Immigration, deportation, and Catholic principles: 21 points
[toward an argument against mass deportation]
For reasons that will be obvious to many readers, I’ve been hoping for some time now to write sooner rather than later about immigration and deportation from a Catholic perspective. Since I am aware of no one source that draws together and covers everything I’d like to explore in a popular yet thorough way, I wanted to write a careful, in-depth longread crafting an argument against indiscriminate or mass deportation in particular, drawing extensively on papal and magisterial documents, sources from Catholic tradition, and principles of Catholic moral theology.
Unfortunately, the reality at the moment is that teaching both university and high school in the fall put me in a hole I’m still digging out from, and the kind of in-depth writing that I like to do will have to wait awhile. I tend to be a perfectionist, and in practice I often let the best become the enemy of the good.
But not today, I hope.
Here is a first stab at my argument: not the sprawling, polished essay I hoped to write, but a hopefully useful outline of some key concepts in Catholic Social Teaching and moral theology relevant to the topics of immigration and deportation. A work in progress, certainly—one I may amend in the days or weeks ahead—and perhaps a sketch for the full argument I still hope to complete.1 Feedback, criticism, and suggestions are welcome!
The common good is the outcome toward which the whole of Catholic Social Teaching2 is ordered. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines the common good as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily” (CCC 1906). Human beings are social creatures, and the well-being of each is connected to that of all. The Catechism identifies three essential elements in the common good:
Respect for the human person. The dignity and sanctity of the human person is the first and most essential principle of Catholic Social Teaching. “In the name of the common good, public authorities are bound to respect the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person.… In particular, the common good resides in the conditions for the exercise of the natural freedoms indispensable for the development of the human vocation” (CCC 1907).
The social well-being and development of the group. “Development is the epitome of all social duties. Certainly, it is the proper function of authority to arbitrate, in the name of the common good, between various particular interests; but it should make accessible to each what is needed to lead a truly human life: food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on” (CCC 1908).
Peace, i.e., the stability and security of a just order. “Authority should ensure by morally acceptable means the security of society and its members. It is the basis of the right to legitimate personal and collective defense” (CCC 1909).
Catholic teaching affirms the universal destination of created goods, which means that God has created the world and all of its resources for the benefit of the entire human race. This primordial gift of creation to all of humanity does not negate private property or national borders, but in Catholic thought these latter principles are rooted in, and secondary to, the primary reality of the universal destination of goods.
The family is the natural and original society and the fundamental unit of all human society. Communities and nations exist for the sake of the family, not the other way around. As a rule, families are not self-sufficient; to the extent that families need help and support from one another and, as needed, from larger communities, we are all indebted to one another. This is the foundation and rationale for communities and nations.
Private property is rooted in work. Because the goods of the earth are enjoyed only through labor, it is natural for each person and each family to have the right to the fruits of their own work. The principle of private property is not absolute; in Catholic thought, we are stewards rather than masters of our property, obliged to consider the needs of others, beginning with our families.
A right to live in one’s own country or homeland, i.e., a right not to migrate, is rooted in the dignity of the human person, the primacy of family, the ties of community, the principle of private property, and the necessity of peace and security, among other factors. People are not property of the state, and the state cannot dispossess people of their rightful connection to their homeland and deport them to another land that is not their home.
This right not to be deported from one’s homeland strikes me as the best context in which to understand a much-debated passage in Pope St. John Paul’s landmark encyclical Veritatis Splendor. In an extended quotation from the Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution Gaudium et Spes, John Paul II lists “deportation” among various evils from homicide to degrading work conditions. Going beyond Gaudium et Spes, John Paul II emphatically characterizes these acts, including deportation, as “intrinsically evil.”3 This has raised questions regarding how deportation can be considered “intrinsically evil.” After all, strictly speaking, criminal extraditions are a form of deportation that the Church supports; and it can’t be supposed that the Holy Father intends to condemn deporting those who cross borders with criminal intent, or recently arrived migrants who commit serious crimes! Various attempts have been made to qualify the “deportation” intended in the Holy Father’s encyclical, with varying degrees of plausibility. I think the most natural reading, and the one most clearly grounded in Church teaching on immigration and deportation, is that the deportation that removes a person from their homeland is rightly condemned as “intrinsically evil.”4
Deporting migrants from a country that is not their homeland, and returning them to their homeland—i.e., involuntary repatriation—is thus permissible in some cases, as in the examples above. In other cases, such involuntary repatriation may be extrinsically evil, based on factors other than homeland rights (see, e.g., 11, 15 and 16 below).
The “homeland” to which one has a moral claim is not necessarily the land of one’s birth, nor is it necessarily defined by legal nationality or citizenship or lack thereof. For example, consider a person who was born in the United States, but was then raised from infancy in another country without ever setting foot in the US. Under the 14th Amendment, such people enjoy birthright citizenship—but this is a legal right granted by the state, not an inalienable moral or human right. On the other hand, consider a person who was born in another country but raised from infancy in the US without ever living in any other country. While the US does not automatically grant citizenship rights to such people, morally speaking they have the same inalienable right to the US as their homeland as anyone who has lived here since birth. These are extreme cases, but they serve to establish the principle that the homeland to which one has a moral right is not established by birth location or nationality laws.
