Immigration is one of the most divisive issues in the 2024 US presidential election.
Polling agency Gallup reported in July, before entering the final stages of the campaign, that U.S. adults want fewer immigrants to the U.S. by a 55% to 41% margin.
“This is the first time since 2005,” Gallup said, “that a majority of Americans want less immigration, and today’s numbers are the highest percentage holding that view since 2001, when 58 percent The highest percentage ever was 65%, recorded in 1993 and 1995. ”
As Americans head to the polls on November 5, it remains unclear which presidential candidate or party will win, and which immigration policy proposals will ultimately become law based on the results.
Republican candidate former President Donald J. Trump’s immigration policy is clear from his campaign’s “core promises.” The first and second are to “close our borders and stop immigration” and “conduct the largest deportation operation in American history.” ”
President Trump has promised to “stop the immigration epidemic, crush foreign drug cartels, crush gang violence, and lock up violent criminals.” The Republican platform also mentions stricter vetting, the abolition of sanctuary cities (local governments that prohibit law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement), and that the legal immigration system is “merit-based” and ” It guarantees to eliminate “chain immigration” (the term is often used to refer to sponsors of immigrant visas for large families) and “put American workers first.”
Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign website vows to “secure our borders and fix our broken immigration system,” “tacken the opioid and fentanyl crisis,” and “protect our communities from gun violence and crime.” .
Harris has repeatedly emphasized that she prosecuted gangs and cartels as California’s attorney general. Harris also supports U.S. immigration reform, with a focus on “strong border security” and a “path to citizenship.”
The Democratic Party’s platform also expands legal immigration and preserves family unity while ensuring that long-term unauthorized immigrants, including “Dreamers,” the noncitizen children of unauthorized immigrants admitted to the United States through DACA, become citizens. (Deferred Action for Child Arrivals) program that is committed to finding a path to rights.
According to the Pew Research Center, an estimated 11 million immigrants are currently living and working in the United States without legal permission, which is still below the 2007 peak of 12.2 million. The population of the United States is estimated to be 335 million people as of early 2024.
On October 22, U.S. Customs and Border Protection released its fiscal year 2024 numbers, and preliminary data showed that the Department of Homeland Security had “more than 700,000 removals and returns, more than any fiscal year since 2010. completed.” It also said that “the estimated number of migrant leavers (people who cross the border without encountering CBP) decreased by 60 percent from fiscal year 2023 to fiscal year 2024.”
Catholic teaching is in crisis
While these numbers may seem like some kind of progress to Americans concerned about legal immigration, the temperature of public debate remains high.
“Unfortunately, this issue has fallen victim to widespread politicization that has held our politics hostage,” Dylan Corbett, executive director of the HOPE Border Institute in El Paso, Texas, told OSV News. “But that’s why our political leaders need to take responsibility and put together a vision, because the contributions of immigrants to our country are many.”
Corbett urged Americans to reflect on the role of immigrants and their “social responsibility to them” in fixing the immigration system.
“We are a country built on the contributions of immigrants, whether they are social contributions, economic contributions or religious contributions,” he stressed. “We just came out of a pandemic, and a lot of our essential workers were immigrants, a lot of them were undocumented. So the people who fed us, kept us healthy. Many of them were immigrants.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “wealthier countries have an obligation, whenever possible, to welcome foreigners seeking security and livelihoods not available in their country of origin.”
At the same time, the Church made it clear that human law is subject to the divine limits of what human reason can know. St. John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical “Veritatis Splendor” (“The Splendor of Truth”) and 1995 encyclical “Evangelium Vitae” (“Gospel of Life”) – “Gaudium et Spes” (Pastoral Citing the teachings of Vatican II in the Constitution (Church in the Modern World) – cited as condemning “deportations” among other specific acts that “violate human dignity,” and that these The acts are “disgraceful and insofar as they affect human civilization, they pollute those who harm them, those who harm them.” To suffer injustice is given to the Creator It denies honor. ”
In Veritatis Splendor, the late pope emphasized their moral severity, calling them examples of “essential evil” and asserting that, whatever the motive, these acts “contradict the relationship between God and man.” It cannot be ordered for profit.”
Conflict between Trump and Harris over immigration issues
J. Kevin Appleby – senior fellow for policy and communications at the New York Center for Immigration Studies and former director of immigration policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops – tells OSV News the church’s moral response to Trump’s mass deportation plan. I explained the opposite.
“It’s a bit like night and day. In Trump’s case, the mass deportation plan clearly violates fundamental principles of Catholicism. It not only hurts the country economically, it destroys families. , it will separate children from their parents,” he said. “And that is the exact opposite of what the bishops have been saying for 20 years.”
