Immigration: Catholics Are Compassionate

IMMIGRATON: CATHOLICS ARE COMPASSIONATE

Recently while I sat in a doctor’s waiting room, a man attempted conversation with a stranger across from him. The man sounded off, harshly and long, about illegal aliens as if immigrants were aliens from another planet here to invade us — not fellow human beings. After talking for quite a while and seemingly confused because no head nodded in agreement, he asked the stranger “Well, what do you think about immigration?” The stranger quietly responded, “We studied the issue at church; I have a very different opinion.” The stranger’s soft answer ended all talk.
Just as in the diatribe about immigration, by the man in the waiting room, the rhetoric around the issue of immigration has become relentlessly severe. In the Criterion, Bishop Wester, the new chairman of the U.S. Bishops’ Migration Committee says, “One of the most frustrating aspects of the public debate about what to do about immigration…is the shock-jock approach of talk radio that dismisses the complexities of the issue with sound bites like ‘what part of illegal don’t you understand’ or ‘send them back to their own countries.’”1
We Catholics, on the other hand, as Jesus teaches us, use compassion when we discuss the complex issues of immigration. Our point of view as Christians will differ from those who consider only their own interests and not the suffering of our brothers and sisters.
Regarding compassion, at a meeting last month in Terre Haute, I spoke personally about immigration with Representative Brad Ellsworth. I had just received a flyer from him on immigration. I told him I was Catholic and described what the bishops have written about immigration: how they stress compassion. Representative Ellsworth said he himself is compassionate, but added that he does not hear compassion for immigrants from his Catholic constituents. I wondered how he identified the Catholics. I know the Sister’s of Providence — I see them at his town meetings — would always speak with compassion for others. Probably people with harsh views are the persons he hears from most, similar to the self-righteous man in the doctor’s waiting room.
However, more than discussion, we need to resolve the tangled mess of immigration laws and poor political decisions in order to alleviate the massive human suffering such as the suffering of business persons who lose their livelihoods because they can not find workers; the suffering of children who are torn from parents; the suffering of parents who risk death to find work and end up sweating under the hot sun, bent over the lettuce we eat at our tables; and the suffering of women who work for corporations across the border, often enslaved and sometimes found dead
Everyone agrees: something must be done. But as we study the best solutions to the complex immigration issues, we know that we Catholics will strive to be compassionate.
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1Criterion, January 18, 2008, “Changing Terms and Hearts Is Seen as Key to Immigration”