As the US Catholic Bishops have repeatedly emphasized in response to questions concerning immigration, there are two relevant moral principles indicated in number 2241 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), both of which must be carried out, and neither of which can be ignored. Both of these are duties of good governance.

The first duty is:

“to welcome the foreigner out of charity and respect for the human person. Persons have the right to immigrate, and thus government must accommodate this right to the greatest extent possible, especially financially blessed nations: ‘The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.’”

The second duty is:

“to secure one’s border and enforce the law for the sake of the common good. Sovereign nations have the right to enforce their laws, and all persons must respect the legitimate exercise of this right: ‘Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.’”[1]

Any traditional natural-law analysis of this controversial issue must begin by admitting that here we have a fundamental collision of rights: the individual right of a person or family to immigrate, versus the right of a nation to secure its border and enforce immigration laws. The principles for resolving a collision of rights must be used in each case to decide whether a person’s right (or a family’s right) to immigrate should prevail over a nation’s right to exclude a person (or a family) for a good reason.

A right is a moral power of permission or protection, one that makes an appeal to others by reason. It is thus also a relation which grants someone power to do, to possess, or to exact something necessary for attaining the human good. Duties are correlative to rights and are the limitation of rights. The limitation is the point beyond which a right cannot be exercised without violating the right of another person (human, divine, corporate, or national). The right to immigrate thus has limitations.

Duty is defined as the moral obligation to do or to omit something. Conflicts can arise when one person has a moral power to do something and another person has the moral power to prevent it, or when two persons have the moral power to claim the same thing, or when one person has two incompatible duties to discharge at the same time or has a duty to one person to do something and a duty to another not to do it. Such moral conflicts are only apparent since moral rights and duties are derived from natural moral law, which is based on divine law and cannot contradict itself by commanding and forbidding the same thing.

In cases where there are apparent conflicts between moral rights or duties, the stronger right or duty prevails. Regarding the subject of the right, the closer relationship prevails. Regarding the term of the right, the greater common good and the wider social order prevail. Regarding the matter of the right, the graver matter and the greater urgency prevail. Regarding the title of the right (which is always the main consideration), the higher law and the clearer title prevail. Persons should use prudence when making these decisions and recognize that the negative duty of never doing anything intrinsically wrong still prevails over all else, since the stronger necessity changes the very nature of the act. When two colliding duties or rights seem to be equally strong, a person can then morally do either. For a complete description of the hierarchy of intrinsic moral values, consult any reliable Catholic manual of natural-law ethics, on resolving collisions of rights.

If the migrating person is a criminal or manifests a habitual unwillingness to obey civil laws, then he or she clearly has no right to immigrate and can morally be excluded from citizenship. But the Catholic position is that for normal law-abiding potential citizens who are seeking immigration legally for some serious reason, a wealthy nation has a moral duty to honor the natural right to immigrate to the greatest extent possible and thus make it legally possible for them to do so, unless there is a just cause in a particular case to conclude that the right does not prevail. Lack of education or skills is never in itself a sufficient moral reason to exclude people from citizenship.

There is of course a limit to the number of immigrants that a nation can reasonably absorb without significantly impeding the common good. But the common good must not be understood as maximum overall satisfaction or the collective level of comfort. Rather, it is the set of social conditions (education, employment, healthcare, protection, liberty, property, rule of law, religion, etc.) that enables all individuals and families to pursue and attain perfective goods, human virtues, and thus true happiness (not merely wealth, pleasure, power, or fame). Catholic social teaching does recognize and grant that whenever accepting more immigrants will clearly prevent a particular nation from meeting the basic human needs of its existing citizens, that nation is morally permitted to close its borders, but only by means which are humane and do not impose serious dangers on persons who have a moral right to immigrate for legitimate economic or political reasons.

With regard to humane means to close a nation’s borders, a Catholic can be either for or against them as either prudent or imprudent for the security of the nation and to keep out people such as criminals who have no right to immigrate. But as Catholics we must support immigration reform so that people who do have the natural moral right to immigrate are given a reasonable legal means by which to do so. The United States of America is not yet clearly in the position that accepting more law-abiding immigrants will effectively prevent the basic human needs of our existing citizens from being met, but there are other nations which clearly are in that position, and they have the right to close their borders.

