On May 17, 1954, The U.S. Supreme Court issued Brown v. Board of Education, a historic decision striking down the “separate but equal” doctrine that allowed for white-only and black-only schools. The decision created an uproar in the South. In Little Rock, the school superintendent sought to conform to the Court’s decision, working out a plan for integration. Local resistance hardened. Community groups organized, promising to turn out protesters to prevent black students from entering white schools. It all came to a head in September 1957. White protesters created an atmosphere of intimidation. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus expressed sympathy for their efforts to prevent integration. President Dwight Eisenhower ordered federal troops to escort nine black students into Little Rock’s Central High School as a white mob shouted insults and skirmished with the authorities.

The organized resistance to racial integration was not limited to Little Rock. In the 1960s, Boston public school administrators disobeyed orders to develop a plan to integrate the city’s schools. By the early 1970s, courts became involved and judges imposed a busing plan. Protests ensued, often devolving into riots and fights between white and black students.

The famous battles over civil rights concerned a fundamental principle of justice, the rights due to all citizens. However, they were also tests of America’s rule of law. Those who opposed integration ignored court decisions, civil rights legislation, and administrative rulings to ensure that the decisions and laws were put into force. Some went into the streets to reverse the results produced by our system of government. The goal was to so befoul the public square with bitterness and rancor that officials would back down.

The organized resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis follows the pattern of Little Rock. There was no internet in the 1950s. Community groups organized with leaflets and meetings. Today, the organizing is done on Signal, an app with secure privacy protections. Immigrant rights organizations take the lead. They form group chats. Participants monitor ICE movements, calling for protesters to assemble at a moment’s notice. Their objective is simple: to foment resistance and prevent the federal government from enforcing immigration laws in their city.

Writing for the Free Press, Olivia Reingold reports on anti-ICE activities in Minneapolis. A nonprofit leader told her that “the average participants in these Signal groups are church members, retirees, and parents.” In other words, they’re “really mainstream normies.” The same could have been said of those who opposed integration in Little Rock. It was certainly true of parents who rioted in opposition to busing in Boston.

The activists in Minneapolis may be “mainstream normies,” but they are insisting that the duly elected Donald Trump has no authority in their neighborhoods. Reingold reports a telling chant: “Whose streets? Our streets. Whose streets? Our streets.” I can imagine white Boston parents echoing the chant as they insulted police officers and threw refuse at them, behavior very much in evidence in Minneapolis.

Some uphold the right of the Trump administration to enforce America’s immigration laws, while criticizing the unseemly zeal and unnecessary use of force. Plenty of moderates did the same during the uproars over racial integration. Constrained as he was by respect for the rule of law, Orval Faubus himself tried to find a way to make at least a show of integration in Arkansas, until it became evident that voters would punish him severely. The same is true for the mayors of Minneapolis, Portland, New York, and other blue cities. Political survival requires them to denounce the Trump administration and side with the proponents of nullification.

Reingold quotes Thomas Brophy, an ICE official: “As a United States citizen, you don’t have the luxury to pick and choose which laws you want to follow and when you want to follow them.” Our history suggests otherwise. There are times when mobs rule. Many look back on the Boston busing plan as misguided, and after the 1970s, mandatory busing fell out of favor. To a great degree, the white Boston parents won that battle. The uproar was politically damaging to the civil rights cause. Judges became more circumspect, and federal government retreated.

Will the progressive white “normies” in Minneapolis (and they are almost all white) succeed after the fashion of white Boston parents? Can they prevent the executive branch of the federal government from enforcing in their cities the laws that they reject?

I think not. The Trump administration’s policies of border enforcement and deportation emerge from an electoral mandate. Promising to close the border and deport illegal aliens has been a central element of Trump’s political success. For this reason, the organized resistance to ICE in Minneapolis and elsewhere is counter-majoritarian. Which means that the success or failure of efforts to nullify American immigration law will be settled in the court of public opinion, not in our nation’s courtrooms.

AP Photo/Adam Gray

The post From Little Rock to Minneapolis appeared first on First Things.

I am and continue to be shocked at how extensive it is. You see, the Minnesota I grew up in—moderate governors, fiscal discipline, nonpartisan and highly effective government—is how I still remember the state. Yes, it has always leaned left, but it was not culturally left. That state is now gone, and in its place is something wholly different. 

Trust is vital to the functioning of a society, and we feel its absence palpably in cities and regions that lack it. When I grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, we rarely locked our front door. The thought that someone would randomly come into our house to steal or hurt us was not on the menu of possibilities. Likewise, Minnesotans have historically had high trust in government because it was effective and transparent. 

Broken public trust is not easy to fix, but the real damage of fraud is that it corrodes the ability of government to do what it should. Progressives, who have an expansive view of government’s role in our lives, stand to lose the most from declining trust in government, yet they also appear to be the least concerned.

The uncovered fraud is not the work of Machiavellian masterminds. Quite the opposite: It was occurring in broad daylight. How was it permitted? Hannah Arendt, drawing on the Augustinian idea of evil as privation, argued that many of the evil actors in the Nazi regime had motives that were banal, that is, that the actors who carried out the evil deeds of Auschwitz were not driven by sinister motives but rather more mundane ones. Adolf Eichmann, the focus of Arendt’s book, was a shallow character. His head was filled with cliched slogans, and he seems to have been mostly concerned about career advancement. Arendt’s frightening conclusion is that Eichmann acted more like a bureaucrat than a demon.

The cast of political leaders who seemingly enabled the massive fraud in Minnesota are, likewise, shallow caricatures of the actual virtues they pretend to possess. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Gov. Tim Walz, and Rep. Ilhan Omar crusade in the name of justice, compassion, and diversity, but behind their transparently thin facade are operators who have learned how to use guilt, fear, and power to manipulate Minnesotans to advance their own interests while the state continues to slide toward dysfunction. 

Minnesota was a state ripe for corruption because it is a state where progressive ideology and politics have become deeply rooted in the past couple decades, though primarily in the Twin Cities metro area. Historically, the Minnesota Democratic Party, called the Democratic Farmer Labor Party, performed well in rural areas and in the mining country of Northern Minnesota. Tim Walz is a master of evoking the aesthetics of the old DFL, with his talk of fixing cars and pheasant hunting. But most Minnesotans don’t buy it, which is why the DFL is now an urban party in a sea of red. 

Still, even in the red parts of Minnesota there is a communitarian ethos of taking care of all members of society, a part of the Lutheran-Scandinavian DNA of the state that persists.  This humanitarian and compassionate concern, while one of the great strengths of the state, can easily be exploited. Thinking the best of everyone and having a general desire to benefit all its members can easily lapse into naivete. 

On top of that, and perhaps more powerfully, in a white state like Minnesota, concerns about racism are particularly acute. If your ideology emphasizes diversity and acceptance, but you live in a homogeneous society, there is a not-so-latent guilt that makes one vulnerable to race-grifters. Democratic politicians and the Somali community have exploited that vulnerability to great effect. 

Progressives argue for an extensive and ever-expanding welfare state that addresses all issues from cradle to grave. They are fiercely opposed to borders and believe in a universal, cosmopolitan vision of all humanity flourishing together. When it comes to Democratic leadership in Minnesota, however, their community-oriented rhetoric functions as a mask for naked self-interest and corruption. They resist the investigations currently underway not because of some high-minded principle, but because it is a threat to their stranglehold on Minnesota government.

The dirty little secret is that for all their talk of the public good, progressives do not have a conception of the common good, because their conception of justice is rooted in a hierarchy of victimhood. When one pulls back the rhetorical layers of leftist ideologues one finds a constellation of ideas that are wholly anathema to public good of cities, states, or nation. If politics is about cultivating and maintaining those public goods that are essential for the thriving of a political community, the political policies of Minnesota Democrats have only undermined that basic principle. Identity politics focuses only on difference, what sets us apart, and not on what binds us together.

Walz and Democratic leaders in the state refuse to take any responsibility for the massive fraud that is being uncovered. Instead, they accuse Trump and the U.S. attorneys of some malicious plot to attack Minnesota, portraying themselves as victims. Even as the evidence mounts against Minnesota Democratic leaders, they seem intent on making their banality clear for all to see.

The post The Banality of Minnesota Fraud appeared first on First Things.

Previous administrations have been hostile to Maduro. Obama sanctioned some of his close associates. Both Trump and Biden put a bounty on his head. Sending special forces to Caracas was certainly a dramatic escalation. But anyone who read the recently released and much-discussed National Security Strategy could have predicted it. 

The document reasserts America’s Monroe Doctrine, which for two hundred years has justified American dominance of the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela had become the lynchpin of resistance to that dominance in Latin America and, through alliances with China, Russia, and Iran, a challenge to American interests in the wider world. Trump decided that the United States needed to take stern measures to overthrow Maduro and bring Venezuela and its oil reserves into America’s orbit.

I’ll leave it to experts to debate the legality of Maduro’s arrest in Caracas. But I cannot refrain from pointing out that our post–9/11 legal regime accords great latitude for military action. The Trump administration deemed Maduro to be the head of a “narco-terrorist” organization earlier this year. I’ll venture that this designation ensures that the use of U.S. military personnel in Venezuela falls within the letter of the law. 

Legality aside, what are we to think of the morality of Trump’s action? 

Although the White House justifies that operation as an arrest, not an invasion, the Russian foreign ministry’s altogether hypocritical denunciation of the “act of armed aggression against Venezuela” expresses an element of truth. Military assets were employed to arrest Maduro, and Venezuelan sovereignty was violated. Moreover, as I suggest above, the administration clearly acted for reasons of state, not simply to bring a criminal to justice. Therefore, we are wise to assess Trump’s decision under the morality of war.

The Catholic Church advances a doctrine of just war. It includes many criteria for assessing reasons to go to war, as well as moral constraints on how warfare is conducted. These elements of just war doctrine are rooted in the biblical presumption in favor of peace. The morally licit use of violence aims to restore and secure a tranquility of order.

