Archbishop: Catholics Are Rebelling Against Church’s Pro-Migration Policies

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, talks during an interview with the Associa
AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino
Neil Munro

Catholics are rebelling against their religious leaders’ pro-migration policies, and the Catholic leadership must set them straight, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York said in an interview on December 21 with the Catholic-run Center for Migration Studies (CMS).

“We were about ready — [with] Catholic Charities — a year ago to turn that [empty New York City] school into a school for immigrant kids, who would come in, and we’d help them with their English. We would help them get up to speed when it comes to their eventual insertion into one of our schools,” the Catholic Cardinal said.

 

“And the people in that parish … rebelled and said, “Absolutely not, we will not have them here,” said Dolan, who watches over the massive government-funded, migrant-delivery process operated by the legally independent Catholic Charities USA.

Dolan also dismissed criticism from “bigots” in Congress and asserted that he and other bishops get “hate mail … saying, ‘We’re tired of you bishops being hung up about the immigrants, and we’re not going to support you anymore.'”

“This is part of our Catholic responsibility to do this, and this is part of that pro-life ethic that gives a lot of flavor to our evangelical witness,” he said, adding, “I am honored to receive criticism and to be maligned for defense of the immigrant.”

Not “everybody who wants high immigration is guilty of the sin of pride, but that sure seems to be the case here,” Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, responded.

The Bishops “think expressing their views on broad political issues is at least as important — if not more important — than actually preaching the Gospel,” he said:

They’re making the mistake about “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” … If there is somebody who shows up in front of your church and they’re hungry, [charitably] feeding them is perfectly appropriate. But trying to change [government] policy so that there are more hungry people [delivered to] your church door is very different. That’s the [doctrinal] mistake they’re making.

“It’s a very superficial and poorly thought approach to the issue, but I think it’s sincere,” he added.

Dolan is determined to overcome his parishioners’ growing, rational, and decent opposition to the government-run migration flood.

“Those two things…I have found effective in kind of breaking down this terrible Berlin Wall [between Bishops and parishioners] that’s existing in us getting anywhere,” Dolan said as he explained how he tries to get his parishioners to support the government’s economic policy of Extraction Migration:

I tried to reason with them, to go back in history, and to say this is exactly what your parents, your grandparents, and your great-grandparents faced. It was the same thing. And gradually they began to recall the stories and they said, “Oh, that’s right. … We remembered when the Irish pastor made us Italians go downstairs for mass, and that being the main church.” I’m not saying I was eminently successful here, but I could see the ice begin to melt and the people sort of saying, “Oh, that’s right. We are immigrants, too. We are children and grandchildren of immigrants, and that’s what makes our country great.

“We do need to be reminded of our history,” echoed Nicholas DiMarzio, Dolan’s pro-migration colleague and a bishop emeritus of Brooklyn, New York. U.S.-born citizens are born with an unchangeable immigrant identity, he stated: “I think that we have to constantly remind [parishioners] people of where they came from, that we all are immigrants here. No one has a right to be here. We came as immigrants to a country where there were Indians before immigrants.”

“I’m not an immigrant,” responded Marguerite Telford, a U.S.-born citizen and a Catholic who works with Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies. “If I moved to France, would I become an immigrant-immigrant?” she scoffed, adding:

I don’t understand why they would want to take away the significance of my citizenship and label me an immigrant — and my children and grandchildren!  — when that does not fit who I am. What does this [redefinition] have to do with theology?

DiMarzio also posited that migration is good for the United States:

The benefits of immigration to our country need to be emphasized. People don’t see that. Again, the negativity is that “they’re taking away [resources].” Well, they give more than they take when all is said and done. To analyze it properly, economically, we get people that are already grown, somewhat educated, some very educated, and it doesn’t cost us anything. We benefit as a country.

“Does that sound like a church statement?” Telford responded: “It’s good for the economy, and you need to do this.” Does that make any sense coming from the pulpit? … It is not doctrine, and we do not have to agree with them on this:

In contrast, Dolan claimed that national political and economic debates are unrelated to Catholics’ religious duty to help migrants:

We have to distinguish between the political and the economic and security issues, which are big time and which are broken and which are scandalous and which deserves criticism, whether it comes to the right or the left, and which desperately needs to be fixed. We have to distinguish between that and loving and caring for the people that are here, who have really nothing to do with that.

“When you greet the Iraqi family at the airport, you get a warm feeling that you’re helping people,” Krikorian responded. But Dolan and the Bishops are downplaying the case-and-effect links between migration and the nation’s economy, Krikorian noted:

The fourth person on the video was Kerry Robinson, the president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA. The charity accepts government funds to help move huge numbers of illegal migrants via its 168 aid centers into Americans’ communities, housing, workplaces, and already-crowded K-12 schools. Robinson dismissed public criticisms of her government-funded focus on migrants:

I have seen firsthand the services that our border agencies provide to migrants. It is demanding, relentless, noble, and I would say holy work.

After migrants have been processed by the federal government and permitted to enter the country, federal authorities often bring them to one of our respite centers, where they receive a nourishing meal, access to a shower, a change of clothes, a safe place to sit, to sleep … [and] navigate transportation systems so that they can travel to their destination cities.

“It is not political, and it should not be controversial,” she insisted.

But in October, Robinson admitted that poverty and homelessness are growing amid President Joe Biden’s migration:

There are roughly 4 million affordable homes available nationally for 11 million extremely low-income renter households. That’s a shortage of 7 million affordable housing units. That’s catastrophic … [and] child poverty increased from 5.2 percent in 2021 to 12.4 percent in 2022—the largest single-year increase since 2010.