“The US Catholic Bishops accept the legitimate role of the US government in intercepting unauthorized migrants who attempt to travel to the United States. The Bishops also believe that by increasing lawful means for migrants to enter, live, and work in the United States, law enforcement will be better able to focus upon those who truly threaten public safety: drug and human traffickers, smugglers, and would‐be terrorists. Any enforcement measures must be targeted, proportional, and humane.”[2]

As Catholics, we must always morally oppose border closures which use inhumane means of enforcement, but we can be either for or against a humane border closure and thus argue either for or against its prudence, so long as we are also supporting immigration reform and respecting the natural moral right of law-abiding individuals and families to immigrate in order to escape from harm and find work. Conservatives who maintain that as a nation we have the right to forbid immigration in general and thus protect our personal comfort and affluent lifestyle are morally wrong from the perspective of natural-law theory and Catholic social teaching. The basic human need of migrants to escape from harm and find work morally trumps our desire to protect our personal comfort and affluent lifestyle. Migrants have a moral claim on the surplus wealth of the host nation because that surplus wealth ought to be used to create jobs and provide a family wage for everyone, according to the Catholic doctrine of the universal destination and distribution of goods. Surplus wealth is defined as wealth over and above that which is needed to meet the possessor’s basic human needs.

Of course, no one has a moral claim on what a family needs to live and protect itself from harm. That is one reason why a national border is different from a wall or a fence built around a house to keep out intruders and protect a family. It is also true that wealthy families might build a wall or a fence around their property merely for the sake of greed and just let the poor families around them starve, which would certainly be immoral. The basic principle is that migrants and the poor who are willing to work and to obey civil laws have a moral right to be employed by the people and corporations who can afford to employ them. With surplus wealth come moral and social responsibilities.

In the case where a wealthy nation refuses to recognize its moral duty to provide for the legal immigration of families who have a manifest urgent need to immigrate, it becomes morally permissible for such families to immigrate illegally in order to escape from serious harm or to find a means to secure their basic human needs. St. Thomas Aquinas, among others, explains the basic moral principle which would be applicable in such a dire circumstance:

“Things which are of human right cannot derogate from natural right or divine right. Now according to the natural order established by divine providence, inferior things are ordained for the purpose of meeting human needs by their means. Thus the private possession of things, which is based on human law, does not preclude the fact that human needs have to be remedied by means of these very things. Hence whatever certain people have in superabundance is owed, by natural law, to the poor for the purpose of meeting their basic human needs. For this reason St. Ambrose says, ‘It is the hungry man’s bread that you withhold, the naked man’s cloak that you store away, and the money that you bury in the earth belongs to the poor man as the price of his ransom and freedom.’ Since there are many people who are in need, and it is impossible for all to be relieved by means of the same thing, each one is entrusted with the stewardship of his own property so that out of it he may come to the aid of those who are in need. Nevertheless, if the need be so manifest and urgent that it is evident that it must be remedied by whatever means are at hand (for instance when a person is in some imminent danger and there is no other possible remedy), then it is morally lawful for a person to relieve his own need by means of another’s property, by taking it either openly or secretly. In such a dire circumstance, taking the property of another is neither theft nor robbery.”[3]