A well-established rule of law brings tranquility of order. It need not be perfect in its justice. The mere existence of reasonably decent and predictable laws is sufficient. The post–Cold War ambition to create a global rule of law (rules-based order) reflected that ideal. Unfortunately, global realities have dictated otherwise. 

Over the last decade, the greatest threat to the global tranquility of order has been the relative decline in American power. Put simply, American weakness, real and perceived, has invited challenges to the global order that was once backstopped by American cultural, economic, and military power.

If we filter out partisan rhetoric, in 2026, the main foreign policy arguments boil down to a debate about how to restore a global tranquility of order. In this debate, both sides presume that American power plays a crucial and central role.

In one fashion or another, Trump’s critics envision a renewal of the rules-based order. For example, they argue that the United States should expel Russian forces from Ukraine, and that this must be done in close cooperation with our allies, as we strive to build an ever-more unified world.

The Trump White House thinks otherwise. It regards the post–Cold War system as a cause of the relative decline in American power. What’s needed is a new approach, one that recognizes the reality of significant adversaries and seeks to reestablish the cultural, economic, and military foundations for American predominance in an interest-based rather than rules-based global order.

The Trump administration recognizes the need to consolidate the American capacity to contain China. This imperative is the leitmotif of the recent National Security Strategy, the unspoken meaning of every sentence in the document, from start to finish.

The Trump administration’s approach to Russian aggression in Ukraine reflects this imperative. At every turn, the White House has whipped European nations toward greater military expenditure, while criticizing them for self-imposed economic disabilities and civilizational malaise. I doubt that policy planners in the Trump administration seek to eliminate the Russian threat to Europe’s borders (which may be an unattainable goal in any event). The goal is to strengthen the European capacity to meet that threat, and in so doing, to consolidate Western civilization’s resources for the larger global struggle with China.

The White House can take a more straightforward approach in the Western Hemisphere. The original Monroe Doctrine was formulated to prevent the fledgling American nation from being dominated by European powers operating in the Western Hemisphere. It was largely defensive: Keep France and England out. Today, the Monroe Doctrine means ensuring that the hemisphere functions as a unified and effective foundation for American power. This requires gaining control over energy, trade, and military security throughout the hemisphere. The intransigent regime in Venezuela was a significant impediment to achieving that end.

The Trump administration envisions an interest-based global system in which great powers compete—and America is the first among equals. Will this system bring a tranquility of order? Those with longer memories will recall the resentment caused by earlier American interventions in Latin America, resentment that nurtured a generation of anti-Americanism. Perhaps the twenty-first century will see different outcomes. A muscular approach may backfire. The same holds for global affairs. Perhaps Putin and Xi will become more aggressive, seeking to expand their spheres of influence to meet America’s efforts. 

Time will tell. If the interest-based order brings conflict, we’ll judge the Caracas “enforcement action” an ill-considered step down a fateful path. If the Trump administration can navigate toward a relatively stable global system, we will regard it as wise, one of the foundations of the twenty-first century’s tranquility of order.

The post Trump’s Caracas Gambit appeared first on First Things.

This is a childish oversimplification. America does have a creed, but we also have a common culture and a common stock, as do all other nations. Immigration is only healthy when it leads to integration, when the “other” qualities of the immigrant culture fade into the background and normal American customs dominate family life.

Vivek spends over half the essay hand-wringing about racism. Young people engage in dissident discourse, testing boundaries and violating long-held taboos. But this is not happening in a vacuum. They are responding to the material conditions and political forces thrust upon them. It is those conditions that must be addressed, not their epiphenomena.

Instead of spending Christmas lecturing us about what makes Americans Americans, Vivek should sit down and do the reading. A recent essay in Compact, “The Lost Generation,” went viral around the time Vivek’s article was published. It describes in detail how affirmative action, and the legal and cultural conditions it fostered, went into overdrive about a decade ago, dramatically decreasing opportunities for white American men. This is a third rail issue, in part because white men traditionally avoid framing themselves as victims or playing identity politics. Moreover, the antiracist ideological structure calls anyone who questions it a racist beyond the pale of acceptable society. 

This catch-22 has consequences. “For about a decade, under woke and racial-reckoning conditions,” writes Ross Douthat, “certain important American institutions appeared to systematically disfavor younger white men for employment, preferment and advancement. In the process, these institutions forged a cohort that had concrete, economic, material reasons to regard the existing system and its values as a racially motivated conspiracy against their interests.” While DEI was militating against the people Vivek is now smearing, it was helping people like him.

Vivek’s success and that of his family rely on existing immigration and identity politics regulations. His family entered the country through the precursor programs to the H-1B. They were the tip of the spear of modern mass migration. Should we be shocked that he defends the system that birthed his citizenship? If immigration law were radically revised to prioritize American citizens, would he intervene out of familial loyalty? 

We do not know comprehensively the ways in which DEI helped him and his family rise to elite status. But given what we know now about higher education and the DEI machine, it would be far more surprising to learn that he had suffered setbacks because of his race. In 2011, Vivek received a scholarship from the Soros family. This money was not available for what Vivek calls “heritage Americans.” He accepted the scholarship despite being far wealthier than the average American at the time. And as recently as 2020, Vivek established Roivant Social Ventures to support pro-DEI initiatives like increasing racial and gender diversity in biopharmaceutical leadership.

Tell me again about those pernicious identity politics, Vivek!

Last December, on the second day of Christmas, Vivek denigrated Americans for not revering hard work enough, unlike immigrants. The context was a fight about H-1B visas. His long X post included gems such as:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers . . .

“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent.

I argued in First Things at the time that just as children need a stable home, families need a stable homeland. And a stable homeland is built on more than efficient allocation of capital (human or otherwise).

The Preamble to the Constitution states: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” 

The Constitution does not establish a universal good for all mankind, but a common good for a particular people and their posterity. At the time, “posterity” meant the offspring of one progenitor to the furthest generation; not, as some modern legal scholars argue, “whoever comes after us.” The founders were building a world for their children and their children’s children. Like many Americans, I have ancestors who were present at our country’s founding; it is clear that the founders intended this more perfect Union for us. They of course anticipated immigration and integration, the grafting of new branches onto the tree of liberty. But it is the tree and its roots that make grafting possible.

The founders took it as common sense that America’s originating culture must be given primacy. Consider Federalist No. 2:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence. 

Americans are those who, as Vivek notes, honor the principles of the U.S. government. But an American is more than that. Americans speak English and honor the legacy of English literature and law. We have particular manners and customs that anyone seeking to be an American should embrace. Americans are proud of our athletic abilities, our jocks, and we are equally proud that the jock can be a scholar-athlete. We are proud of our prom queens, and love to celebrate female beauty and social prowess. Primordially Sabbatarian, we are rightly proud of our leisure and reject the idea that work is an end in itself. Work, for Americans, is vocational, a calling placed on us by God and from which God will relieve us one day. But in the meantime, we are in fact very good at working hard, which goes a long way in explaining why we are the richest people in the world. Americans are Christians, even if often secularized; more specifically, as Charlie Kirk so well articulated, America is Protestant. Americans are those whose families have fought side by side, whose sacrifices we remember on Memorial Day. 

We are a people largely descended from the same ancestors, and if a family immigrates to the U.S. we should expect them to drop their former customs and take up ours. They drop their often unpronounceable names to take on American ones. Aleksandr becomes Alex, Jorge becomes George, 康 becomes Lawrence. Over time they will integrate and intermarry and become Americans, but this is not accomplished at the moment of their naturalization oath. That oath grants full legal status of citizenship, but the citizenship is that of an American, and it assumes in the heart of the new citizen a firm desire to emulate the founders of the country, its culture and customs.

We, the American people, have maintained this land as a free and ordered republic for 250 years. Vivek and some of his family have joined themselves to our common project. But as new arrivals, they do not get to tell us what that common project is, nor shame us when we correct them for misunderstanding it.

Image by Xuthoria, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

The post What Vivek Gets Wrong About Citizenship appeared first on First Things.

Pastoral accompaniment is certainly necessary, but it does not encompass the entirety of the Church’s moral teaching. If anything, the Church insists on holding together truths that the political imagination is tempted to sever. The bishops acknowledge this when they write that “human dignity and national security are not in conflict,” and when they reaffirm that “nations have a responsibility to regulate their borders” for the sake of the common good. These are not caveats tacked onto an otherwise humanitarian manifesto: They are part of Catholic doctrine. To omit or minimize these truths would be to deprive the Catholic moral tradition of the wisdom our nation needs.

This is the kind of nuanced conversation many American Catholics—and civic leaders—find themselves hungry for but rarely encounter: a conversation where mercy is not weaponized against justice, and where sovereignty is not reduced to xenophobia. It is precisely this fuller conversation that CatholicVote’s document “Immigration Enforcement and the Christian Conscience” wants to start.

The American bishops are right to be troubled by “a climate of fear,” by the plight of parents afraid to take their children to school, and by the often harsh, sometimes dehumanizing conditions in detention centers. These are realities Christians must not look away from.

“Immigration Enforcement and the Christian Conscience” raises the other unavoidable dimension of the problem: the federal government’s failure over decades to maintain a coherent, enforceable immigration system. This is not a peripheral concern. As we argue, it is precisely the collapse of lawful order that has created the conditions in which exploitation flourishes, cartels thrive, and millions of migrants are pushed into a shadow-world without legal recourse or clear prospects. 

A nation cannot honor the dignity of immigrants if it has effectively abandoned the rule of law under which immigrants might be protected.

Catholic teaching asserts that governments have a duty to regulate migration for the sake of the common good. The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms the right of persons to migrate for just reasons, but places parallel obligations on immigrants to respect a country’s laws and on governments to enforce those laws in ways consistent with justice and human dignity. Pope Benedict XVI warned repeatedly that the absence of lawful structures harms migrants most of all.

