cost at least $500 billion to implement, with annual losses of $126 billion in taxes and a reduction in the gross domestic product of $5 trillion over 10 years.
Finally, anti-immigrant sentiment demonizes racial, ethnic and religious minorities. Representations of the outsider as a social menace signal the salience of racism and xenophobia in our national imagination. Portrayals of immigrants as public charges or a dangerously porous border have also long shaped our collective self-understanding. This past election cycle, we heard the president-elect refer to undocumented migrants as subhuman “animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
These diversionary tactics generally ignore structural relationships affecting migration. Reducing immigration matters to the border crossers in the Mediterranean or in the American Southwest eclipses transnational actors from view, much less blame. It refuses to consider those responsible for “push factors” like violent conflict, economic instability or climate change. Moreover, fear of difference is relatively easy to mass-market and shapes imagination in powerful ways.
As we all well know, actual encounters with reluctant or desperate migrants—and evocative artwork like “Angels Unawares”—can help unmask operative narratives. Catholic social teaching offers a contrasting vision marked by human dignity, regardless of citizenship status, and solidarity that crosses borders.
A Christian counter-narrative
The story of the Jewish and Christian pilgrim communities is one of migration, diaspora and the call to live in memory of those experiences. Indeed, as the theologian William O’Neill, S.J., has noted, after the commandment to worship one God, no moral imperative is repeated more frequently in the Hebrew Scriptures than the command to care for the stranger. And, as Pope Pius XII noted in “Exsul Familia” in 1952, the flight of Joseph, Mary and Jesus to Egypt in the New Testament establishes the émigré Holy Family as the archetype for every refugee family. Further, Jesus’ praxis of hospitality to outsiders recurs throughout the Gospels.
One of the most persistently recurrent themes in Scripture is justice and compassion for the vulnerable. The prophets repeatedly connect bringing justice for the poor to experiencing God. Concern for the economically vulnerable echoes throughout the New Testament as well, particularly in the Gospel of Luke, which depicts Jesus being born in a stable among mere shepherds and inaugurating his public ministry in terms that emphasize his mission to bring good news to the poor and release to the oppressed.
The New Testament scholar Donald Senior, C.P., has noted that in “the overall landscape of the gospel stories, the rich and powerful are often ‘in place’—reclining at table, calculating their harvest, standing comfortably in the front of the sanctuary, or seated on the judgment seat passing judgment on the crimes of others.” The poor, however, are “often mobile or rootless: the sick coming from the four corners of the compass seeking healing; the crowds desperate to hear Jesus, roaming lost and hungry; the leper crouched outside the door of Dives.” Father Senior suggests that experiences of people on the move “reveal a profound dimension of all human experience” and “challenge false ideologies of unlimited resources [or] of unconditional national sovereignty” that “plague our contemporary world, choking its spiritual capacity.”
The theologian Christopher Vogt has noted that while the Scriptures do not provide detailed solutions to contemporary challenges posed by immigration, “for people who turn to the Scriptures for guidance on how to live and what sort of people to become, it is clear they should show a deep concern” for marginalized persons. Biblical justice—which demands active concern for the vulnerable and prophetic critique of structures of injustice—challenges approaches to immigration driven by market or security concerns alone.
A Catholic migration ethic
Flowing from these biblical commitments, the Catholic social tradition champions robust rights for immigrants in its documents, outreach and advocacy. Catholic immigration directives are rooted not only in biblical injunctions to welcome the stranger, but also in longstanding social teachings on universal human rights (as seen in the encyclical “Pacem in Terris”), an understanding of the political community as oriented to serving the common good, and a global rather than nationalistic perspective.
Catholic social teaching is grounded in a vision of the person as inherently sacred and made for community. All persons are created in the image of God and therefore worthy of inherent dignity and respect. Whereas this vision does not compromise autonomy, it understands humans as profoundly interdependent. Hence, human rights are claims to goods necessary for each to participate with dignity in community life.
Catholic principles of economic and migration ethics protect not only civil and political rights, but also more robust social and economic rights and responsibilities. These establish persons’ rights not to migrate—to live with full human rights in their homeland—or to migrate if they cannot support themselves or their families in their country of origin. In situations where individuals face pervasive gang violence or desperate poverty, the Catholic tradition supports the right to freedom of movement so that persons can live free from credible fears of violence or severe want.
I would add that this vision of the person is not fundamentally at odds with our national narrative at its best. As Simone Campbell, S.S.S., put it during a “Nuns on the Bus” tour: “fear is crippling us and promoting an unpatriotic lie of individualism. After all, the Constitution begins, ‘We the People,’ not ‘We who got here first,’ or ‘We the owners of businesses’ or even ‘We the citizens.’”
