In the year 2004, the U.S. population was about 293 million.  Of that number, 35.7 million had been born in other countries, about one in eight, or 12.8% of the total population.  Of these immigrants to the U.S., 11.4 million were naturalized citizens and an estimated 12 million were out of status, that is, undocumented.   This may seem an unprecedented wave of immigration, but in fact, at 12.8%, the proportion of immigrants to population as of 2004, was the same as it’s been through most of U.S. history.  In 1850, foreign-born people composed 9.7% of the population.  In 1910, the foreign-born rose to 14.7%.  Immigration appears on our legislative agenda because, strong anti-immigration laws severely reduced the proportions of foreign-born in the middle of the last century, and the lack of a coherent immigration plan on the federal level have left us with a massive population of immigrants who have come here without reference to the legal system, more than 12 million, maybe as many as 20 million.  Our country’s economy depends upon them.  Our government doesn’t know what to do about them.  They and those behind them looking to get in have become a huge moral and political challenge.

How does a system of laws balance the right of people to migrate in order to live decently, a right consistently confirmed by Catholic social teaching over the last 60 years, with the right of nations to control their own borders? 

How does Jewish and Christian revelation inform the present political question of immigration?  Is there a particular position by which we Catholics who are historically the immigrants and newcomers enter the debate?  And what might Catholics who listen carefully to their own Church demand that their state legislators do?

Let me suggest the importance of a quality of mind and heart which is essential for all concerned: empathy.  Empathy asks me to see how a person different from me is like me.  Laws which are not informed by empathy are bound to be punishing, coercive, and mean-spirited.  Without empathy we tend to see others as threatening – as those who are different: a different generation, a different history a different color of skin, a different level of education, a different religion.    So our religious tradition asks us to practice empathy with regard to the immigrant as we seek justice and the common good.  In Leviticus 19: God said: ‘If a stranger lives with you in your land, you must count him as one of our own countrymen and love him as yourself – for you were once strangers yourselves in Egypt – I am the Lord your God’.  Empathy at work.  Jesus’ puts it even more directly: In Matt. 25, he says, “ I was hungry and you fed me; thirsty and you gave me to drink, a stranger and you made me welcome…and the vitruous will say to him in reply, ‘when did we do that’, and he will answer, ‘Insofar as you did it for one of these least brothers and sisters of mine, you did it for me’”.  Is Lord Jesus making a rhetorical point?  Or do we take seriously Luke’s report that Jesus himself was born homeless because no one had room for the strangers that night and Matthew’s report that Jesus and his family became refugees on the foreign soil of Egypt when they fled the violence of the tyrant, Herod

My twenty years with immigrant Catholics have been an exercise in learning to see how people different from me are like me. I visited their homelands: Peru, El Salvador, Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  I saw every city surrounded by shanty towns, often without electricity or water, rings of misery.  I wondered how anyone could live with the foul smells, the desolation, the grinding poverty seen in the tin and cardboard shacks they called their homes.  I saw children who instead of going to school were peddling, begging, washing car windshields at stop lights, then holding out their hands for something, anything to bring home in order to eat and live.  I felt the strange discomfort of learning to walk by them all and pretend not see them because one handout would mean that you were soon surrounded by dozens, all with their hands out.  And I promised myself that I would not ever lose that feeling of discomfort or forget the sights I had seen.

In Eastern CT., I listened to a dying Mexican tell me about his wife who tried to cross the Texas border with him.  They tried to cross the river flooded by spring rains, her hand slipped from his, she was swept away and drowned, the last he saw of her.  I listened as a young man, the valedictorian of his high school class told our church that he could not go on to college because he had been born in Mexico.  Though he was brought to this country when he was less than two years old and has no memories of Mexicooften referred to as an illegal.  He has no country.  Our system is cruelly unfair to him.  I discovered that out of status immigrants are families, hard working folk who bear with tremendous hardship for their children.  They take the least desirable jobs at the worst hours and lowest wages.  Often they are exploited by employers who know that they have no legal recourse.  They pay top dollar for very lowest-grade apartments.  They pay taxes; but qualify for no rebates, no benefits.  They have no health insurance.  They are like so many immigrants before them who came here to work, to give their families an opportunity – not criminals, but people I admire.  If I were born into their situation, I tell you the truth, I would have done what they did.  It would have been wrong not to. 

