It’s one of the most divisive issues of the 2024 U.S. presidential election: immigration.
The Gallup polling organization reported in July – before the final stretch of the campaign – that U.S. adults by a 55 percent to 41 percent margin would like to see immigration to the U.S. decreased.
“This is the first time since 2005,” Gallup stated, “that a majority of Americans have wanted there to be less immigration, and today’s figure is the largest percentage holding that view since a 58 percent reading in 2001. The record high was 65 percent, recorded in 1993 and 1995.”
As Americans head to the voting booth Nov. 5, it’s still unclear which presidential nominee or party will prevail – and with the outcome, which proposed immigration policies will eventually be enacted.
Republican nominee former President Donald J. Trump’s immigration policy is evident from his campaign’s “Core Promises” – the first and second of which are, “Seal the border and stop the migrant invasion” and “Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.”
Trump pledges to “Stop the migrant crime epidemic, demolish the foreign drug cartels, crush gang violence, and lock up violent offenders.” The Republican Party platform additionally mentions strict vetting, an end to sanctuary cities (local jurisdictions that prohibit law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement), and assurances that the legal immigration system is “merit-based,” eliminates “chain migration” (the term is often used to refer to sponsoring immigration visas for extended family members) and “puts American workers first.”
Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign website vows to “secure our borders and fix our broken immigration system,” “tackle the opioid and fentanyl crisis,” and “keep our communities safe from gun violence and crime.”
Harris has repeatedly emphasized that – as attorney general of California – she prosecuted gangs and cartels. Harris also endorses reform of America’s immigration system, with an emphasis on “strong border security” and “an earned pathway to citizenship.”
The Democratic Party platform further promises to expand legal immigration, keep families together while long-term unauthorized immigrants seek a pathway to citizenship, including the “Dreamers”– noncitizen children of unauthorized migrants that are allowed to remain in the U.S. through the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program.
According to Pew Research Center, there are an estimated 11 million migrants currently living and working in America without legal authorization – a figure still below the peak of 12.2 million from 2007. The U.S. population was estimated to be 335 million at the start of 2024.
On Oct. 22, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol released figures on fiscal year 2024 stating its preliminary data shows the Department of Homeland Security “completed over 700,000 removals and returns, more than any prior fiscal year since 2010.” It also stated the “estimated number of migrant gotaways – people who crossed the border without encountering CBP – has decreased 60 percent from FY 2023 to FY 2024.”
Catholic teaching at stake
While these figures may seem like some version of progress for Americans concerned with legal immigration, the temperature of public discourse remains high.
“Unfortunately, this issue has fallen victim to the broader politicization that is taking our politics hostage,” Dylan Corbett, executive director of the HOPE Border Institute in El Paso, Texas, told OSV News. “But that’s precisely why you need political leaders to take responsibility and marshal a vision – because the contributions of migrants to our country are numerous.”
Corbett urged Americans to reflect on the role of people who have migrated and their “social responsibility to them” to fix the immigration system.
“We’re a country that’s built on the contributions of migrants – whether it’s social contributions, or economic contributions, or contributions of faith,” he stressed. “We just came out of the pandemic, and many of the essential workers were migrants; many of them were undocumented. So the people that kept us fed; the people that kept us healthy; that kept our economy going – a large number of them were migrants.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church instructs, “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.”
At the same time, the Church has also made clear human laws are also subject to divine limits knowable to human reason. St. John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical “Veritatis Splendor” (“Splendor of Truth”) and 1995 encyclical “Evangelium Vitae” (“The Gospel of Life”) – quoting the Second Vatican Council’s teaching in “Gaudium et Spes” (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World) – have been cited as condemning “deportation” among other specific acts “offensive to human dignity” that “are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honor due to the Creator.”
The late pontiff underscored their moral severity in “Veritatis Splendor” by calling them examples of “intrinsic evil,” explaining that no matter the motives these acts are “not capable of being ordered to God and to the good of the person.”
Trump, Harris contrast over immigration stakes
J. Kevin Appleby – senior fellow for policy and communications at the Center for Migration Studies of New York and the former director of migration policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops – illustrated to OSV News the Church’s moral objections to Trump’s mass deportation plan.
“It’s a little like night and day. With Mr. Trump, he clearly violates the basic principle of Catholic teaching with his mass deportation plan. Not only will it economically hurt the country – it will break up families and separate children from their parents,” he said. “And it’s exactly opposite of what the bishops have been advocating for, for two decades.”