While the Catholic social teaching tradition recognizes the right of sovereign nations to control their borders, this right is not understood to be absolute. In the case of blatant human rights violations, the right to state sovereignty is relativized by the tradition’s primary commitment to protecting human dignity. Hence, its doctrinal body of migration teaching protects the right to remain and the right to migrate.
Twenty years ago, in their joint pastoral letter “Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope,” the U.S. and Mexican bishops delineated these principles and called for their nations to address root causes of and legal avenues for migration and to safeguard family unity; by contrast, border enforcement, deportation and enforcement through attrition have remained the primary focus in the U.S. context.
Beyond its foundation in social and economic rights, the Catholic right to migrate is also rooted in the tradition’s commitment to the universal destination of created goods—that is, the idea that the goods of the earth are generally intended for everyone. Pope Francis frequently underscores this social understanding of what belongs to those in need and constraints on market freedom.
Once people do migrate, the Catholic tradition profoundly criticizes patterns wherein stable receiving countries accept the labor of millions without offering legal protections. Such “shadow” societies risk the creation of a permanent underclass, harming both human dignity and the common good. Pope John Paul II condemned the exploitation of migrant workers based on the principle that “capital should be at the service of labor and not labor at the service of capital.” This idea that the economy should serve the person—rather than vice versa—raises significant issues not only about the freedom of markets compared to people, but also about the significant financial stakes in the broken immigration system, where detained immigrants fill beds and those assigned for deportation fill private buses.
So the Catholic tradition also provides a counternarrative of economic ethics critiquing global dynamics that allow capital and goods and information, but not laborers, to flow freely across borders. Pope Francis has spoken out against the dictatorship of faceless economies; his image of humans as commodities in a throwaway culture particularly resonates with vulnerable migrant workers’ experiences.
In the Southern Poverty Law Center’s interviews with undocumented women across sectors of the food industry in the United States, respondents overwhelmingly reported feeling like they were “seen by employers as disposable workers with no lasting value, to be squeezed of every last drop of sweat and labor before being cast aside.”
(Re)contextualizing migration
With so many undocumented immigrants in the United States having lived here for over a decade, a “double society” increasingly threatens the common good. In their 1986 pastoral letter “Together a New People,” the U.S bishops called this double society “one visible with rights and one invisible without rights.” Obstructing viable paths to legalization for the majority of immigrants welcomed in the marketplace but not the voting booth, college campus or stable workplace risks making permanent this underclass of disenfranchised persons, undermining not only Catholic commitments but also significant civic values and interests.
Not only are established communities and migrants often, in the words of the legal scholar and theologian Silas W. Allard, “bound together by history, politics and economics even before the act of migration bridges the distance of geography,” but the dynamics of employer recruitment tend to be shaped by prior bonds forged by colonialism, military invasions or economic ties. For instance, the ongoing legacy of 19th- and 20th-century U.S. foreign policy and economic strategies—with their attendant narratives—has generated migration flows from Latin America to the United States.
Given such systemic culpability, some have proposed that an “instability tax” be levied on private and governmental entities that destabilize regions that then experience a large outflow of migrants and refugees—whether that means hedge funds profiting from commodity trading in African minerals, weapons manufacturers profiting from selling arms to the Middle East, or multinationals profiting from degrading or destabilizing poor nations. In light of this moral proximity to harm, the ethicist David Hollenbach, S.J., of Georgetown University, has suggested that countries that have gained economically from their colonies or that have histories of military involvement in another nation “have special obligations to people in flight from that nation.” This is particularly relevant to the issue of refugee resettlement, now under threat.
Becoming a neighbor to the migrant through a social vision of the person and the good requires meeting basic responsibilities of justice, not charity or hospitality alone. This is important given the role that receiving nations play in shaping the conditions that directly contribute to irregular migration. A social anthropology that includes a focus on robust rights and global responsibilities helps to recontextualize migration in the face of tendencies to locate responsibility solely in a migrant’s choice to cross borders.
Structural sin
The Catholic notion of structural sin explicitly connects these relationships with their harmful consequences and abetting ideologies. Distinct elements of structural sin—dehumanizing trends, unjust structures and harmful attitudes—shape complex dynamics that perpetuate inequalities and influence receptivity to outsiders. Whether in forms of cultural superiority or profiteering, social inducements to personal sin in the immigration context abound. One prominent example is the attempt to build a southern border wall in the United States. Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Tex., has explicitly decried the white supremacy and xenophobia behind such a wall, calling it an “open wound through our sister cities” and “a monument to hate” in his pastoral letter “Night Will Be No More.”
