U.S. Catholic bishops are once again opposing President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda, but they may want to examine Catholic teaching on immigration and national sovereignty first. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) recently published a document lamenting many of the President’s latest actions to restrict immigration into the U.S., criticizing his suspension of “refugee resettlement” programs, the restoration of the “Remain in Mexico” policy, the revocation of “humanitarian parole” programs, and mass deportations, including the President’s controversial use of the Alien Enemies Act.

While the Catholic Church has emerged in recent years as one of the most prominent voices urging that immigrants be treated with respect and dignity, it is crucial to remember that the Church has far more vocally demanded respect for just laws, the preservation of the nation’s well-being, and the importance of a nation’s social order, provided that it facilitates or fosters virtue. In other words, the Catholic Church has always encouraged and endorsed a balanced and reasonable approach to the issue of immigration, not a civilizationally suicidal open borders mandate.
[T]he Catholic Church has always stood firmly against this warping, perverting, and inverting of justice.
In the early fifth century, Doctor of the Church St. Augustine of Hippo addressed the state’s role in maintaining order in his treatise The City of God. “The peace of the earthly city is a temporal peace… It is the business of the state to ensure this peace by just laws and measures, even if such measures involve restrictions on certain freedoms,” he wrote. While the USCCB complains that “legal pathways” to permanent residency or U.S. citizenship are being restricted, Augustine actually suggested that immigrants should not be eligible for citizenship until they have proven, over the course of several generations, that they have assimilated and can and do contribute meaningfully to society.
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