Empathy is not the last word, but the first word, at the beginning of the legislative process.  This is the link with the whole of Catholic Social Teaching which begins with a serious, even radical look at the dignity of every human person from conception to natural death: before you look at circumstance, conditions, precedents, and norms, there is the human person. Pope John Paul expressed it directly in his apostolic letter, Ecclesia in America: “The Church in America must be a vigilant advocate, defending against the unjust restriction of the natural right of individual persons to move freely within their own nation and from one nation to another.  Attention must be called to the rights of migrant and their families and to respect the hman dignity, even in cases of non-legal immigration”.

Empathy must guide us, not to blind us.  Employ empathy.  Recognize the dignity of persons who are out of legal status. Then  get down to work.

Work to build public support.  Our society will not get an adequate immigration reform unless we all, people and legislators, demand it.  We must not settle for anything less than  an immigration reform which will enhance national security, strengthen the economy, improve wages and conditions for all workers,  strengthen the rule of law, control future immigration and open a path to permanent residency and future citizenship to those 12 million plus who are willing to work and sacrifice to gain it.

Beginning in 1993, U.S. immigration policy has been focused on border blockade initiatives, an enforcement only approach.  Since that year, the government has spent $30 billion, has tripled the number of border agents and added 80 miles of fencing – and the number of undocumented persons entering the country annually has doubled.  One significant result is an increase in the number of deaths of people attempting to enter the country: about 3,700 between 1994 and 2006.  It has been estimated that the death toll at the border in those years was more than 10 times as high as the number of people killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall in its 28 year history.

About 500,000 imigrants come into this country each year without legal status.  90% obtain work within 6 months.  Apparently, they are meeting an economic need.  Despite this, the federal government issues only 5,000 visas annually for low-skilled workers.  Do these workers rob U.S. workers of jobs or lower their wages?  That was the reason for many years the AFofL-CIO opposed legislation friendly to immigrants.  But in 1999, the union reversed its stand.  It seems that unions have become aware that these people were not taking away American jobs, but filling a need, a need for workers especially in areas such as agriculture, construction, food services and textiles.  Out of status workers make us 36% of all insulation workers, 29% of all roofers and drywall installers; 21% of all private household workers.  The union recognized that these new workers weren’t the problem.  In many sectors, our economy needs them.  The problem is a system which keeps the minimum wage at $5.15 nationally, $7.65 in the State of CT. and in which everyone’s real wages, except those of the very wealthy, are eroding.

We need to support a federal immigration reform which includes a path to permanent residency and citizenship for workers and their families so that they come out of the shadows.  We need to keep that path open as the normal path for future immigrants so that they have a legal path to follow instead of having only one path, the subterranean route of illegality. 

We need to oppose all initiatives to criminalize undocumented immigrants.  They are not criminals; we are not rewarding criminal activity..  Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles suggests this: Any judge in exacting punishment in our courts considers two things in particular: the intent of the lawbreaker and the effect of his or her act.  The intent of the overwhelming majority of migrants who come here without papers is one thing: to work and support their family.  The effect is positive: their work moves the economy forward.  They may be breaking the law, but they are not engaged in criminal activity.  Maybe the law needs to be changed.

We need to oppose all initiatives such as an act before our state legislature which would recruit local police officials to be agents of ICE, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.  There is no quicker way to separate a significant portion of our population, the undocumented immigrant from recourse to the police in time of need. Just consider: there are women and families in situations of domestic abuse.  Immigrants out of status have the same percentage of abuse as anyone else.  Where can they go if police and other service providers become reporters to immigration?  Our bishops are calling for a legislative investigation of just this issue.

We need to support and spread initiatives such as that undertaken in New Haven to issue local identification cards to out of status immigrants who cannot obtain drivers’ licenses.  If government at higher levels cannot find a way to bring them out of the shadows, government at more local levels must take up the challenge.  We need to renew support this year for initiatives in this state legislature to provide an in-state tuition rate for prospective college students who live in our state but don’t have permanent residence status.  Last year’s bill passed both houses, but suffered a governor’s veto.

There are also consequences in our decisions for every one of us and for the very nature of our society. By doing nothing to reform immigration comprehensively and by forgetting empathy by seeking justice only for some, not for all, we are creating a reality which is incompatible with American democracy a permanent underclass, a significant part of our population with no legal rights, and no means of changing their status.  Only the sad history of African American slavery and of our nations past treatment of Native Americans bears any resemblance to this contradiction.  In those cases, our nation has rightly begun to repent of the lack of empathy which in our history has distorted our sense of justice.  Now it is time to pick up the banner and follow the angels of our better nature.  It is time to move legislation which reaches out to the stranger in our midst and to oppose legislation which merely punishes.  “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.”