A nation’s first obligation, to its citizens and to newcomers alike, is to sustain the conditions in which authentic solidarity is possible. A border that exists merely in theory is not an instrument of mercy. On the contrary, it generates the conditions that the bishops lament. It feeds not only social fragmentation but moral confusion. When millions enter the country outside legal processes, the basic juridical relationship between the newcomer and the political community is never formally established. Charity is asked to substitute for justice, and the result is neither.

Immigration enforcement, properly conducted, is not opposed to Christian conscience. Rather, it is the precondition for any humane and sustainable immigration policy. Without enforcement, even the most generous legal pathways will collapse under the weight of circumvention.

None of this requires a rejection of the bishops’ pastoral concerns. In truth, the pastoral and the political must be held together if we are to move toward coherent reform. Law itself is a moral good. And the just enforcement of law is not contrary to the gospel; rather, it is the instrument by which the gospel’s demands are made possible in the public square.

A state that fails to enforce its borders effectively is a state that invites chaos. A state that enforces them cruelly or arbitrarily betrays its own moral foundations. Catholic social teaching never asks us to choose between these errors. It asks us to reject both.

If the bishops’ statement is an appeal to conscience, the CatholicVote document is a modest, faithful appeal to prudence; and prudence is the cardinal virtue sorely lacking in our national debate.

Catholic communities must reckon with these four truths:

1. The moral right of a state to regulate migration is not merely “allowed” by Catholic teaching but required by the common good. Ignoring this truth, or relegating it to a parenthetical aside, leaves Catholics unprepared to contribute meaningfully to policy questions.

2. Large-scale unlawful migration is not a morally neutral event; it creates real social costs borne disproportionately by the poor. Pretending otherwise erodes public trust and weakens the credibility of the bishops’ appeals for compassion.

3. The human dignity of migrants is best protected when migration occurs through lawful, transparent, orderly processes. This requires enforcement, not as a gesture of hostility, but as an extension of justice.

4. Catholics betray neither their faith nor their compassion when they insist on secure borders. To say otherwise is to confuse sentimentality with charity.

The bishops close the letter with a reminder that “hope does not disappoint.” They are right. But hope must not be confused with a refusal to confront reality. If we wish to stand with immigrants, we must also stand with the truth: the truth about human dignity, but also the truth about political responsibility and the requirements of public order.

The post A Catholic Approach to Immigration appeared first on First Things.

As I have mentioned now and then over the years, I have a longtime interest in immigration, and even after divesting myself of many books in the last decade or so (passing them on to people working on the subject), I still have plenty of shelves and stacks of books devoted to immigration, not to mention back issues of journals and magazines, photocopies (remember those?), and so on. I am pro-immigration but also convinced of the need for responsible enforcement of the law.

President Trump, following his campaign pledges, has pursued a crackdown on illegal immigration, a necessity after President Biden’s utter failure on this score. Alas, as might be expected, the Trump-directed response, rather than being measured, “prudent,” enforcing the law without gratuitous cruelty, has too often been excessive. No matter how scrupulous the ICE agents had been, of course, they would have been met with furious protests, false accusations, and an utter failure to recognize the need for enforcement. We can only conclude that Trump wanted a degree of excess to daunt potential migrants and to persuade some of those who are already here illegally to return to their homeland.

I have been struck again and again by the extent to which many people I respect simply brush away the consequences of unchecked illegal immigration. This is especially the case with fellow-Christians. One of the most remarkable magazine pieces I’ve seen anywhere on any subject in the last decade appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of Christianity Today magazine. “They Led at Saddleback Church. ICE Said They Were Safe,” the title proclaimed. Below that (in what we used to call the “deck”): “A Colombian couple prayed with neighbors and raised their children in one of America’s most influential churches. What did we gain from their deportation?”

Rich in detail, exceptionally long but not padded, Andy Olsen’s piece tells the story of this Colombian couple. I urge you to read it; it will repay your time and attention. Now join me in a thought-experiment. Let’s suppose that while Olsen was at work on his article, another magazine had assigned an equally gifted writer to tell the story of an illegal immigrant who (like the couple profiled in Christianity Today) has been in the U.S. for decades. But unlike that couple, a very sympathetic pair, the protagonist of this piece is a shape-shifting predator, assuming several identities over the course of his time here and comfortably ensconced in a high-paying job as a school-district administrator.

How much would his story tell us about immigration policy? Taken alone, very little; ditto the Christianity Today piece. Of course, that’s not what Christianity Today intends for you to conclude. But that article, alas, represents (in its most persuasive form) the approach to immigration that’s dominant in many Christian circles.

And of course, this problem isn’t at all limited to Christian takes on the subject. Here in Wheaton, Illinois, our newspaper of record is the Chicago Tribune, once a great paper and still a very good one when we moved from Pasadena, California, to Wheaton in the summer of 1994. Now, alas, it’s just a shadow of what it once was, but we still subscribe, and I read it every day.

Since ICE came to Chicago, the Tribune has been running a slew of one-sided articles, heavy on criticism of the crackdown, presenting a simple story of good people going about their lives only to be seized and manhandled and terrorized by Trump’s thugs. Some of the criticism, alas, is justified. But there’s a fundamental disconnect. Story after story offering an idealized portrait of this or that person swept up in one of ICE’s raids must acknowledge that the victim in question is not legally in the United States. “Chicago day care teacher arrested by ICE released: ‘I am so grateful,’” ran the headline in a story this week. 

There were the requisite howls of protest and the assertion that the case “has generated widespread backlash.” The Colombian woman who was arrested, who “cares for infants” at a Spanish Immersion Early Learning Center, had “undergone a background check,” the school said. Then there is this, buried at the end of the piece, without comment: “the Department of Homeland Security said . . . she illegally entered the U.S. on June 26, 2023, and ‘was encountered by Border Patrol,’ and that ‘the Biden administration released her into the U.S.’” Oh.

The post Beyond the Immigration Headlines appeared first on First Things.

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Dilexi Te, the recently issued apostolic exhortation of Pope Leo XIV, offers an example. The topic is love for the poor, and the document offers fine spiritual guidance to which we should harken. But one section addresses migration. Although these paragraphs admit of nuanced reading, on their face they convey the impression that the Catholic Church does not just endorse open borders, but also teaches that those opposed to unlimited migration are enemies of Christ.

One passage mentions St. John Baptist Scalabrini, a bishop who founded the Missionaries of St. Charles “to accompany migrants to their destinations, offering them spiritual, legal and material assistance.” In fact, the order, like its founder, was Italian, and it accompanied Italian immigrants to the New World to ensure that they flourished and remained faithful to the Catholic Church. The apostolic exhortation transforms this noble ministry—pastoral leadership from a people and for a people—into today’s progressive dream. Dilexi Te cites Pope Francis’s fantastical opinion: “­Scalabrini looked forward to a world and a Church without ­barriers, where no one was a foreigner.”

Pope Leo cites more of Pope Francis’s rhetoric: “Our response to the challenges posed by contemporary migration can be summed up in four verbs: welcome, protect, promote and integrate.” The sentiments are astonishingly inapt. In 2025, migration, both legal and ­illegal, is tearing apart the political settlements that have governed Europe for decades. 

Recently, authorities in Birmingham declared that Israelis must not attend an upcoming soccer match because the police could not guarantee their safety. The ordinary Englishman wonders, “Who governs England? Imams in Birmingham or the people we elected to enforce the law?” A similar distrust affects France, Germany, and many other nations. And in this fraught context, the Catholic Church preaches “welcome, protect, promote and integrate”? Doing so insinuates that, were it not for the nativist rubes and their St. George flags, everything would be fine.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the administration has reinforced our borders and embarked on an effort to deport large numbers of people. I predict that European nations will soon join this effort to repatriate migrants. In this context, the Catholic Church offers little moral guidance. To my knowledge, the Vatican sponsors no seminars or consultations to discuss the ethics of deportation. 

There are important questions to address. In ­cases of illegal immigration, it would seem obvious that deportation is always permissible. But we must take into account the fact that European policies in recent decades conveyed the clear message that, if you could get to the West, you would not be deported. (U.S. non-­enforcement and toleration of massive abuse of asylum claims conveyed a similar message.) To a significant degree, these arrangements amounted to a de facto invitation, which millions accepted. I’d like to read a nuanced moral analysis of this aspect of illegal immigration and its bearing on deportation, which should include reflection on the moral culpability of the architects of the de facto invitation.

Family separation is another issue. The Church endorses imprisonment as a licit form of punishment, so family separation cannot be intrinsically evil. Moreover, the wife and children of a man who is deported can accompany him back to his home country. In this respect, unlike imprisonment, in nearly all instances repatriation does not require family separation. Nevertheless, there are human factors that must be weighed. What if the spouse of a person being deported is an American citizen? Or what if, more likely still, his children are? Perhaps the more suitable word is family dislocation, an uprooting from long-standing relations in an enduring community.

The moral evil of uprooting people invites another line of reasoning. In matters of real estate, there exists the common law principle of adverse possession. This legal doctrine holds that if a person occupies private property not his own and, over the course of many years, the owner does not object, then he can claim ownership.

Perhaps we should think about citizenship, or at least the right of residence, in a similar fashion. The common law recognizes adverse possession because it acknowledges the importance of settled expectations. If a man can farm a plot for twenty years without interference or expulsion, then he is entitled to continue to do so. By analogy, if a man can live and work in Houston for twenty years without legal hindrance, is he entitled to continue to do so?

Will this pontificate encourage reflections of this sort, which draw upon lucid legal and moral concepts? Leo inherited from ­Francis a magisterium of sentimental slogans. And when not sentimental, the Francis magisterium was largely irrelevant. Denouncing greed is a perennial necessity. It does nothing, however, to help Catholic leaders think about the effects of economic globalization on their own nations—or what principles to use to oversee de-globalization. The same holds for mass migration. Urging “accompaniment” is fine. The Church should minister to all, including migrants, whatever their legal status. But this notion gives no guidance to governing authorities. What are the limits of “welcome”? How should we think about populations of migrants (Muslims, for example) that don’t integrate? Do governing authorities have a duty to promote the interests of the natives of a nation above the interests of newcomers? 

