Mass immigration isn’t good for the US or our global neighbors

Is it selfish to oppose our de facto open-border policy and mass illegal immigration? Is it selfish to oppose high levels of immigration or even skilled immigration? Liberal-left messaging says yes to all, but attention to all of immigration’s moral questions reveals that charity toward our fellow citizens and our global neighbors demands that we drastically change our current approach.

It isn’t selfish to say our current policies are destructive to our country. Many blue-state residents have been further wakened to the reality that massive immigration’s costs will now be borne not merely by residents of places such as El Paso, Texas, but by them.

Parts of O’Hare Airport in Chicago last week were blocked off to house illegal immigrants. James Madison High School in Brooklyn was closed, and students were told they could access teachers online as the city sheltered almost 2,000 illegal immigrants from winter conditions. Though the migrants were removed, school remained out of session last Thursday, and the school’s Winter Wonderland dance was “postponed indefinitely.”

New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced he would ask “faith-based” groups and then private residents to pitch in since many people “are suffering right now because of economic challenges” and “have spare rooms” — presumably to rent. Massachusetts Governor Kim Driscoll also asked that residents take “migrants” into their own homes.

The lesson? Illegal aliens take priority over those who are here legally in blue America. Their ability to travel for work, send their kids to school, and live as they wish in their own homes is now either blocked or in doubt. It should be obvious that it is not “selfish” to say this is wrong and destructive. But thanks to the buses from Texas and Florida, blue-state residents are discovering that fact.

Yet the endless lecturing goes on. Perhaps it’s not good for us Americans, they say, but we must open our doors to the world. That’s to assume that it is good for the world that we take in everybody. To “think globally, act locally,” as the old liberal slogan says, should mean accounting for how policies affect our nation and the world.

Catholic social teaching has always included this reality, even if too many activists, academics, and even prelates miss it. Immigration is a right but not absolute. It gains in strength depending on the situation. Those persecuted have the greatest right. Those in economic need are second. Those doing well but desirous of more wealth have the weakest claims.

In a 1995 speech, Pope John Paul II said, “Illegal immigration should be prevented, but it is also essential to combat vigorously the criminal activities which exploit illegal immigrants.” Illegal immigration weakens the rule of law in both countries receiving and sending immigrants. It encourages trafficking, lower wages, and a culture of lawlessness.

But there’s more. We often focus on unskilled labor, but the other kind also poses moral problems. In his 1981 encyclical, “Laborem Exercens,” John Paul argued that though migration can be a “necessary evil,” we must remember that it “constitutes a loss for the country which is left behind.”

No pure individualist, John Paul talked about “the loss of a subject of work, whose efforts of mind and body could contribute to the common good of his own country, but these efforts, this contribution, are instead offered to another society which in a sense has less right to them than the person’s country of origin.”

We ignore this, even saying we should only “let in skilled workers.” But other countries can’t ignore it. Brain drain — the loss of skilled workers — hurts them. Last month, a Nigerian medical association met to decry and propose solutions to the loss of doctors post-residency.

It isn’t just medicine. In India, a study last year of the 1,000 highest scorers in the 2010 joint entrance exams to the Indian Institutes of Technology found that “36% migrated abroad, and of the top 100 scorers, 62% left the country.” As in Nigeria, concerted government efforts to lure back talented natives have met with some success.

Some immigration will always be a fact of life, but the present nature and scale of ours is destabilizing to our country, to the countries losing population, and ultimately to the world. As the saying goes, good fences make good neighbors. If we want to be good neighbors to fellow Americans and the global village, we must mend our fences and limit who and how many people we let through them.