American Catholics deserve moral clarity regarding the ongoing immigration crisis. Unfortunately, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ amicus brief in Trump v Barbara this week failed to give them that.
The brief categorised ending birthright citizenship as an immoral attack on human dignity and so reduced a complicated moral and political issue to an incoherent emotional appeal. It also excluded or misinterpreted key Catholic teachings regarding the obligations of citizens, national leaders and immigrants. It was not even written by a Catholic.
This half-hearted attempt at virtue-signalling from the USCCB was unpardonable. Not only that, but it damaged the bishops’ credibility at a time when the richness of authentic Catholic teaching, particularly regarding the contentious immigration debate, is needed more than ever.
Instead, the USCCB’s brief abandoned faithful American Catholics to their personal consciences on the issue, while demanding a fundamentally anti-Catholic approach: love divorced from the truth.
The crux of the USCCB’s brief was that ‘ending birthright citizenship denies the innate dignity and freedom of the person’. This assertion assumes that birthright citizenship laws are inherently moral rather than a matter for prudential politics. Given the Church teaches that just laws must promote the common good and respect the dignity of the human person, birthright citizenship laws in the US fall short.
Birthright citizenship has contributed to lawlessness by driving desperate foreigners to illegally enter America, many through dangerous means or by engaging in human trafficking, in the hope that they can secure citizenship through their children. Without undergoing the process for legal entry, these individuals have no impetus to fulfil the moral and legal obligations that Catholic teaching imposes on all immigrants entering a foreign nation: to assimilate and adhere to their host nation’s laws.
In fact, by avoiding legal pathways, most of these individuals likely do not have the common good of America ‘firmly at heart’ and might, in the words of St Thomas Aquinas regarding immigration, ‘attempt something hurtful to the people’. Perhaps not intentionally, but every day illegal immigrants engage in harmful behaviour by the mere fact that their presence requires constant deception and undermining of the law, with many putting their children and families in unthinkable positions as a result. The situations of undocumented parents of children born in the US are living proof that birthright citizenship complicates immigration laws at the expense of both immigrants and the common good.
The brief also ignored the fact that skyrocketing illegal entries into the US over recent years have destabilised the nation at the expense of the common good. Thanks to the Biden administration’s open-border policies, an estimated 11 million immigrants have flooded through the open border since 2020 in disregard of US laws or legal pathways of entry.
As a result, America has been thrown into a state of national chaos – increased rates of violent crime instigated by illegal immigrants, the pillaging of the US social safety net to provide for the 14 million people who are here illegally, rampant fraud committed by certain migrant groups, the inundation of local communities and more – all of which necessitates a revisiting of immigration policy. Any serious attempt to regain national cohesion and restore the common good must consider revoking birthright citizenship, since the millions of individuals who flooded the border illegally in recent years can claim citizenship for any of the children they birthed on US soil.
Is it humane to separate them from those children who are considered American citizens under current law? Is the United States simply expected to keep millions of illegal parents and their now American children at the expense of national security, the economy and the social fabric of the nation?
The USCCB’s brief implies that the entire obligation for the humanitarian disaster falls upon the United States. It downplays the personal moral agency of immigrants and their responsibilities. It also ignores the fact that the foreign nations from which many immigrants are emigrating are clearly failing in their moral obligation properly to care for and promote the common good of their citizens.
This brief simply assumes that the US must shoulder other nations’ responsibility and impoverish itself caring for illegal immigrants – all while forgoing what the Catholic Church, including Pope Leo XIV, recognises as every nation’s right: to guard its borders and humanely enforce the law.
The USCCB’s brief fails to offer much-needed guidance during this turbulent time. Instead of accounting for practical considerations, it demands that Catholics love their neighbour without the essential virtue of prudence, much less the wisdom of truth or reason.
Similarly, the brief implies that nations are expected simultaneously to procure the common good of all while enabling a system that directly undermines that good. All that matters in this extremely sensitive discussion, apparently, is that birthright citizenship is supposedly a human right dictated by the natural law.
If this were the case, however, then why does not a single European nation offer birthright citizenship, including the global home of the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican City State? On this, the brief is silent.
Indeed, it ignores obvious truths about birthright citizenship and immigration while demanding that American Catholics similarly ignore the truth before their very eyes: that unfettered illegal immigration is having a destructive impact on the United States, and that something needs to be done – humanely – to address it.