These questions and others are not asked. Instead, we get citations of the parable of the Good Samaritan. A few years ago, I had a conversation that helped me better understand the parable. The migrant crisis, born of non-enforcement of the border during the Biden administration, had brought tens of thousands of migrants to New York. They were housed in the fine hotels left empty by the pandemic. During the weeks after the first well-publicized arrivals, I was getting my morning cappuccino at my usual place. The owner is Tibetan, an immigrant of recent citizenship. I asked him what he thought about the situation. With disgust, he replied, “They are in nice hotels, while our people are sleeping in the streets.”

The Tibetan-American’s use of “our people” struck me powerfully. It is true that many native-born Americans sleep in the streets of New York, a fact our society tolerates with a shrug. I thought about the parable of the Good Samaritan. One striking element of the story is the fact that his fellow countrymen hurried past the half-dead man lying by the roadside. Perhaps they were on their way to the ancient equivalent of an anti-ICE protest. 

The open society consensus that followed World War II set the agenda for civic life in the West. In its early decades, this consensus ­influenced Catholicism. Pope John XXIII famously urged Catholics to open the windows of the Church. In the aftermath of the Council, clergy drank deeply at the well of openness. The removal of altar rails symbolized the general embrace of a Church open to the world.

In a similar fashion, the Catholic Church adopted mid-twentieth-century internationalism, the general outlook on world affairs that looked forward to a more open world, knit together in pursuit of peace and prosperity. The great hopes many put in the United Nations in the 1950s and 1960s epitomized this outlook. That institution proved to be a flawed vehicle. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dreams of internationalism were renewed.

In Caritas in Veritate (2009), Pope Benedict XVI called for the establishment of a “true world political authority.” Its purpose would be to manage the global economy and address problems that transcend national borders. To some degree, that authority already existed, erected after the Cold War in a patchwork of international institutions and accords, ranging from the World Trade Organization to the International Criminal Court. The most ambitious element of this emerging global system was the European Union, which took its current form in 2009. Further efforts to establish binding international norms were made in the 2010s. The Paris Climate Agreement (2015) is a leading example.  

Today I worry that twenty-first-century Catholicism will repeat the mistake of the nineteenth century, when the Church remained staunchly loyal to a collapsed system, urging its restoration. In that era, the old system was the ancien régime. In our era, Rome too often appears to be fighting for the restoration of the open ­society consensus and the institutions it constructed—even as that consensus is already discredited by events, not the least of which is mass migration, and as the institutions of the open society, such as the European Court of Human Rights, impede efforts to chart another course.

As I noted at the outset, the West is being roiled by the bad consequences of the utopianism that Pope Francis falsely ascribed to Scalabrini: a world and a Church without barriers, where no one is a foreigner. I hope that Pope Leo will follow his namesake, forsake the restorationist impulse, and turn to the task of reframing Catholic social doctrine for a world that is ­de-globalizing. We need guidance. What should be our principles as we re-erect barriers and reject the foolish utopian notion that no one is a foreigner?

The post Rome and Immigration appeared first on First Things.

An honest discussion would not circumvent the issue of legal status, which is why growing numbers of people are beginning to ask whether the Church is a good-faith interlocutor on questions of mass migration. Glossing over the distinction between legal and illegal residency cannot be ecclesial oversight; too many critics have pointed out that the Church regularly sidesteps this issue. Church leaders at times formally acknowledge state sovereignty over immigration, but in practice the rhetoric (“undocumented”) suggests otherwise. Which makes one think the Church is dodging the question of illegal status, a posture more befitting a lobbyist pushing an agenda than an honest broker addressing a question that affects the common good. 

The Church seeks to frame the discussion of illegal immigration through the lens of “human dignity.” This is a fitting concept with which to begin. But the Church’s selective use of this framing neglects to address the way in which illegal immigration offends human dignity.

Free will is an essential aspect of human dignity. Man is alteri incommunicabilis: Nobody can will for me. Nobody can ultimately make me want something. I can be influenced, pressured, and even physically forced, but I cannot be made to will something. Even God does not interfere with free will; in the end, he respects what we have chosen, even if we damn ourselves in the process.  

Willing is not limited to individuals. Political sovereignty is also an act of will. It is a decision of a community, exercised by its designated leaders. In Catholic thought, sovereign decisions are accorded deference, because the one charged with attending to the common good is supposed to employ an objective overview of the common good—which individual parties with individual interests might not see—when making a decision. It’s why distributive justice belongs to the one responsible for the community and not its individual members.

In modern political structures, the sovereign will is expressed by the democratic choice of a majority, adopted through processes established by rule of law. In our constitutional order, this is done through passing legislation in accord with proper procedures. These laws are entitled to the presumption that they serve the common good, which means that they are not subject to veto by parties outside of the legislative process. There is a profound moral reason for the presumptive respect for validly enacted laws: They express the rightly adopted will—an essential aspect of human dignity—of the organized political community on a question. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 fits that requirement.

Thus, if we recognize human dignity to be expressed through free choices, individual as well as collective, and that the latter deserve our deference as decisions made for the common good by those responsible for that common good, then validly enacted laws also deserve recognition as expressions of human dignity. A political community’s free choice of a morally legitimate option (no one has claimed immigration restrictions are intrinsically evil) by a collective decision in the name of the common good cannot be dismissed on the ground that it affects the human dignity of an individual, as if the individual is the only party that has a dignity claim.

The Church’s unartful dodges on the migrant question have especially disturbing consequences. It practically canonizes the isolated individual’s decision to judge laws, find them wanting, and justify disobeying them. This undermines the coherence of Catholic teaching. It makes an unjustified exception to a Catholic’s responsibility to obey legitimate laws, suggesting an anthropology that asserts that the only dignity at stake is the individual’s. This marks a departure from Catholic tradition, which accords dignity to the valid expression of a collective community will embodied in duly adopted laws. 

When churchmen speak about the human dignity of migrants, they are drawing attention to an important principle, one that rightly governs law enforcement’s treatment of any person who is suspected of breaking the law. But it is baffling to think that the mere assertion of the human dignity of an individual can serve as justification in practice for ignoring immigration law. Does “dignity” immunize somebody against enforcement of a valid law? Does “dignity” nullify a state’s right to enforce a valid law against a violator? 

In sum, migrants are not the only parties with a dignity stake in questions of illegal immigration. Communities and the common good their laws seek to incarnate also have dignity rights.

St. Thomas teaches that an unjust law is not a law. Unless churchmen are willing to tell us directly why they think America’s immigration laws are unjust in se—something difficult to do without endorsing open borders—it seems fair to ask whether the ecclesial “dialogue partners” with the Trump administration are engaging in mauvaise foi.

The post Where the Church’s Immigration Rhetoric Fails appeared first on First Things.

Yet there is something strange in the book’s adoption by an ascendant right. For Raspail was above all a man of lost causes, an instinctive romantic. He was drawn not to populist leaders who seek and win the love of the crowd, but to lonely figures who are regarded with indifference or contempt by an unworthy society. The most troubling suggestion of The Camp of the Saints is not that the West is losing its identity, but that it deserves to die.

This idea appears in The Camp of the Saints, when an eccentric band comes together to oppose the new regime created by migrant arrivals. “Mind if I play along with you?” asks one character as he joins their company. He understands that their actions, though earnest, are not ­really serious. The problem is not just that the resisters have no chance of success; it is that they have nothing left to fight for. France—the France they believe in and would like to defend—­disappeared long ago. What has arisen in its place is something that Raspail’s heroes would rather oppose than defend. “The real enemy is always behind the lines, at your back, never in front of you,” says a colonel sent to stop the migrants.

Raspail’s description of a society succumbing to an invading force was informed by his childhood experience of World War II, when he cycled home from boarding school amid the chaos of Germany’s invasion of France. He recalled this period in Blue Island, a novel about a charismatic child who convinces his playmates to resist the Germans. “We’re at war, aren’t we?” he says. “But nothing and no one is worthy of it. Everything is so ugly.”

Raspail believed that Europe had lost contact with the traditions that gave it dignity, and he admired peoples who continued to live in accord with their inherited ways. In Who Will Remember the People…, he ­praises the Alacaluf Indians, who cling to their mode of life on the southern tip of South America as modernity comes rushing in. In his first novel, Welcome Honorable Visitors, he ­praises the postwar Japanese who preserve their dignity amidst defeat.

The words Raspail applies to one character in that novel could be applied to him as well: “Throughout the world, he hunted out the picturesque and the unusual, the exotic or the mysterious.” In Blue Island, an old writer, a stand-in for Raspail, encounters a woman he once knew. “You celebrate noble sentiments, lost causes, sublimation,” she tells him, before adding the deflating ­remark: “You amuse me.”

Today this self-deprecating writer is being taken very ­seriously. The Camp of the Saints is embraced for its unapologetic assertion that immigration involves conflict. Raspail is a writer keenly aware of the history of ­colonization—and decolonization. He believes that if one group is gaining confidence and projecting power, another must be losing its inheritance. This view is gaining broader acceptance across the West.

Yet some elements of the book seem less than prophetic. Raspail’s depiction of a Europe unwilling and unable to turn back migrants is belied by current developments. Mette Frederiksen, the left-wing leader of Denmark, has pursued a crackdown on migrants and joined with ­Giorgia Meloni in criticizing the European Court of Human Rights for making it too difficult to repel and expel them. Even more strikingly, Donald Tusk, the Polish leader beloved of Atlanticist liberals, has suspended the right of migrants to apply for asylum.

