“Illegals” are not “Immorals”: A Persistent Immigration Fallacy

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 18, 2013

Whenever the USCCB dares to advocate policies which provide for easier immigration and naturalization (e.g., here), a few of our readers shout an argument which I devoutly hope never again to hear from anyone claiming to be Catholic: “We don’t owe illegals anything!”

Many Americans, especially conservative Americans, tend to be selective legalists. Despite their recognition of the falsity of some anti-life laws, they hold that the law confirms a sort of territorial moral exclusivity on citizens. This is one of many values which can arise from being culture bound. It typically creates a huge blind spot on immigration.

There are two false assumptions here. First, there is the assumption that those who have come earlier rather than later to a particular region, and have established a government over the region, and have developed a kind of society in that region, somehow have an exclusive claim to that region as their own. This is typically applied self-servingly; it is rarely upheld for peoples who may have occupied a territory prior to “us”. But in any case, the idea that one group of people can morally set a broad region to be off limits to other groups of people is absurd.

Where would such a moral right come from? Our God-given understanding of the universal destination of goods is sufficient to demonstrate its falsity. To the contrary, the Catholic Church has consistently (and rightly) affirmed that people have a right to migrate for good and constructive purposes, including the effort to increase their prosperity and provide better for their families. Such a right cannot be restricted without very good reason. Such reasons would include demonstrated evil intentions on the part of immigrants, or some other particular, severe and direct danger to the common good.

We must recognize that states, boundaries, and governments are mere conventions. They do not arise from moral truths; rather, they are bound by them. The right of migration, for a moral purpose and in a moral manner, is prior to the State, and prior to citizenship, just like the right to life, the right to marry, the right to raise a family.

A second and similar point must be made about the positive law. The positive law—that is, a law passed by government for the purpose of ordering the common good of a community—does not in and of itself generate moral force. Insofar as such laws are designed to correspond with God’s law, the natural law, of course they derive moral force from the principles they encapsulate. But most positive laws are mere conventions. As such they arise from convenience. They outline a particular manner of organizing affairs—one among many possibilities—in order to establish a basic order which, taken as a whole, serves the common good.

Such laws of convenience are called “penal” laws. Their lack of moral content explains why, for example, speed limits and stop lights and curfews have no moral force beyond the general desirability that the conventions of the common good, and sometimes the public authority’s indication of a need for safety, should be respected for the sake of good order. This moral force is exceedingly weak, and a person may morally violate a traffic law or break curfew for any reasonable cause, though he may have to pay a penalty if caught. So too with other such laws. Indeed, what the positive penal law contains is not a specific moral requirement but simply a statement of how the public authority wishes to arrange things and a notification that the breach of the standard arrangement will carry a penalty. The penalty is applied not for a breach of morality, but for a breach of those particular conventions which, in this time and place, are accepted as norms for a trouble-free community experience.

Immigration

There is certainly room for both custom and convention in handling immigration; they may shape but not obliterate fundamental rights. Nearly all our readers can see at once that the State’s enactments to protect and facilitate abortion have not a shred of authority to make abortion moral, or to compel us to obey such laws on moral grounds. Given this perception, it continues to astonish me that so many cannot see what is equally obvious, that a State’s claim to have sole charge over comings and goings in a vast territory does not create a moral argument against migration, and cannot compel us to obey such laws on moral grounds, either for emigration or for immigration. (For more on this, see The Sovereignty Myth: On the Limits of Political Authority.)

Now it is equally obvious that a government has an obligation to protect the common good of all within its territory. Restrictions on immigration and emigration may be morally enacted for serious (and typically temporary) reasons, and of course those who are personal threats to the security of others may be morally restricted. But broader considerations—such as a general desire to reserve available resources for the chosen few—simply do not possess the moral force to deny the basic human right to migration. Moreover, new arrivals in a community are also part of the community whose common good it is the object of government to secure. After all, the idea of citizenship itself is a convention.

A related observation is that the financial benefits provided by government to citizens, and their possible extension to those who have not yet fulfilled the conventions of citizenship, create a separate question which must be settled prudently. I cannot address that pragmatic question here, so I will simply state the obvious: One of the idiocies of a nanny state is that it creates dependent citizens, and then this unnatural state of dependency is used as an excuse for being unable to “afford” immigrants. Sometimes, our own conventions tend to pile up and lock us within false dichotomies. When this happens, we take for granted errors which undermine morality.

The bottom line here is that we really are our brothers’ and our sisters’ keepers. There is a moral obligation in this which is not dependent on who arrived first or on what conventions particular governments may enact. By the law of nature, a welcoming and supportive community is, in this respect, a moral community. How much more is this true for Christians, and especially for Catholics, who have the Church’s social teaching to guide them! Indeed, hospitality is an ancient Christian virtue.

Again, illegals are not immorals. The expression “we don’t owe illegals anything” has no place on a Catholic’s tongue, because it has no place in a Catholic’s heart. Surely Our Lord had this in mind, among many other things, when He said, “But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man” (Mt 15:18).

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For a more extensive treatment of immigration, see Immigration: The Contested Principle.