Emigration represents a loss to those countries and families whose people are moving away. It presents challenges to receiving countries. The populations of Canada and the United States largely comprise immigrants, refugees and their descendants. If you go back far enough in history, perhaps some ancestors of every person on earth were migrants.
However, awareness of that reality does not prevent resentment against people who today are trying to find new homes and new hope. The current Canadian housing shortage is seen as partly due to increased immigration. Population growth increases the demand for schools, medical facilities and other services. Sometimes, jobless people resent newcomers who find employment in their region. Even more basic is a deep-seated suspicion of strangers.
The Catholic Church has offered teaching on issues raised by migration since at least the 1850s. Numerous religious orders arose in North America explicitly to help newcomers in various ways. Catholics themselves, including those from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe, faced persecution and contempt when they arrived in North America.
Migration is the main issue in the current American presidential election, and it will also be near the top of the list when Canadians go to the polls, likely next fall. The Church offers no set-in-stone policies for dealing with migration. Its documents support both a right to remain in place and a right to migrate. They say that countries have a right to regulate borders and control immigration as well as a responsibility — especially in wealthier nations — to receive those fleeing persecution, violence and poverty.
Pope Francis has been the Church’s most adamant advocate for migrants. He continually calls Christians to their responsibility to welcome the stranger and assist those who suffer. He denounces the populism that appeals to an instinct to shut the door on newcomers and also skewers liberal capitalism for treating people solely in terms of their economic value. Distrust and hatred of migrants is a sad tale that reverberates through history and explains, for example, the slavery on which the wealth of nations was based.
“Lack of concern for the vulnerable can hide behind a populism that exploits them demagogically for its own purposes, or a liberalism that serves the economic interests of the powerful,” the Pope wrote in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti. He urged us to “recover the shared passion to create a community of belonging and solidarity worthy of our time, our energy and our resources.”
Pope Francis frequently challenges what he calls the globalization of indifference. Demagogues can exploit an apathetic or intimidated population to exploit the human rights of those on society’s margins. But it goes further. Concern for the other is the key to overcoming our selfish individualism. A welcoming attitude to migrants is a matter of both justice and the soul.
The two cannot be separated. We cannot have justice in society unless our hearts overflow with mercy. If we want to “save our souls,” we must feed the hungry, visit prisoners and welcome strangers. We must undergo interior conversion and create social structures that ensure the dignity of the human person.
Numerous Christian congregations have sponsored immigrants and refugees. They have gone to great lengths to raise the resources needed to welcome the stranger, opening themselves to personal encounters that enrich their own lives. Service to others is a direct path to wisdom.
Pope Francis concluded Fratelli Tutti with a prayer that well expresses the attitudes and tasks we must adopt in fashioning a society of justice and care:
Lord, Father of our human family, you created all human beings equal in dignity: pour forth into our hearts a fraternal spirit and inspire in us a dream of renewed encounter, dialogue, justice and peace. Move us to create healthier societies and a more dignified world, a world without hunger, poverty, violence and war.
May our hearts be open to all the peoples and nations of the Earth.May we recognize the goodness and beauty that you have sown in each of us, and thus forge bonds of unity, common projects,and shared dreams. Amen.
(Glen Argan writes his online column Epiphany at https://glenargan.substack.com.)