The concept of structural sin also draws attention to the connections between harmful structures and ideologies: for example, how powerful narratives casting immigrants as security threats or “takers” influence individuals’ roles in collective actions that affect migration, such as voting in an election.
“Fratelli Tutti” repeatedly underscores other pervasive ideological threats to our social instincts as well, convincingly indicating how self-absorption fuels both apathy and hardened insulation or group preservation. Revisiting his theme of globalized indifference, Francis reflects in that document on the many ways we are tempted, like the priest and Levite in the parable of the good Samaritan, “to pass at a safe distance,” whether we “retreat inwards, ignore others or [remain] indifferent to their plight.” He elaborates how a culture of consumerist comfort abetted by social media distractions incubates false ideologies that can manipulate consciences and insulate them from different perspectives.
Beyond identifying the structural forces demanding institutional solidarity, then, a relational migration ethic entails interrogating those ideological dimensions of social sin that harden resistance to newcomers. On Lampedusa, Pope Francis lamented the pervasive idolatry that facilitates migrants’ deaths and robs us of the ability to weep, a theme he revisited on visits to Manila and to Juárez, insisting that “only eyes cleansed by tears can see clearly.”
The concept of structural sin offers a framework for critiquing histories of unequal relationships between countries, such as proxy wars, as well as harmful ideologies from xenophobia to meritocracy. Portraying immigration through a lens of individual culpability alone obscures these multileveled dynamics at play. Beyond rights to movement and political self-determination, categories of structural sin and transnational solidarity can orient Catholic migration analyses toward the root causes of displacement and shared accountability.
Women and families
As unaccompanied women undertake journeys in increasing numbers—about half of migrants worldwide are female—they face unique threats, from sexual assault by smugglers and officials to harassment on the job to mistreatment in detention facilities. Less likely to qualify for employment-based immigration than men, the majority of migrant women work in unregulated jobs in the informal sector. Undocumented immigrants already earn lower wages than citizens in the same jobs, and undocumented women routinely earn even less than their male counterparts. Undocumented women are often perceived by predators as “perfect victims” of sexual assault: They remain isolated and uninformed about their rights, and are presumed to lack credibility.
Beyond well-founded fears that they will risk job loss and family separation via deportation if they report abuses, such women lack access to legal resources and face language barriers and cultural pressures. Many remain indebted to their coyotes (smugglers), and because they understand that immigration officials collaborate with law enforcement, they rarely seek help from the latter.
Migrant women frequently cite family reunification as their primary motive for migrating. But in the aftermath of detention or deportation, mixed-status families face major economic instability, and children suffer poor health and behavioral outcomes. President-elect Trump’s planned mass deportation would leave 4.5 million children separated from one or both parents.
Despite the courage and resilience of many immigrants, these patterns obscure their full humanity as spouses, parents and children. Families comprise our most intimate relationships; policies that undermine family unity frustrate this core. Beyond a critique of economic idolatry, the sanctity and social mission of the family indicate how conditions that perpetuate family separation undermine the common good. Catholic thought integrates a family’s intimate communion with its charge to mutually engage the broader social good. Deprivation of dignified labor opportunities and traumatic enforcement mechanisms impede immigrant families’ access to social goods.
Migrant women’s experiences of assault on their journeys and the reality of disruptive family separation expose patterns at odds with Christian commitments to human rights and the sanctity of family life. My time with women at Casa Nazaret (Nazareth House) in Nogales, Ariz., always reminded me that migration decisions are rarely personal choices alone. As the director of the Kino Border Initiative, Joanna Williams, recently put it, “parents traveling with their children or sending them to cross the border alone are neither heroic martyrs nor conniving opportunists.”
In other words, any migrant woman’s decisions to “abandon” her children for better long-term prospects for them or for work without documents occurs within constrained social contexts. These means are not desirable, but understanding the realities shaping these “choices” highlights the shortcomings of individualistic paradigms. These women’s experiences highlight the inadequacy of approaches that flatly criminalize irregular migrants—as in, “What part of illegal don’t you understand?”
Encounters with solidarity
For the 107th World Day of Migrants, Pope Francis adopted the theme “Towards An Ever Wider ‘We.’” Given his approach to pastoral and social concerns alike, a dynamically more inclusive community provides an apt symbol for his migration ethic. In his 2021 message, the pope traced the history of our common origin and destiny, highlighting how we are redeemed as a people, not as individuals, “that all might be one” (Jn 17:21).