The right to live in one’s homeland is not forfeited by lawless or criminal actions. When a person commits serious crimes in their homeland necessitating incarceration, it is both normal and just to incarcerate them in their own land, where family, loved ones, and advocates have access to them. If a person commits crimes abroad, in a country not their own, it may be necessary for them to be incarcerated abroad, or they may be deported back to their home country. In the most extreme cases, if a person commits acts of terror or treason against their own country, it might be justified to remove them to a military camp such as Guantánamo Bay, or perhaps even to deport them to another country to which, by their treasonous actions, they showed their true loyalty. Short of these extremes, even grave criminal actions do not justify removing a person from their rightful homeland.
Individuals and families have a right to freedom of movement, both to travel within their home country in pursuit of better opportunities to provide for their needs and also, when necessary, to emigrate from their country in search of better opportunities elsewhere. Nations cannot forbid the emigration of citizens, who, again, are not their property.5
The right to emigrate from one’s own country implies a relative right to immigrate to other countries. In other words, the right to emigrate implies an obligation on the part of other countries, particularly the “more prosperous” ones, “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” (CCC 2241). This is particularly the case for refugees fleeing violence or poverty and lack of opportunity.
Nations have the right, and to an extent the obligation, to control their borders. This is necessary for the defense of security and peace, and includes the right to establish just criteria for regulating migration. The Church does not advocate “open borders.”
Authority of law should be respected. Migrants are obliged to respect the laws of the country in which they reside as well as the laws regulating entry to other countries.
Illegal immigration should be prevented, particularly in view of the attendant evils of human trafficking and the exploitation of immigrants. Notably, in contrast to some American Catholic voices, Pope St. John Paul II in his 1996 message on undocumented migrants discusses illegal immigration more as a social problem to be “prevented” by the state than a moral or legal offense committed by scofflaw immigrants. In other words, his concern is on migrants more as potential victims to be protected than as criminals to be punished.6
An unjust law is no law at all.7 For example, if a wealthy country with the capacity to accept at least some refugees suspends all refugee admissions indefinitely, or makes capricious exceptions that ignore the hardships of the most needy, a case can be made that this law imposes no binding moral obligation on refugees in dire need not to enter the country without permission.
In cases of sufficiently grave necessity, even just state laws relating to private property and regulation of borders are not always morally binding. For example, the Church defines “theft” as taking another person’s property against the reasonable will of the owner. It is well established in Catholic teaching that a person who can afford the loss of property cannot reasonably deny it to someone who needs it urgently for his own immediate needs and who has no other way to provide for himself—so much so that if the person in urgent need takes what he needs without permission, this is not the sin of theft.8 Likewise, a person fleeing violence or grave economic hardship who crosses an international border without permission due to lack of adequate legal alternatives commits no sin.
Irregular immigration status does not deprive immigrants of their fundamental human dignity or their right to humane treatment by the state.9 Lack of documentation does not absolve Christians from the ordinary debts of charity and solicitude that we owe to one another, nor does it exempt the Church from its calling to serve the poor.
Irregular immigration status alone does not call for an enforcement-first approach. Pope John Paul II emphasizes that the “poverty and misfortune” of even undocumented immigrants calls us to come “generously to their aid.” Rather than seeking to punish their illegal actions, he says first of all that “it is important to help illegal migrants to complete the necessary administrative papers to obtain a residence permit,” and advocates charitable institutions such as the Church working with authorities to “seek appropriate, lawful solutions to various cases.” Only in cases where “no solution is foreseen” does he contemplate directing undocumented migrants “either to seek acceptance in other countries, or to return to their own country.” While the Holy Father does not clarify the sort of conditions under which no solution might be foreseen, the emphasis is clearly on trying to find solutions to aid undocumented migrants rather than leading with a law-enforcement approach to them as criminals.
Homeland rights are not limited only to the clearest cases of those who have only ever lived in one country and have no home anywhere else. Migrants who travel as children, teens, or adults can come to belong to their new land as surely as those who have never lived anywhere else. Factors mentioned by John Paul II include length of stay and rootedness in the local community, particularly when children are involved. The Holy Father emphatically rejects “administrative regulations” that “unjustifiably forc[e] into an illegal situation people whose right to live with their family cannot be denied by any law.” Where immigrants have a rightful claim on the US as their homeland, that right must be respected. Even if they commit crimes warranting incarceration, they should be imprisoned here, where family, loved ones, and advocates have access.
These complexities necessarily entail elements of fuzziness and subjectivity, which is simply to say the issues here are like most of human life. I don’t propose, in any version of this piece, to lay out criteria for determining definitively who can claim the US as their homeland and who cannot. But all reasonable human beings should be able to agree that on clear-cut extremes between which lines must be drawn. For example:
A legal migrant who has lived in the US for, say, six months and has been convicted of violent crimes is a reasonable candidate for deportation.