If The Camp of the Saints is of limited usefulness as a political tract, what are its merits as a novel? ­Raspail depicts the migrants as a teeming, inhuman mass—­wretchedness incarnate. They are, in his words, an “antiworld,” a nemesis sent to punish the West for its folly. Whatever one makes of this in moral terms (and it is certainly intended to provoke), it is dramatically inert. Because the migrants are presented as utterly alien, there is no point of contact between them and the novel’s central characters, no subterranean sympathies or uneasy recognitions to set off the tale of conflict.

Contrast this with Septentrion, which Raspail wrote six years after The Camp of the Saints. It, too, depicts a band of resisters defying an inhuman horde. But it is a richer, subtler book. The undifferentiated mass is made up not of foreigners but of neighbors, family members, and friends who have succumbed to “auto-persuasion by contagion”—a kind of mass-culture conformity. And whenever a resister finally has a fatal encounter with a member of the horde, he discovers that the member is himself, a double, a doppelgänger. The conflict is internal. What the characters fear in the enemy, they find in themselves.

Something similar is true of Who Will Remember the ­People…, Raspail’s novel about an Indian tribe holding to its old ways amidst the European onslaught. The most moving scene involves a British commodore who was once rescued by the natives and now has returned in command of his ships. He welcomes the unwashed natives aboard with honor, shocking his crew. But when he sees them face-to-face, he recoils. They smell, act grossly, and are half-dressed. At this moment, Raspail says, “he denies himself,” as Peter denied Christ. The commodore’s inability to recognize the other as his fellow amounts to a denial of the image of God in ­himself—a theological term that Raspail, a Catholic, uses elsewhere in the book.

Another striking episode in Who Will Remember the People… concerns a man with scholarly pretensions whose reports on the natives earn him membership in a learned ­society. Back home in France, he is horrified to find that the natives he had met are being exhibited as cannibals at the Paris Universal Exposition. He is dismayed by their exploitation. But he realizes that his writing likewise held them up for uncomprehending mockery in a way he had failed to recognize. “Behind a glib screen of words he had engendered contempt, hardness of heart, derision.”

It’s an interesting sentence, because it captures what many feel, not without reason, about ­Raspail’s description of the migrants in The Camp of the Saints. The story ­Raspail tells in Who Will Remember the People… is a complex one, from which no political lesson can be easily drawn. Without trying to absolve Raspail of his sins against tolerance, it seems fair to say that he did not believe the crucial distinction was between white or black, colonizer or colonized, but between people who conform with his romantic ideas of what it means to live nobly, and those who do not.

Such people can be hard to find. Perhaps that is why Raspail devoted himself to the Kingdom of Patagonia, a nonexistent polity on behalf of which he sought to claim territory, going so far as to plant its blue, white, and green flag on the tiny British isle of Les Minquiers. Sam Francis, the paleoconservative thinker, liked to mock more liberal conservatives as “beautiful losers.” He meant that phrase as an insult, but for Raspail it would be a high term of praise. There is a great ­distance between Raspail’s ­eccentric, despairing vision and that of a ­contemporary right that seeks to wield power in the here and now.

The post The Romanticism of Jean Raspail appeared first on First Things.

So what do I do?

Imaginary personal encounters make bad national policy. But like parents with a family, a nation’s first duty is to its own citizens. Their security and welfare matter. Thus, borders also matter. So does immigration law, especially in a nation created ex nihilo and held together not by ethnicity, religion, or even language, but by respect for the law and the actions that flow from it.  

One can reasonably criticize the Trump administration’s current deportation efforts as too broad and too blunt. Along with arresting gang members, traffickers, murderers, and rapists, they sweep up innocent, undocumented immigrants who pose no criminal threat, and many of whom contribute as much to this country as they gain from it. But those same ugly removal efforts were inevitable. They were made so by a catastrophic border collapse under the Biden administration, and the failure by both of our political parties over the past two decades to produce workable immigration reform. Undocumented immigrants possess a God-given dignity that cannot be rescinded. But their presence here, under the law, is nonetheless illegal. Which is why the Obama administration, in its own time, deported 2.7 million of them—notably without the current hysterics from the political left.

To their credit, the Catholic and other Christian churches in this country have done heroic work for decades in offering material support and legal counsel to immigrants, documented and otherwise. I saw this firsthand in twenty-seven years of diocesan staff service. The Church resources allotted to social ministry, including immigration services, typically dwarfed other pro-life efforts. The current administration’s defunding of some of those legitimate services has ironically made the immigration crisis worse. But in serving the needs and championing the rights of new immigrants, church leaders have often been seen as downplaying or ignoring the just concerns of their own people. And most of their people are not reactionary nativists or right-wing bigots but ordinary men and women, often with families, worried—rightly—about crime, the financial stability of their public institutions, and social cohesion.  

Acknowledging those honest concerns, as one border state bishop told me privately, has too often been inadequate; an unconvincing “throwaway line” for too many bishops and church workers dealing with the immigration issue. Another voice—a senior border state church staffer with intimate experience of the immigration crisis—added that

I don’t like Trump’s approach; it’s long on muscle and short on explaining why these measures are necessary. But [Pope] Leo and the bishops refuse to make distinctions about immigrants; they’re prioritizing the needs of the undocumented over the legitimate concerns of the faithful who built the Church in this country. Leo’s new apostolic exhortation [Dilexi Te] says that “in every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself who knocks at the door of the community.” That’s lazy exegesis in the service of a globalist set of assumptions. . . . My fear is that Leo does not understand why populism is sweeping Europe and the U.S. I’m also concerned about Rome’s presumption that migrants are automatically “missionaries of hope.” No. In fact, many are, but many are the opposite. And it is not inherently racist to be concerned that your country cannot handle the flood of immigrants.  

The effectively “open borders” messaging of the Church in Europe seems particularly misguided because so many of the continent’s immigrants are Muslim, and Islam has a very different anthropology and approach to politics and the state from anything in Christian and Enlightenment thought. Christianity shaped the soul and development of Europe. But unlike the aftermath of Rome’s fifth-century collapse, the Church throughout Europe today is very far from having the will or the energy needed to convert the newly-arrived immigrant masses. That has massive religious, cultural, and political implications.

So how do we proceed as a believing people?

One of the best recent expositions of Christian thought on the immigration and deportation debate appeared on October 12. It’s worth reading and taking to heart. Writing in the Catholic Times, the magazine of the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois, Fr. Christopher Trummer outlines “a moral framework that neither oversimplifies nor ignores the complexity of immigration.” He stresses the dignity of “every human being, regardless of legal status, nationality, or origin,” that must be respected. This “obviously holds true for immigrants as well,” who should be viewed “not as burdens or statistics, but as persons to be loved, protected, and treated with justice.” Persons have a “right to migrate when necessary to protect their life, dignity, or livelihood.” This is especially true when seeking to escape from war, persecution, systemic poverty, and similar urgent factors.

Trummer goes on to note, however, that “the right to migrate is not absolute. Prudence is needed to determine what counts as a ‘just reason’ for immigration. . . . The desire to migrate, however strong and sincere, does not automatically establish the right to do so.” Alongside the rights of migrants, “the Church also affirms the right—and duty—of nations to regulate immigration in service of the common good. . . . This includes securing borders, maintaining public order, and ensuring the stability of cultural and economic life. While the right to migrate is real, it must be balanced with a nation’s capacity to welcome and integrate new arrivals. Finding this balance is the real crux of the debate.”  

Finally, faithful Catholics should “note at the outset that the Church does not teach that deportation is intrinsically evil. . . . The state has the right—and at times the duty—to enforce immigration laws, including even the removal of those who lack legal standing.” In practice, deportation becomes morally problematic when it lacks justice and restraint—“when it is applied without proportionality or due process.” An inevitable tension thus arises between “overly aggressive law enforcement [that] breeds fear [and] fractures communities” and the fact that “legitimate laws do have to be enforced, and this is never done perfectly.”

The Trummer text is a model of prudent, balanced reasoning, persuasively expressed. But this should surprise no one. His bishop is Bishop Thomas Paprocki, himself both a canon and civil lawyer who spent years as a young priest working with immigrants and co-founding the Chicago Legal Clinic to help provide legal services for the poor.  

Paprocki’s main focus, as he notes in the same Catholic Times issue, was immigration law, “helping people to obtain legal status as lawful immigrants and citizens.” He writes that “when migrants are undocumented, they are vulnerable to unscrupulous employers who pay them below minimum [wage], threatening to call immigration authorities if they complain. The best way for immigrants to thrive in our country is to come here legally.”  

Alas, making that path more accessible to migrants, while also safe and manageable for the wider public, is a serious challenge. It demands serious immigration reform, along with the prudence and spirit of compromise to see it through. Our leaders in Washington—both political and ecclesial—might profitably give Springfield a call. Not for policy details, but some training in common sense. That would at least be a start.

The post The Church and Immigration Sanity appeared first on First Things.

Of course, cockneys have never regarded themselves in that way. Their self-aggrandizing myth portrays native Londoners as tough, spirited, and blessed with the gift of the gab. Over the centuries, a set of distinctive cultural traditions was born in the capital: a cuisine (pie and mash, pale ale, jellied eels); a costume (the black suits of the “pearly kings and queens,” adorned with shiny white buttons); and the songs of the music hall tradition, some of which will be familiar to Americans (“Daisy, Daisy / Give me your answer, do”).

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of cockney culture is its language—not only h-dropping and glottal stops, but also a complex and esoteric system of rhyming slang (phrases like “I can’t ­Adam and Eve it,” meaning “I can’t believe it”). This is the accent of Michael Caine, Adele, David ­Beckham, and Ray Winstone—the traditional sound of working-class London, still to be heard from the black-cab drivers who now drive to work from well beyond the boundaries of the city. These cabbies will often describe London’s current state in very direct terms. They are not at all happy about it.