He linked this social salvation history to the present time, in which that “we” willed by God has become wounded and fragmented:“Our ‘we,’ both in the wider world and within the church, is crumbling and cracking due to myopic and aggressive forms of nationalism and radical individualism. And the highest price is being paid by those who most easily become viewed as others: foreigners, migrants, the marginalized, those living on the existential peripheries.”
Global migration has intensified during Francis’ papacy, both in numbers of displaced persons and in the issue’s increased politicization. Addressing each of these issues has become a central priority of his papacy, as evidenced through his voluminous teachings on the subjects through homilies, addresses, public statements and frequent pastoral visits to borders and detention facilities.
As Robert Ellsberg noted in his introduction to Francis’ A Stranger and You Welcomed me: A Call to Mercy and Solidarity With Migrants and Refugees, the central message repeated throughout his many addresses remains “migrants and refugees are human beings, precious in the eyes of God; they are our brothers and sisters; they are worthy of respect; what we do for them, we do directly for Christ.”
The pope grounds his concern in scriptural texts, some reflective of the tradition he inherited, like the Exodus story, the Holy Family’s flight, the parable of the good Samaritan and the summons to final judgment. He also incorporates less familiar applications, whether of Jonah and the Ninevites or the ideal of the new Jerusalem. In 2017, Francis established a new Vatican office to oversee the church’s response to migrants and refugees: the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. He personally oversees its Migrants and Refugees section.
Pope Francis first introduced four verbs that are central to his teaching in a 2017 address to participants in an international forum on migration and peace: welcome, protect, promote and integrate. These offer organizing principles for his subsequent addresses (and the work of the dicastery section), where he regularly suggests that “conjugating these verbs, in the first person singular and the first person plural” is a “duty of justice, civility, and solidarity.”
For Francis, welcome entails offering broader options for migrants to safely and legally reach destination countries; protect involves defending the human rights and dignity of those on the move, regardless of their legal status; promote summons the empowerment of newcomers’ participation in areas of work, religious expression, family integrity and active citizenship; and integrate refers to efforts at mutual intercultural enrichment, not the mere assimilation of newcomers. His emphases encourage a two-way street of integration rather than a unidirectional model marked by assimilationist paternalism that can tempt even ecclesial groups at times.
In our U.S. context, it is worth noting the pope’s historic address to Congress in 2015, where he exhorted lawmakers to apply the Golden Rule with respect to migration policy. Identifying as a fellow descendant of immigrants from a shared continent of immigrants, he asked our nation through its representatives to identify with the needs and dreams propelling those traveling north in search of a better life for themselves and for their loved ones, asking, “Is this not what we want for our own children?”
He pleaded with lawmakers to resist the temptation to discard migrants as troublesome or to fear and dehumanize them because of their numbers. With characteristic directness and clarity, he concluded: “In a word, if we want security, let us give security; if we want life, let us give life; if we want opportunities, let us provide opportunities. The yardstick we use for others will be the yardstick which time will use for us.”
An ‘ever wider we’
In these days clouded by new fears and divisions, it might be instructive to return to the “Angels Unawares” sculpture installed in St. Peter’s Square on the World Day of Migrants and Refugees. The piece was commissioned by Cardinal Michael Czerny, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, and produced by Timothy Schmalz. It incorporates Muslims escaping Syria beside Jews escaping Nazi Germany beside an Irish boy escaping the potato famine. One figure could easily be an Eritrean attempting to reach Lampedusa.
The bronze and clay of “Angels Unawares” can help counter the collective delusion that we are not responsible for our neighbor and remind us that in our acts of welcome and widening we may be “entertain[ing] angels” (Heb 13:2). When I took my students at the time to see the replica that visited our campus, many instantly recognized their own family histories, their very identities. Like art, our religious practices, narratives and symbols—the tradition of Catholic social teaching—all hold potential to (re)shape moral imagination.
This pope has called attention to the urgency of this formation task, from Lampedusa to “Angels Unawares.” His uses of Scripture as well as his appeal to encounters across difference illuminate a path toward the work for conversion and structural justice. These approaches to welcoming migrants spring from, and move us toward, an “ever wider we.”
Kristin E. Heyer is the Joseph Chair in Theology at Boston College. This article is adapted from a keynote address at the “Church at the Borders: Best Practices, Promises, and Aspirations for New York” conference at the Center for Migration Studies, New York, N.Y., on Sept. 12, 2024.
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