Florida Catholic | Editorial

Guess who came to Egypt — with no papers

JEFF HENSLEY | NORTH TEXAS CATHOLIC

Published: 01.11.08

it’s time for us to turn things on their heels and make legalizing immigrants — who are already a part of who we are — a Catholic issue and not just a social justice issue”

Just last week, one of my wife’s English-as-a-Second-Language students came to her with tears of pain streaking his face. He had a very bad toothache. He had gone to our local “charity hospital” and been refused treatment unless he could fork over $500.

My wife’s response was to want to bundle him up and carry him to the front door of a candidate for political office, part of whose platform has included getting state law to line up with our county’s policy of refusing to pay for medical services for illegal immigrants. She didn’t, of course, but it was a good thought.She would have confronted him with both the teenager and the question, “How would you respond if this were one of your children?” That question has an easy answer, easy for any one of us, even if we think we have fixed ideas on how to treat immigrants without papers. At this time of year we put a lot of attention on a very famous, well-known, even revered, illegal immigrant. He would have qualified as a refugee, since there was a credible threat of physical harm.

Those who sought to take his life did take the lives of all male children around his age, so even our laws would have allowed his refuge here. Fortunately there weren’t even any papers or court proceedings in Egypt at the time. Jesus was “home” free. But now there are laws. And there is enforcement. And there is xenophobia, fear of strangers, specifically, fear of those recently arrived from Mexico, who are merely fleeing hunger and lack of opportunity. But as the Vatican is pointing out to us in recent pronouncements, even they are not criminals. The laws broken by illegal immigrants in seeking economic asylum are civil laws, not criminal laws.But even if compassion fails to move us, even if arguments from a Christian point of view fail to get our attention, there are other things at stake here.

There’s a huge amount of self-interest involved in welcoming the immigrants and treating them as we ourselves would want to be treated. (Isn’t that from Scripture? Isn’t it called the golden rule?) As someone who just turned 60, I’m particularly sensitive to this self-interest set of arguments. I’m delighted to see this reasoning showing up in columns from political pundits.

A friend, having heard the arguments from me, was happy to pass along an article from The Wall Street Journal with all but one of them. I’ll come back to that one in a bit. These arguments have to do with the soon-to-be-failing Social Security system.

If those under 40, particularly, want to see any money coming back from that system when they need it, they need to be working to get illegal immigrants legal — legal and paying into the system. And not only do they want to see them paying into the system, they want them doing well economically, educated to the maximum consistent with their intelligence and skills. And they want their children to be healthy and also educated as well as possible, so they can achieve and make their own contributions to our society, while supporting their own children, who can be expected to do even better than they have.And of course we should be wanting these things and advocating for these things because we believe they are right, because they are consistent with Catholic social teaching, consistent with what both the Vatican and our bishops, acting in concert through the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, are telling us.And none of this is inconsistent with making our borders secure. But for those already with us, already making our hamburgers, steaks, tacos, soups and salads; for those who are taking care of our children; planting, picking and packing our food, and waiting on us in our restaurants; for those working in our nursing homes and factories and doctors’ offices and other places of business, we need for them to do well.

We need their labor. We lost the option of making them legal when we failed to keep Roe v. Wade from coming onto the American scene. Whether you use the number 30 million or 40 million or even more, whatever unimaginably large number of aborted children you want to use for the past 34 years of carnage, we have a tremendous hole in the American labor force that the illegal and legal immigrants are only partially filling. Even economists are now admitting that the hole is there, but because it’s the huge blind spot in those who comment on the American social scene in the secular arena, no one is saying where the hole came from. The hole that has been ripping the fabric of American society since 1973 has also ripped a hole in our work force, in our economy.Funny, isn’t it? Catholics (and Protestants too) can take great offense at measures aimed at making “illegal” immigrants legal (even though it’s in our own long-term self-interest), but fail to recognize that they are here taking jobs of unborn children never born because of a “legal” procedure. Even if others can’t speak to the “why” of legalizing immigrants, it’s a particularly Catholic sort of thing for you and me to talk about it openly.

Everyone has tried to make the social justice issue of abortion a Catholic issue these past 34 years. Well, now it’s time for us to turn things on their heels and make legalizing immigrants — who are already a part of who we are — a Catholic issue and not just a social justice issue. By the way, one final question for anyone around my age still clinging to their fear of strangers: “Where do you think the laborers to care for the elderly will come from in a decade or two or three, if there’s a huge shortage in the labor force?”

This appeared as an editorial in the Dec. 21 issue of the North Texas Catholic, newspaper of the Diocese of Fort Worth. It was written by Jeff Hensley, editor.

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