According to Pew nearly 70 percent of households with unauthorized immigrants are “mixed status,” meaning they include U.S.-born citizens or immigrants with legal status, and would be vulnerable to breakup by mass deportation.
The American Immigration Council – a Washington-based nonpartisan organization conducting immigration research and policy analysis – also predicts a sizable economic impact of $1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion in 2022 dollars could accompany any mass deportations. It estimated the nation’s annual gross domestic product would shrink 4.2 percent-6.8 percent, potentially exceeding the 4.2 percent GDP contraction caused by the 2007-2008 Great Recession.
Appleby explained that Harris, by contrast, has “become more conservative on the issue,” including becoming “more bullish on border control.”
“She still maintains that the undocumented, for example, should have an opportunity to earn citizenship,” he said. At the same time, he said the bipartisan border bill Harris is touting “would undermine asylum protections for asylum-seekers at the border – which is an important principle of Catholic teaching as well.”
“So the bottom line is, on the issue, our leaders are becoming more restrictive – and are not leading on the issue,” Appleby reflected. “They’re politicizing it even further than it has been in the past.”
Approaches to mass deportation
Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and resident fellow in Law and Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, an internationally recognized national security and immigration expert, told OSV News he did not view Trump’s “mass deportation program” would not involve the dramatic picture of “guns drawn and sirens blaring and kids crying.
“But as a practical matter – and I’ve been doing immigration enforcement now for more than three decades – that’s not generally the way that it’s done,” Arthur said. “Most individuals who are here illegally, ICE knocks on the door, and they go along with them, or they respond to a letter.”
He added, “Really, the only issue is the will to do that. Right now, there’s popular consensus that it is something that needs to be done.”
Arthur also supposed an amnesty program would be a component of any mass removals.
“I anticipate that if there were some sort of actual enforcement program undertaken, that would be coupled with some sort of amnesty,” he added. “The size of that amnesty is to be determined. But I could easily see it being 2 million to 4 million people who are here.”
Trump has not mentioned an amnesty program on the campaign trail, and in June, his campaign accused President Joe Biden of engaging in a “mass amnesty plan” by taking executive actions that allowed mixed-status families to remain united by helping qualified noncitizen spouses and children apply for lawful permanent residence without first leaving the U.S. The White House said the rule was set to benefit “approximately half a million spouses of U.S. citizens, and approximately 50,000 noncitizen children under the age of 21 whose parent is married to a U.S. citizen.”
But Arthur said universal required use of the E-Verify system – an online government platform that verifies in real time the eligibility of a prospective employee to work in the U.S. – could also push many unauthorized immigrants to leave the U.S.
“If that were to become mandatory, it would likely deprive the vast number of people who are here illegally of their ability to get another job,” he noted. “People talk about the benefits that are available to migrants; that really does run the gamut. But most migrants come to the United States illegally not for the benefits, but primarily to work,” observed Arthur. “And if they can’t work, then there’s a very strong likelihood they’re just going to go home.”
An obligatory registration program – converting unauthorized and unregistered immigration from a civil to criminal offense, with jail time and fines attached – would likewise make an impact on the migrant community.
“There would be, definitely, some real incentives to comply with it,” Arthur said, “and some real disincentives not to.”
Additional immigration concerns
At the same time, there are indications that currently authorized migrants could find their legal status revoked under a second Trump administration. Trump promised in an Oct. 2 interview with NewsNation to deport Haitian migrants living and working legally in Springfield, Ohio, under Temporary Protected Status, and send them back to Haiti, which is overrun by violent gangs who have terrorized the country’s typically Catholic population. The Haitian migrants in Springfield have also been credited with fueling the city’s economic renaissance even as the municipality had to adjust to infrastructure demands after decades of population decline.
Holy Cross Father Daniel Groody, an internationally recognized expert on migration and refugee issues, and the vice president and associate provost for undergraduate education at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, told OSV News, “There’s no real intelligent discourse about migration from any political perspective.”
He admitted the issue of migration has “no magic solution,” but also said he viewed an American double standard at work: “We want immigrant labor – we just don’t want immigrants.”
He said that it’s important for Catholics to recognize that while there is “a value to having borders” there is also “a larger human community, an international community, that we’re interconnected to.”
“What’s at stake in the migration issue is our own humanity,” emphasized Father Groody. “If we can’t see the humanity of those who come to us from these difficult spaces, then we’ve got a bigger problem in our country than immigration.”
Ultimately, said Father Groody – whose work has focused upon Christ as “the prototypical immigrant” – faith must inform a voter’s outlook and conscience.