According to Pew, nearly 70% of households with undocumented immigrants are “mixed status,” meaning they include U.S.-born citizens and immigrants with legal status, putting them at risk of collapse due to mass deportation. That’s what it means.
The American Immigration Council, a nonpartisan organization based in Washington that conducts immigration research and policy analysis, also estimates that mass deportations will result in billions in the range of $1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion in 2022. We anticipate that there may be economic consequences. It is estimated that the country’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) could contract by 4.2-6.8%, exceeding the 4.2% contraction in gross domestic product (GDP) caused by the Great Recession in 2007-2008. .
Appleby said Harris, by contrast, has become “more conservative on this issue,” including becoming “more bullish on border control.”
“She still insists, for example, that undocumented immigrants should have the opportunity to obtain citizenship,” he said. At the same time, Harris said the bipartisan border bill would “undermine asylum protections for asylum seekers at the border, which is also an important principle of the Catholic faith.”
“The bottom line is that our leaders are becoming more restrictive and not leading on this issue,” Appleby said. “They are becoming more politicized than ever.”
Tackling mass deportations
Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge, resident law and policy fellow at the Washington Center for Immigration Studies, and an internationally recognized national security and immigration expert, told OSV News that President Trump He said he didn’t think a “mass deportation plan” would involve anything drastic. “Guns were drawn, sirens were blaring, children were crying.
“But the fact of the matter is, I’ve been involved in immigration enforcement for over 30 years, and that’s not the way it’s typically done,” Arthur said. “For most illegal aliens, ICE knocks on their door and they either accompany them or respond to a letter.”
Furthermore, he added: “Really, the only question is the will to do it. At this point, there’s a national consensus that it’s the thing to do.”
Arthur also expected an amnesty program to be included as part of the mass purge.
“If there is indeed some kind of enforcement program in place, I would expect that there will also be some kind of amnesty,” he added. “The size of the amnesty is still to be determined. But it was easy to see that there were between two and four million people here.”
President Trump did not mention the amnesty program during his campaign, and in June, the Trump campaign announced that President Joe Biden would offer assistance to eligible noncitizen spouses and noncitizens to unite mixed-status families. He accused the government of being involved in a “large-scale amnesty program” by taking administrative measures to allow the government to continue doing so. The White House said the rule was set to benefit “approximately 500,000 spouses of U.S. citizens and approximately 50,000 noncitizen children under the age of 21 whose parents are married to U.S. citizens.” said. ”
But Arthur said universally mandated use of the E-Verify system, an online government platform that verifies prospective employees’ eligibility to work in the U.S. in real time, could force many undocumented immigrants out of the country. He said there are also.
“If it becomes mandatory, a huge number of people who are in the country illegally will likely be denied the opportunity to re-enter the workforce,” he said. “People talk about the benefits that immigrants get. It really runs the gamut. But most immigrants come to the United States illegally primarily to work, not for benefits,” Arthur said. said. “And if they can’t work, there’s a very good chance they’ll just go home.”
A mandatory registration program that transforms unauthorized and unregistered immigration from a civil offense to a criminal offense punishable by prison terms and fines would similarly impact immigrant communities.
“Certainly there will be substantial incentives to comply and substantial disincentives not to comply,” Arthur said.
More concerns about immigration
At the same time, there are signs that currently permitted immigrants could be stripped of their legal status under a second Trump administration. In an Oct. 2 interview with NewsNation, President Trump said he would deport Haitian immigrants who legally live and work in Springfield, Ohio, on Temporary Protected Status, scaring the typical Catholic population. He promised to send her back to Haiti, which is infested with organized crime. Springfield’s Haitian immigrants are also credited with helping fuel the city’s economic recovery, even as the city has had to meet infrastructure demands after decades of population decline.
Father of the Holy Cross Daniel Grudy, an internationally recognized expert on immigration and refugee issues and vice provost and vice president for undergraduate education at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, told OSV News. perspective. “
While he acknowledged there is “no magic solution” to immigration, there is a double standard in the United States: “We want immigrant workers, we just don’t want immigrants.” He also recognized that.
He said that while “there is value in having borders” for Catholics, it is important to recognize that there is also “a larger human community, a global community, to which we are interconnected.” Ta.
“What is at stake in the immigration crisis is our own humanity,” Father Groody stressed. “If we cannot see the humanity of people who come to us from difficult spaces like this, then we have bigger problems in our country than immigration.”
Father Groody has focused his research on Christ as the “archetypal immigrant,” but said ultimately faith must inform voters’ outlooks and consciences.