Confronted with such a moral argument, many well-intentioned but uninformed people accuse those who offer it of moral relativism or utilitarianism or situation ethics, since the argument may seem to compromise a moral principle insofar as it may appear to conclude that the act of stealing is neither intrinsically evil nor always wrong. The same kind of accusation is often thrown at Pope Francis whenever he points out that knowledge of theoretical principles is insufficient for judging the good that must be done in concrete situations in order to assist the poor, the hungry, the ill, the imprisoned, the stranger, and those who are regarded as “rejects” by society.[4] But the accusation is false, and it is important to recognize that St. Thomas and Pope Francis are not endorsing any kind of moral relativism, utilitarianism, or situational ethics. Their claim is not that dire circumstances can justify performing an evil act, but that dire circumstances can change the moral object of the act so that it is no longer an evil act, given the necessity of respecting some higher moral duty or right. In dire circumstances, as St. Thomas argues, the act of taking another’s property, even secretly, in order to relieve one’s own need, is not an act of stealing and is in fact the morally right thing to do, because there is a stronger moral duty that prevails over the right to property. And as Pope Francis keeps reminding us, circumstantial conflicts of moral rights and duties must always be taken into consideration in evaluating the morality of acts which in the abstract would otherwise be morally wrong. Exceptions such as those indicated by St. Thomas and Pope Francis do not undermine the inviolability of moral rights.

In speaking of what is owed to the poor in justice, St. Thomas is also not calling for the creation of a welfare state; rather, he is calling for the use of surplus wealth to enable every person capable and willing to work to find gainful employment. Along these lines, it is not difficult to construct a compelling moral argument that the current US immigration system does not adequately provide for the legal immigration of families who have a manifest and urgent need to immigrate, and that many if not most of the people who are crossing our borders are in fact in such dire circumstances that they have a morally just reason to break our immigration laws and enter our country illegally. Most of them are simply ordinary people in desperate situations, not habitual criminals.

Given that this moral argument is sound, the corollary immediately follows that it would in fact be immoral to close the borders of our nation without also reforming the immigration system and thus providing for the legal immigration of people who have a manifest and urgent need to reside in the US. Closing the borders by humane means in order to keep out those who have no right to immigrate is morally permissible and necessary, but natural law also requires that legal provision be made for those who do have a manifest and urgent need to immigrate, in accord with a reasonable estimation of the number of immigrants which our nation could handle, and then some reasonable and efficient legal process must be offered to them. From the Catholic natural-law perspective, the urgency in the need to change the US immigration laws comes from the fact that they are currently unjust and are harming people in need and denying them the natural moral right to immigrate. The fact that political opportunists and socialists are invoking that human right for their own political ends must not distract us from the moral issue and the truth of the moral claim which economic immigrants have on the use of US surplus wealth for their employment.[5]

The doctrine of surplus wealth is not difficult to understand and is firmly established in Catholic social teaching, which insists that everyone has a right to suitable employment and a right to be paid a family wage, regardless of whether they have a family to support or not. A family wage is a very well-defined and heavily defended element of natural-law ethics. The moral claim is that society ought to promote the common good by creating social conditions that (1) enable every person capable and willing to work to find gainful employment, (2) ensure every worker a wage which will enable the workers and their dependents to eat adequately, to buy adequate clothes, and to own an adequate home, and (3) make every person reasonably secure in the savings which his or her thrift accumulates for retirement. Surplus wealth is the wealth that an individual or corporate person possesses over and above that which satisfies these basic family needs.

The natural human right to a family wage is the main reason why Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (1891) promoted unionization as a partial solution and why Pope Francis is now promoting a universal basic income. Due to the universal destination of goods, the private ownership of surplus wealth carries the moral and corporate social responsibility to use it to employ people who need employment and to pay them a family wage. These rights are based in human needs and cannot morally be ignored due to lack of citizenship. It is true that not everyone ought to be granted citizenship, but those who have a moral right to immigrate based on human need must be granted a reasonable path to citizenship in order to bring US immigration law in line with natural moral law. Most of the people being turned away by the current process are being denied their natural human right to immigrate, and the US Catholic Bishops are correct to point out that moral fact and call for a legal reform. It does not matter whose political agenda such a call to justice might support or contradict.

Any conscientious person born into poverty in Mexico (for example) and having a family there in desperate conditions would not hesitate to enter the US illegally in an attempt to find employment. Following the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas, it seems clear that such illegal actions in conditions of manifest and urgent need are not morally wrong. If there were in fact a reasonable legal process to allow people with manifest and urgent needs to immigrate, then it would be true that they ought not to enter the country illegally. But as things currently stand, people who want to become law-abiding US citizens and clearly have a manifest and urgent need to immigrate have no hope that the US will legally grant them permission to enter. The Catholic position is that legal permission to immigrate is owed to them as a matter of justice, not merely as an act of charity or compassion.