The Bishop’s pro-migration policies are bad economics and harmful to their parishioners and to ordinary Americans, Telford said.

By supporting the government’s policy of importing more wage-cutting, rent-spiking workers, “they’re making it difficult for Catholics to have large families,” she said. “Yet then they turn around and say, ‘Oh, we need to bring in more workers for the economy.'”

The Bishops “don’t understand [the pocketbook impact of migration] because they’re not economists,” and their lack of understanding will help make Catholic parishioners poorer and less able to fund charity, Telford said.

In political debates about economics and resources, “there’s always winners and losers; there’s always costs and benefits,” Krikorian said. “The black and white thinking that is appropriate in asserting [religious] doctrine [about good and evil] is not appropriate in these kinds of [political compromise] situations”:

Dolan is touting his pro-migration policy, which is growing as the public increasingly opposes Biden’s invitation to millions of economic migrants.

In New York, 62 percent of Catholics described legal migration as a burden, and just 27 percent describe it as a benefit, according to an October poll by Siena College for the New York Times. A majority of Americans say migration is an invasion as the public rejects the Cold War-era narrative that declared the United States a “Nation of Immigrants.”

“Something does feel different now from what we have seen in the past 25 years or so,” admitted C. Mario Russell, the executive director of the pro-migration CMS group and the host for Dolan’s video. He told Dolan, stating, “Perhaps it’s a gradual letting go of empathy or compassion as an imperative. Or perhaps it’s the choice just to ignore … [a prior] shared self-understanding of ourselves as a ‘Nation of Immigrants'”:

The criticism is growing because Biden’s almost-open borders policy cuts American wages, inflates housing costs, and pushes Americans away from good jobs in coastal cities, such as Dolan’s New York City.

In 2023, Biden’s pro-migration deputies welcomed roughly 3.2 million economic migrants over America’s southern border. He also imported roughly 2 million legal immigrants and short-term visa workers. That huge inflow was greater than the number of girls and boys born to Americans during the year:

Migration diverts taxpayers’ aid from young and sick Americans, job-creating investment from Heartland states, economic opportunities from poor and minority groups, and also imposes huge costs on communities and poor counties.

The policy also favors landlords and migrants over American families, who lose the income to afford to have children. It transfers wealth to older investors from the younger employees, who lose wages and productivity-boosting investment, and it widens wealth gaps, especially in Dolan’s New York City.

Many employers are eager to hire healthy, hard-working, and compliant migrants instead of by-the-book American professionals, or the unwanted, drug-tainted, disabled, sometimes criminal, and often uncooperative Americans found at the lower end of the labor force:

Migration allows the government and investors to divorce themselves from the neediest people and to avoid painful “big time” policy decisions, such as birth declines or the remedy for education gaps in population groups. For example, Biden’s government does little to block the deadly drug inflow from Mexico because it prioritizes deals on migration policy. Similarly, business has less incentive to support education reforms or drug eradication programs because migrants can fill the jobs abandoned by drug addicts and school dropouts:

The migration policy also retards the science, productivity, and innovation that is needed for U.S. prosperity and weakens the strong middle class that is needed to balance the political power of the wealthy, especially in Dolan’s city of New York.

The wealth-shifting policy favors D.C. politics over truth-telling. For example, investors fund the pro-migration advocacy groups that insist that migrants are fleeing violence — even though many migrants openly say they are economic migrants in search of better jobs in U.S. workplaces. “Many of us that are coming over are just wanting to work. … Some of us are professionals. We aren’t thieves. We aren’t violent thugs. Just give us an opportunity,” a Venezuelan migrant told the Washington Post in May 2023.

The Biden policy also helps the armed cartels gain more wealth and smuggle more deadly drugs to U.S. addicts. The federal policy also extracts human resources from poor countries to stimulate the investors’ share of the U.S. consumer economy, expands poverty in migrants’ home countries, reduces wealth-generating trade, and strengthens anti-democratic dictators:

Biden’s migration splits a myriad of foreign families, expands the U.S. child-labor economy, and also kills thousands of foreign migrants. “There were two images of his treacherous journey north that he couldn’t get out of his head,” Albinson Linares from Telemundo.com wrote in January 2023 about a Venezuelan migrant named Johan Torres, who crossed through the Darién Gap in Panama:

The first was how a [migrant] person who resisted a robbery in Mexico was killed with a machete; the other happened in the jungle, when he saw a man leave behind his young daughter, waist-deep in mud. “He left her there, lying in the mud and crying. And I couldn’t do anything because I was dying of exhaustion. But I can’t forget that.”

Dolan, however, insisted that observant Catholics must support more illegal migration.

“I have a duty and a sacred responsibility to welcome and defend the immigrant,” Dolan insisted. “This is not some option. This is not some hobby. I have a duty to do that. … [It] is part of our moral heritage.”

“The Roman [Catholic] church is a hierarchical institution, and the hierarchs are used to having their way,” Krikorian responded. “In this country, Catholics are Americans, and they’re going to decide for themselves what they want to do.”

The Bishops’ pro-migration policies are “very, very divisive, and right now, we’ve got enough divisive things in the church and with people in general,” Telford said.

Dolan “should consider sitting down … and find out why so many disagree with him on immigration,” Telford said, adding, “Perhaps he is living in a bubble surrounded by [pro-]immigration activists.”

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