You see, the cockneys have mostly left London. Between 2001 and 2021, census records show that the number of “White British” people in London fell from 4.3 million to 3.2 million, at a time when the overall population of the city grew substantially. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann believes that this exodus of nearly a million people was almost entirely made up of cockneys, who have since settled in Essex, Kent, and other surrounding ­counties. It is obvious to anyone who lives in London that the city is now composed almost exclusively of affluent white British people—who earn 50 percent more than those outside of the ­capital—and ethnic minorities, some poor and some very rich. Vestiges of cockney culture continue to circulate in the British mainstream, particularly in film and TV intended for an international audience, but the cockney London of previous centuries is gone. The capital doesn’t have a white working class anymore.

Traditionally, a “true cockney” was born within earshot of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheap­side, a church that dates back to 1080 and is celebrated in the English nursery rhyme “Oranges and Lemons.” In modern London, road and air traffic have increased ambient noise levels so much that there are no longer any maternity units to be found within audible range of “Bow Bells” and therefore no more “true” cockney babies. But in the ­pre-modern era the sound carried for many miles and the cockney kingdom covered a large swathe of London: all of the east, plus parts of the south and north. These were the poorest parts of the city, as they were the most polluted and the closest to the docks, a key source of working-class employment.

You’ll be familiar with cockneys from their fictional representations, most of which were created by outsiders, in large part because the literary world was so hostile to working-class intrusion. The Londoner John Keats, for instance, was referred to by his enemies as one of “the cockney poets,” derided for evidence of ­working-class diction in his rhyming patterns.

Perhaps the greatest writer of cockney London was the partial outsider Charles Dickens, who—unusually among his literary peers—had lived and worked in the slums of the capital as a child, although he was born outside of it. That may be why Dickens’s cockney characters are so richly and sympathetically imagined—many were based on people he knew. 

Much more often, fictional cockneys have been foils to upper-class characters. The pre-eminent example is Eliza Doolittle, a character in George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion—portrayed by Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady—who is rescued from poverty by a scholar of phonetics who successfully rids her of her burdensome cockney accent. Doolittle’s tragic counterpart is to be found in E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End—adapted into a 1992 film of the same name—in which a young cockney man by the name of ­Leonard Bast is taken under the wing of the upper-class characters, with disastrous consequences for him. Bert, the cheerful jack-of-all trades in P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins books—made into a Disney film in 1964—plays a role similar to that of ­Doolittle and Bast, in that he facilitates the adventures and psychological development of those above him in the class system.

The other favored type of fictional cockney is the villain. In Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, the orcs were given cockney accents—a departure from the books that was justified by Andrew Jack, the series’ dialect coach, on the grounds that the accent sounded “modern,” in contrast to the West Country burr of the Hobbits. And yet “modern” is hardly the right word for what may well have been the accent of Geoffrey Chaucer. What Andrew Jack meant, I think, is that the cockney accent has long carried a sense of urban threat. 

Even before Jack the Ripper’s 1888 murders ­created an indelible connection between violence and cockney London in popular culture, readers of trashy novels would have been familiar with ­Sweeney Todd, the murderous barber of Fleet Street, who first appeared in an 1846 penny dreadful series and was portrayed in 2007 by Johnny Depp. Sometimes the criminal cockney is comical, as in One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). Sometimes he is a roguish antihero, as in The Italian Job (1969). The director Guy Ritchie keeps the tradition of the cockney gangster alive in his films, although they increasingly look like period pieces—since the predominant accent of working-class London nowadays is not cockney but MLE (Multicultural London English), which incorporates sounds from the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Indian Subcontinent. Ritchie is making films for an international audience who don’t yet realize that cockney London is a thing of the past. 

For centuries, cockneys were the archetype of urban poverty in the British imagination. As the working-class group most proximate to the intellectual elite of London, they inspired fear, pity, and sentimentalism. They also attracted idealists. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the East End became a focus for sociologists, and the research conducted there formed much of the thinking behind the creation of the post-war welfare state. Working-class areas experienced particular suffering during the Blitz, and London dockers made an outsized contribution to the war effort. Thus the arrival of the welfare state, and particularly the National Health Service, was popularly understood—by cockneys and non-cockneys alike—not as charity, but as ­recompense. 

Charity was a touchy subject in the old East End. The year 1957 saw the publication of Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s highly influential ^­Family and Kinship in East London, a sociological study of cockneys that sought to explain how these people had survived in the era before the welfare state. The East End solution to precarity, the authors observed, was a delicate system of longstanding reciprocal relationships among neighbors and kin, propped up by a doctrine of respectability. Cockneys could expect to receive support from one another only if they cultivated a good local reputation. Social capital could be accumulated through keeping a house clean and tidy, obeying local morality codes (which were not necessarily the same as those of outsiders), and offering aid to others within the network. 

This moral system was particularly apparent in the allocation of social housing. At the beginning of the twentieth century, social reformers began clearing the London slums and replacing them with new dwellings that were managed by charities or local government, a process that accelerated following the destruction of so many old buildings during the Blitz. This subsidized social housing was intended for the upper working class, not the underclass, and would-be tenants were selected on the basis of their local reputations. Social housing was not regarded as a system of charity, but rather as a system of insurance: You paid in through your social capital and were rewarded with a comfortable new place to live. It was in keeping with the morality of the old East End. 

The great turning point for cockney London came in 1977 with the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act, a well-intentioned piece of legislation that upended the old process of social housing allocation, forcing local governments to prioritize the most needy, rather than those who had “paid in” to the local community. 

In the East End, this new law had a particularly dramatic effect on the fortunes of a small community of Bangladeshi men that had been established in the Tower Hamlets area since the end of the Second World War. Most of them were working in the textile and restaurant industries and living cheek-by-jowl in cramped private accommodation. As ­Michael Young and his colleagues Kate Gavron and Geoff Dench described in their 2006 book The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict, the 1977 Housing Act gave these men the opportunity to bypass the old system of local reputation and gain access to social housing for their wives and children, who promptly started arriving from Bangladesh to join their menfolk.

Some cockneys responded with hostility, even violence. But the economic pull factors were sufficiently strong that Bangladeshi families continued to come, despite local attempts to deter them. A process of white flight took effect, and by the end of the century just over one-third of the population of Tower Hamlets was categorized as “Asian” in census data. In 2021, that proportion had risen to almost half.

This little-known 1977 change in the allocation of social housing goes most of the way toward explaining the current socioeconomic and ethnic composition of London. A 2021 report from the Greater London Authority notes that 74 percent of households moving into “general needs” social housing “were headed by someone of Black, Asian or other minority ethnicity,” and that this disparity is a consequence of the fact that “social housing is allocated on the basis of need.” Ethnic minorities with high rates of unemployment, household overcrowding, single motherhood, and other kinds of dysfunction, along with those who have arrived in London as refugees, will always end up at the front of the queue for this heavily subsidized housing when prioritization is based on need. Cockneys, being comparatively high-functioning, just don’t cut it. 

Mostly as a consequence of the Blitz, London contains an amazing amount of social ­housing—40 percent of units in Southwark, 33 percent in Camden, and 28 percent in Westminster—and nearly half of the households occupying this housing stock are now headed by someone who was born abroad. The remaining housing has become so expensive, following the property boom that began in the late 1990s, that working-class people without access to social housing cannot afford to live in the capital. 

This is why London has seen such dramatic demographic change within my lifetime. When I was born in West London in 1992, the city was 71 percent white British; when my youngest son was born last year (in the very same hospital), that figure had fallen to 36.8 percent. “I can think of no other major city,” said Paul Collier, now professor of economics at the University of Oxford, in an interview with The Economist magazine, “[in which] the indigenous population has more than halved in half a century.” 

There are two stories you’ll commonly hear about why so many cockneys left London. The first is a story of aspiration: Sick of their poky old houses and with new employment opportunities available to them, the cockneys opted for leafier and more spacious surrounds. The second narrative is more antagonistic: that the cockneys were forced out by a combination of mass immigration and hostile housing policy, all engineered by the governing class. 

Both of these explanations are true. I don’t believe that British policymakers of the 1970s deliberately set out to remove the native working class from London. It’s more that they didn’t mind especially when they looked up and noticed that the cockneys were gone, largely thanks to their efforts. Centuries of fiction reveal that wealthy Londoners have tended to take either a condescending or a fearful attitude toward their poorer neighbors, and it still does not occur to most of them that a working-class culture rooted in the place that birthed it might be valuable in some intangible way. In fact, in a recent comment on the rapid ethnic transformation of London, ­Labour Party activist John McTernan—formerly Tony Blair’s political secretary—wrote simply: “A better London has been ­created.” Progressives like McTernan now regard the loss of cockney London as a good thing.

This longstanding antipathy toward cockneys is aggravated by the fact that the British elite likes to imagine that our history is more American than it really is. The phrase “a nation of immigrants,” borrowed from the United States, entered political discourse at the beginning of this century and has since become a popular cliche, even though Britain was in fact remarkably ethnically homogeneous right up until the 1950s. The idea of a centuries-old working-class subculture cannot be ­accommodated within this worldview because such cultures just don’t exist in most of America, a country in which nearly everyone has been affected by immigration—both newcomers from the Old World and indigenous peoples whose ways of life were violently interrupted. 

When confronted with the reality of the cockney exodus, members of the British elite will claim that London has always been a “melting pot” (another American phrase), with vague references to the French Huguenots, who in 1700 formed 5 percent of the city’s population (and whose presence frequently contributed to rioting), as well as to London’s Jews, who at a peak in 1901 formed 2 percent of the population. If pre-war London was “built by migrants”—as Mayor Sadiq Khan likes to claim—they were overwhelmingly migrants from other parts of the British Isles. Of course, as an ­urban subculture, cockneys were never genetically or culturally isolated from the rest of the country, or the rest of the world. But that does not mean, as the “melting pot” narrative implies, that the existence of a distinctive cockney culture is a racist fairytale. This people really did exist, and they really were displaced. 