When a couple at the time of their deportation had lived in my state of New Jersey for more than 30 years with no criminal record (other than illegal entry) after fleeing poverty and violence in Mexico as young adults, and were married homeowners with a family business and three children ages 15 to 22, deporting them was the opposite of justice. Deportations like this serve no good purpose and inflict great harm (among other things, forcing their middle child to put her college studies on hold to work in order to try to save the family home, though mercifully also occasioning the kind of heroic community response that sometimes leavens terrible tragedies and great wrongs).10
Given the unavoidably complex nature of individual cases, a policy of mass deportation inevitably means mass injustice.11 It means uprooting people from homes and lives to which they have inalienable rights and shipping them to countries where in many cases they will have no one and nothing. It means tearing apart families and harming communities, in many cases with significant economic costs for local businesses and economies. The more aggressive the policy and the wider the net, the more mistakes and bad decisions, and the graver the harm.
Some resources
Pope Pius XII, Exsul Familia Nazarethana (Apostolic Constitution, 1952)
Gaudium et Spes (Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution, 1964)
Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (Encyclical Letter, 1993)
Pope John Paul II, Undocumented Migrants (Message for World Migration Day, 1996)
Pope John Paul II, On Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees (Address to the Fourth World Congress, 1998)
Pope Benedict XVI, Migrations: Pilgrimage of Faith and Hope (Message for World Migration Day, 2013)
Pope Francis, 2025 letter to U.S. bishops (regarding the Trump administration’s planned mass deportation efforts and Vice President JD Vance’s remarks about immigration and the ordo amoris)
You might think this piece is long enough as it is! In the first place, though, I had to trick myself into writing this much by planning to write a short, quick piece. In the second place, this is nothing! You should see how long I can go when I really get going.
For those unfamiliar with the term Catholic Social Teaching, and especially for those who think the Church should have nothing to say about political topics, from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
It is a part of the Church’s mission “to pass moral judgments even in matters related to politics, whenever the fundamental rights of man or the salvation of souls requires it. The means, the only means, she may use are those which are in accord with the Gospel and the welfare of all men according to the diversity of times and circumstances.” …
“Christian revelation … promotes deeper understanding of the laws of social living.” The Church receives from the Gospel the full revelation of the truth about man. When she fulfills her mission of proclaiming the Gospel, she bears witness to man, in the name of Christ, to his dignity and his vocation to the communion of persons. She teaches him the demands of justice and peace in conformity with divine wisdom.
“The Church’s social teaching comprises a body of doctrine, which is articulated as the Church interprets events in the course of history, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, in the light of the whole of what has been revealed by Jesus Christ. This teaching can be more easily accepted by men of good will, the more the faithful let themselves be guided by it.” (CCC 2246, 2420–2422)
How emphatically? Here’s how John Paul II introduces the quotation from Lumen Gentium mentioning deportations:
Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature “incapable of being ordered” to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image. These are the acts which, in the Church's moral tradition, have been termed “intrinsically evil” (intrinsece malum): they are such always and per se, in other words, on account of their very object, and quite apart from the ulterior intentions of the one acting and the circumstances. Consequently, without in the least denying the influence on morality exercised by circumstances and especially by intentions, the Church teaches that “there exist acts which per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object”. The Second Vatican Council itself, in discussing the respect due to the human person, gives a number of examples of such acts: …
This interpretation would include, for example, the immoral expulsion of medieval Jews from various nations, including France and England, in which they had long resided.
Obviously the right to travel both within one’s country and to emigrate to another country is curtailed in the case of convicted criminals during a period of incarceration or parole, etc.
This is presumably because Church leaders understand that many people who would gladly migrate legally if they could are driven to illegal entry by urgent necessity.
Lex iniusta non est lex (an unjust law is no law at all) is an aphorism associated with Saints Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Pope Leo XIII, and Pope John Paul II, among many others.
On the contrary, St. Basil the Great, among others, goes so far as to say that the one with clothing or goods he doesn’t need who fails to share it with the needy is the one guilty of theft! By the same token, the nation that can accommodate refugees in need but refuses to do so defrauds them of the right of entry that is truly theirs.
In theory, of course, this should go without saying. In practice, many Americans effectively believe that people who are here illegally have essentially no rights and that we have no oligations of any kind to them.
This is not most unjust deportation in recent US history. I assume at this point in the argument that the reader accepts the injustice of deporting a family man who has lived here from young childhood (in that particular case, thankfully, the unjust decision was eventually reversed). There are many other terrible cases as well.
Mass deportation is, in fact, another proposed interpretation of Pope John Paul’s condemnation of “deportation” as intrinsically evil. I prefer my interpretation that what is intrinsically evil is deporting people from the homeland in which they have a right to live, but certainly on either interpretation mass deportation means mass injustice.
A niggle, perhaps but there is not agreement on birthright citizenship.