The collision of rights involved in this issue is primarily one of distributive justice, not of commutative or contributive justice. Commutative justice is what ought to hold between equals and is thus person to person, or state to state; it is the kind of justice that is the basis of contracts. Distributive justice is a relation from the community to its members and requires a fair and proper distribution of public benefits and burdens among the members of the community. This kind of justice is what ought to hold between a superior and subordinates, and it involves a distribution of goods that do not yet belong to individuals. When a government withholds these goods it is depriving individuals not of something that is theirs but of something that they ought to receive. Contributive justice is a relation from the members to the community and requires each individual person to contribute his proper share to the common good. In Catholic social teaching, a just society is one that attains justice on all three levels. Most societies unfortunately tend to emphasize one kind of justice to the exclusion of the others.

There is nothing communist or socialist or merely ideological about the natural-law position argued above. It is a moral argument. It does not deny the right to private property, as communism and socialism do. It is seeking to secure capital goods for as many families as possible, which is directly contrary to what communism and socialism seek. The Catholic position is that the right to private property is an important individual right but also that is conditional upon the universal destination of goods, as taught in the CCC and other places. It is not an inalienable right, which is what libertarians generally seem to think. Ownership of wealth brings with it moral duties to use it for the common good, and specifically for the benefit of those whose basic human needs are not being met, regardless of whether they are citizens.

Citizens and non-citizens alike have a moral right to employment with a family wage and thus have a moral claim on how surplus wealth is distributed. This basic conclusion follows necessarily from the requirements of distributive justice as understood in the Catholic tradition of natural-law ethics. In the US, the distribution of wealth and capital goods is clearly unjust even among those who already enjoy the benefits of citizenship. Most hard-working people in the US nowadays do not earn a family wage. Over 60 percent of US citizens have less than $500 available for emergencies. Most workers around the world still do not have any ownership or management of the capital goods that their labor is producing, which is a situation that continues to be contrary to corporate social ethics, as Catholic leaders like Ven. Fulton Sheen and St. John Paul II repeatedly pointed out and condemned. Socialism, however, is never the answer, even though socialists often agree with Catholic teaching that certain social conditions routinely created by laissez-faire capitalism are clearly unjust. The answer, as always, is found in the assiduous voluntary offering of suitable employment, a family wage, and private ownership of capital to all those who are willing and able to work. As Pope Francis put it in his 2022 Message for the 108^th World Day of Migrants and Refugees:

“Building the future with migrants and refugees also means recognizing and valuing how much each of them can contribute to the process of construction. I like to see this approach to migration reflected in a prophetic vision of Isaiah, which considers foreigners not invaders or destroyers, but willing laborers who rebuild the walls of the new Jerusalem, that Jerusalem whose gates are open to all peoples (cf. Is 60:10-11). In Isaiah’s prophecy, the arrival of foreigners is presented as a source of enrichment: ‘The abundance of the sea shall be brought to you, and the wealth of the nations shall come to you’ (Is 60:5). Indeed, history teaches us that the contribution of migrants and refugees has been fundamental to the social and economic growth of our societies. This continues to be true in our own day. Their work, their youth, their enthusiasm and their willingness to sacrifice enrich the communities that receive them. Yet this contribution could be all the greater were it optimized and supported by carefully developed programs and initiatives. Enormous potential exists, ready to be harnessed, if only it is given a chance.”[6]

Notes

[1] http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/immigration/churchteachingonimmigrationreform.cfm

[2] Ibid.

[3] Summa Theologiae II-II.66.7

[4] Cf. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/pont-messages/2021/documents/papa-francesco_20210323_messaggio-santalfonso.html

[5] Cf. http://www.usccb.org/about/migration-policy/current-policy-issues/index.cfm and https://justiceforimmigrants.org/

[6] https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/migration/documents/20220509-world-migrants-day-2022.html

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Image: US Mexico Border Wall. Adobe Stock. By Kurt