Which is not to say that they have suffered materially. Poppy Coburn of London’s Telegraph newspaper, who comes from a long line of cockneys, tells me that they’re doing just fine in Essex, Kent, and the other counties that absorbed all these Londoners, most of whom are quite happy to be living lives far more luxurious than those of their grandparents. As sociolinguist Amanda Cole has pointed out, the cockney accent “hasn’t died—she’s just called ‘Essex’ now.” This is a story of cultural transplantation, not extinction. 

But Coburn identifies a profound wariness among the ex-Londoners she grew up around. Newly cockney parts of the country take every opportunity to signal their opposition to further mass immigration, voting to leave the European Union in 2016 and now supporting Reform. The cockneys left London without much fuss, but now their backs are to the sea. 

In July of this year, a hotel in the Essex town of Epping became the focus of a series of protests that turned violent. The catalytic event was the arrest and charge of an asylum seeker accused of ­sexual assault. Hadush Kebatu, from Ethiopia, has since been convicted of sexually assaulting a local fourteen-­year-old girl and a woman, just a week after arriving in Britain illegally. Upon arrival, he had been housed in the seventy-nine-room Bell Hotel, alongside other male asylum seekers. 

The protests quickly spread to hotels in ­Canary Wharf in London and Diss in Norfolk, where ­illegal migrants are also being housed. The crowds at all of these protests were full of cockney accents, which is not surprising given recent migration patterns: Epping is an affluent town full of ­ex-cockneys who still commute into the capital, many of them working in Canary Wharf, and the area around Diss is home to a large community of cockneys who moved out to Norfolk in the second half of the twentieth century. 

The protests soon progressed to a new and richly symbolic form of civil disobedience that is being popularly referred to as “Operation Raise the Colours” or as “flagging”—that is, the adornment of lampposts and other street furniture with British and English flags, as well as occasional graffiti. Nowhere were the flagging efforts more energetic than in the East End, where groups of white men with cockney accents—often masked—defied the efforts of Tower Hamlets council to remove their flags. This council is held by Aspire, an independent party that has only ever fielded candidates of Bangladeshi heritage, and the rise of flagging in the East End must be understood as a (currently peaceful) territorial contest between two different ethnic groups. Former deputy Prime Minister Angela ­Rayner has warned that the country may well be facing more riots. Professor David Betz, professor of war studies at King’s College London, has warned that the country may well be on the brink of civil war. Conflict over the ownership of London risks tearing the country apart. 

There’s a speech that’s often circulated by British nativists on social media, including those who cheered on this summer’s disorder. There are various edits of it available on YouTube, all with hundreds of thousands of views. The speech is taken, curiously enough, from a BBC drama first aired in 2001 and now impossible to get hold of. From what I can gather, the character who delivers it was written as a villain, the head of a shadowy far-right organization responsible for a string of violent crimes. Here is our old cockney villain again—a fictional character we all know so well. 

It’s odd, then, that the speech is so poignant. The character—Laurence—describes his family tree, going back centuries in Bermondsey, an area of cockney London adjacent to the Thames. A family of Georges, Edwards, and Victorias, all based in the same area and working in the fish trade. “I stand here, in front of you, as a representative of all of them,” he says, speaking for a family 

who understand well their own country. Who understand even better their own capital, London town, as we used to call her. As we strolled in her parks, as we marvelled at her palaces, as we did business in the city, went west for a dance, took a boat on the river. The pale ale and eel pie of old London. The London of my family for as many generations as I know.

Put these words in the mouth of any other indigenous character, and that character would immediately be understood by a BBC audience as tragic. A new audience of online nativists has chosen to read this piece of fiction against the grain, I think because George expresses their complaint with unusual clarity. 

As the speech details, cockney animosity is mostly not directed at immigrants. These newcomers are understood as instruments of a class warfare waged by the British elites, a view that was frequently voiced by the cockneys interviewed in The New East End. Those cockneys spoke bitterly of the “middle-class do-gooders” who had provoked communal tensions by favoring immigrants over natives and then labelling as racist anyone who resisted the new regime. The crowds in Epping, ­Canary Wharf, and Diss keep telling journalists much the same thing. 

One could respond to this interpretation by pointing out that cockneys are materially better off now than they were in the past, which is surely true. One could also point out that modernity itself is at odds with any project of cultural preservation: People move, things change, “all that is solid melts into air.” Should we care if cockney culture melts away, too? 

I say that we should. Fourteen miles from the center of London, in the town of Epsom, eighty-seven-year-old George Major has built The Cockney Museum in a large outbuilding behind a residential street. “This is his life’s work,” his daughter told me when I visited the museum this summer. Major has filled every foot of wall space with photographs, captions, and artifacts that foreground not just the suffering of London’s cockneys, but also their creativity and resilience. “All the cockneys have moved out of London,” Major told the BBC, when asked why he hadn’t built the museum there. Intentionally or not, the place feels elegiac. 

As I walked around George Major’s museum, I thought of my cockney great-­grandfather, who spent much of his childhood living in the pub that his family ran, roughly a mile from Bow Bells. Like so many Britons of the twentieth century, he immigrated to Australia as a young adult but held on to the culture of his youth. (My mother remembers him singing music hall songs to her.) 

Australian culture may have absorbed many cockney elements—not least the pronunciation of certain vowels—but my great-grandfather’s descendants are not cockneys. Although my brother and I ended up back in London, by the time we returned to the city the process of cultural transmission had been disrupted. That’s what migration does, and my great-grandfather must have realized that when he made the choice to leave. 

When they immigrated to Australia, my ancestors (perhaps unwittingly) contributed to the displacement of the people indigenous to that country. After two centuries of violence and disease brought to them by Europeans, the indigenous population is now actually slightly larger than it was at the time of first contact, with longer life expectancies and access to the various comforts and delights offered by Western technology. But it is absurd to say that, since they are now materially better off, there was no wrong done to indigenous Australians. Of course they were wronged, and grievously. 

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognizes that violence is not the only way in which such peoples can be harmed. It affirms—among much else—“the right of all peoples to be different, to consider themselves different, and to be respected as such.” In other words, the UN insists that cultural particularity is valuable in and of itself, and that governments should not try to erase it. 

The British government has belatedly recognized that harm was done to the people subjected to its colonial adventures. Even if in the long term they were made richer, or healthier, or better educated, the anti-colonial position is that indigenous peoples should not have their lands ­taken from them. It is provocative to use the word “­indigenous” to describe cockneys, because doing so suggests that the British government has not yet shaken off its disregard for “the right of all peoples to be different.” I have chosen to use the word because that is exactly what I am suggesting: that the colonial instinct has turned inward and has been directed in particular at working-class people who were never much liked by the people who governed them. Many cockneys realize what has been ­done to them and is still being done to them. They realize that many people in government believe that London has been (in John McTernan’s words) made “better” by the absence of the people who built it. They realize, too, that this colonial instinct is still trained on them and has no qualms about permanently destroying what remains of cockney culture in places like Essex and Kent. They realize that this is just the latest iteration of the same class war that has been waged for centuries on these islands against people like them. And they are not at all happy about it.

The post Indigenous London appeared first on First Things.

At the graduation ceremony (which I did not attend), other students approached a colleague of mine, not in a spirit of guidance but of arrogance: We cheated the whole year, and you never caught us. They had escaped the noose of accountability. They weren’t relieved. Instead, they reveled, seeming to relish being scholastic frauds.      

We are in the era of pervasive, brazen student cheating. “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” proclaims New York Magazine. High school and college teachers must now revert to old-school methods of assigning work. The ballast of media panic has been about how cheating will diminish students’ capacity to labor, to produce. They won’t acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to be good doctors or lawyers or therapists. GDP might crash.

But the AI cheating crisis, at its heart, concerns something more profound. Journalists should be asking teachers a different question about student cheating. Not “Do they do it?” or “Is it becoming more widespread?” But: “Do your students feel bad about turning in work that is not their own? Do they feel any shame?”

Increasingly, alarmingly, the answer is simply no. When they get caught red-handed, they don’t blush. They certainly don’t apologize or offer any authentic excuses. There is no sense that what they are doing is immoral. At best it’s amoral. Their reaction to getting caught is best described as annoyance, the reaction one might have for being singled out and ticketed among a jaywalking mob.

This is the more insidious harm embedded in the modus operandi of the American student. When a corrosive habit becomes so widespread that it feels normal, the few who resist are left not only disadvantaged, but resentful—punished, ironically, for their integrity. The temptation proves too strong. And who can blame them? Teenagers have always cheated. But it was never everyone, and never with the most powerful intelligence tool humanity has ever known. Moral drift, normative desensitization—call it what you will—is now unfolding in our schools at such a scale and speed that it marks a titanic fork in the road for the future of American education.

My concern is not for my students’ brains or diminished skills. It is for the state of their souls.  

As teachers and parents, we should demand more than the trappings of achievement or a false sheen of perfection. The trophy matters little; it is the skill and the excellence behind the victory that counts. We teachers should want our students to be more than praised. We should want them, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, to be praiseworthy. 

It’s why my Gen X generation, as teenagers, was scandalized to learn the voices on our Milli Vanilli CDs didn’t belong to the guys holding the Grammy, Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, but to studio singers instead. It’s why sports fans were heartbroken when Lance Armstrong’s miraculous comeback turned out to be a sham. It’s why Meg Wolitzer’s captivating novel The Wife—about a woman who secretly writes her husband’s celebrated works while he collects the acclaim—is such a powerful meditation on the cost of misrepresentation.

Education, at its best and most inspiring, is a process of constant if uneven human growth. All this rhapsodizing about substantive learning is moot if our young people do not feel morally compelled to present their work as their own. The constant use of AI to perform the tasks they ought to perform for themselves makes a farce of the entire enterprise of education.  

This moral failing is currently perpetuated by the likes of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. But make no mistake—it is sewn into human nature. The catalyst is different, but the sin is the same: Bearing false witness. The root of Iago’s evil in Othello is his duplicity: “I am not what I am.” 

Our students have forgotten that there is immeasurable value in the authenticity of failure. Educators once expected a hue of vulnerability in their students, not because they reveled in critique or correction, but because revealing what one knows, however imperfectly, is the only way to deepen understanding and refine the self over time. A misplaced comma on an English essay, forgetting the Truman Doctrine on a history exam, or shifting the demand instead of the supply curve on an economics assignment are important steps toward becoming a better writer, knowing one’s history, or understanding the fundamentals of the free market. 

When our students stop being ours or anybody else’s students, they will step into the richer realm of adult life where our greatest joys are found not in our trophies but in our human connections, connections that are endlessly messy and yet are the deepest wells of purpose any of us will ever encounter. When one of my children is truly suffering, when my wife desperately needs my support, when a close friend requires my counsel, what they are going to get is not the clinical wisdom of a large language model, but the words and actions of a broken and deeply flawed human being trying his best to provide aid. This is why it was axiomatic among the Greeks that character is destiny. Alexander Pope, in his Essay on Man, exhorts us: “Act well your part: there all the honor lies.”       

Our students are not truly acting their part as students. And it’s not entirely their fault. They’ve been swept along, even corrupted, by the habit of projecting a false perfection with the digital trinkets handed down from Silicon Valley. To the tech bros, my students aren’t learners; they’re customers. And they’re winning the battle for our children’s souls. First came the assault on their mental health through social media, then reels eroded their attention spans, and now AI drains their capacity to ever be fully, genuinely educated. 

How much more must we surrender to these high priests of the digital age?

And yet, what matters are the anchors we can throw overboard when the storms of life greet us. There are no shortcuts to kindness. No hack to becoming loyal. No artificial means of acquiring the fruits of human wisdom. If we don’t teach our students to fail with honor, they will never learn to live with integrity. A generation that cannot bear the miniscule shame of a misplaced comma or a forgotten fact will be pitifully defenseless against the larger indignities of life.

We learn through failure. But what happens if our students never learn how to learn? They will simply fail. 

The post The AI Cheating Epidemic appeared first on First Things.

My ministry has taken me from the rolling hills of Appalachia to the brackish sounds of North Carolina and the fields of southwest Georgia. In each place, I’ve seen the challenges rural communities face: drug addiction, environmental damage, economic decline, and an all-too-common misunderstanding—bordering on disrespect—of rural people.

Glenmary is committed to walking with these communities. For over eighty years, our community of priests and brothers, along with lay co-workers, has worked in fourteen states, started over a hundred mission parishes, and successfully implemented hundreds of life-giving ministries. We start and run food banks, build affordable housing, tutor in struggling schools, offer drug addiction counseling, serve in prisons, facilitate faith and belonging in our churches, and much more. While others leave rural America behind, we stay.

But now our ability to serve is under threat—not from lack of will, but from the United States’ broken legal immigration system.

Like many Catholic religious communities and dioceses, and other Christian and non-Christian religious groups as well, Glenmary depends in part on members from outside the U.S. For instance, two-thirds of our members under fifty years of age are from abroad. Despite efforts to recruit Americans, the reality is that few are knocking on our doors. The men and women who come to us from other countries bring skills, faith, creativity, and a deep commitment to rural ministry. Without them, our work in some of the most underserved regions would grind to a halt.

Under recent changes during the Biden administration, it became nearly impossible for religious workers to move from a temporary visa to permanent residency. What once took months can now take decades due to administrative backlog. Those delays mean dedicated ministers—already embedded in rural towns and parishes—are forced to return home, disrupting their crucial work, and leaving others scrambling to fill the void. One of our members is, right now, packing his bags and leaving behind his ministry because he must wait for his visa to be granted.

Challenges within the legal immigration system aren’t new, and they aren’t partisan. During the current Trump administration, Glenmary has seen a rise in visa denials for vetted candidates hoping to join or remain with our community. But the reality is that, for years, overall denials for those seeking nonimmigrant visas to enter the U.S. have, in general, become increasingly common. For Glenmary, this means that our dreams to expand into other rural areas fade with each rejection, the reasons for which often seem ambiguous and arbitrary at best. This year, for the first time in recent memory, we have no new students entering formation—an unprecedented blow to our future.

Our story mirrors that of other religious groups relying on legal immigration. And here’s the irony: Many of the people we serve voted for leaders who promised to protect and support rural America—yet current policies are making it harder for us to be there.

There is a path forward. A bipartisan bill, the Religious Workforce Protection Act, now in Congress, would allow ministers on temporary visas to remain in their roles while waiting for residency. If passed, it would mean stability for ministers—both in Glenmary and in other religious congregations throughout the United States—who are already changing lives. It would also mean hope for communities that depend on them.

Even in today’s polarized climate, most Americans recognize the value of legal immigration. I see that value every day in rural parishes and towns sustained by courageous, sacrificial men and women from around the world.

I will keep working—and hoping—for the day when these dedicated ministers can enter the United States without unnecessary delay and stay where they are most needed: alongside the rural people and places I love.

The post Immigration Policy Is Hurting Rural Catholic Ministry appeared first on First Things.

Dear James,

My wife, an immigration attorney here in Texas, held a well-attended “know your rights” session for immigrants last night. But not a soul who was at risk of deportation came. Undocumented people here are terrified, and they have good reason to be. Vulnerable women, male breadwinners, and people facing destitution or death in their countries of origin are being deported on an hourly basis—not, as the Trump administration sometimes claims, just criminals.

Trump and his backers often say that immigrants are leeching off the American social service system. Some version of “We need to take care of our own” is their typical conversation-stopper. But the truth is that undocumented immigrants are the ones taking care of us. They pay taxes, including social security tax, which they’ll never benefit from themselves. Nor can they receive other entitlements like Medicaid or SNAP. Businesses stay afloat by paying them below minimum wage for farm work, picking our fruits and vegetables, nannying, or construction work. They’re an easily preyed upon shadow population—and the American economy is deeply dependent upon them.

So, as you can imagine, I don’t find President Trump’s policies to be morally coherent or rational even from a purely self-interested perspective. But more importantly, I think they’re theologically unsupportable.

Christians are supposed to be a people who live a different sort of Spirit-led politics, a “nation” (1 Peter 2:9) of people from every nation. That we Christians would deport our fellow citizens of the kingdom because they don’t have the right papers and don’t look like “job creators” militates against this fundamental Christian logic. It also repulsed the Catholic Church’s greatest modern thinkers. As Gaudium et Spes says, deportation “insults human dignity,” “poison[s] human society,” and is a “supreme dishonor to the Creator.”

Clearly you think otherwise. I’d be pleased to learn why.

Joel

***

Dear Joel,

Your wife’s experience indicates that the laws constituting America as a nation and Americans as a people are at last being enforced. That is a good thing. What is mystifying is that it should have taken political leaders so long to fulfill their duty to implement laws enacted by Congress at the behest of the people. As Aquinas reminds us, it is a basic precept of natural law that rulers are to uphold the positive laws that it grounds, especially those laws intended to protect citizens from physical injury and financial insecurity. Romans 13:1–7 instructs Christians to submit to governing authorities on the basis that they are instituted by God to maintain order and punish wrongdoing. Illegal migration by definition involves disregarding the legal authority of a nation.

Rapid unvetted migration at scale harms citizens. It depresses working-class wages. It strains public services. It sustains the vast criminal networks that make up the human trafficking industry. It facilitates the flow of drugs that are killing tens of thousands every year. It erodes civic trust. It gradually dissolves the shared heritage of a people—its norms, its traditions, its language, its culture—to the point where it can no longer use the first-person plural. And it harms the migrants’ countries of origin by draining them of the very citizens who would make poor countries less poor.

You cite Gaudium et Spes, which does indeed condemn unjust deportation; but it is not unjust to deport those who hold in contempt the laws of the nation whose hospitality they are seeking to enjoy. Moreover, that encyclical also insists on the indispensability of ordered societies (§26) and the importance of legitimate political boundaries (§74). Nowhere does it imply that there is a universal human right to live and work in a nation, nor would it have been coherent to posit one. Immigration is not a human right that any charter or convention would recognize—it is a privilege that should be granted to a person only insofar as it promotes the national interest.  

Yours,
James 

***

Dear James,

We can agree that Gaudium et Spes shouldn’t be interpreted as prohibiting deportation no matter what. Some people do hold the law in contempt, after all. But even on your reading, the Trump administration’s mass deportations should be understood to fall under the council’s condemnation. The first people the administration deported legally entered and applied for asylum through the now-defunct CBP One app. Others with no criminal record were sent to Guantánamo Bay. If the council fathers thought these people deportable, what immigrant isn’t a legitimate target (see §26)?

Further, shutting down the U.S. asylum process—which President Biden campaigned on and President Trump carried out—appears to violate the right to asylum (article 14) set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (article 1. A. 2). U.S. asylum law is based on the Protocol’s definition of a refugee; hence the recent proliferation of immigration-related lawsuits. 

But I doubt the ultimate basis of our disagreement lies here. Perhaps we can get at it by considering the biblical query, “Who is my neighbor?” If I’ve read you rightly, you believe Christians should put their countrymen above the foreigner. I believe, however, that Christ rejected such thinking in the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Recall what led the expert in the law to ask Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:27) He believed that to inherit eternal life he must love his neighbor as himself. Jesus agreed. In fact, he called this the second greatest commandment (Matt. 25:27).

So Christians advocating strict limits on immigration seem to have a dilemma: (1) Either they must argue that they could lovingly deport their neighbor—and themselves. Or (2) they must say that the foreigner isn’t their neighbor. Do you believe that the foreigner isn’t your neighbor?

Regards,
Joel

***

Dear Joel,

You argue that Trump’s deportations violate Gaudium et Spes, but that document champions the common good, not an unrestricted right of entry for all. You claim that shutting down asylum breaches international law, but that law grants a right to seek asylum, not to receive it, and restricts refugee status to the persecuted, excluding economic migrants. 

Hospitality is a virtue, but not one that eclipses every other. Chesterton’s observation that “[t]he modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad” aptly captures the way some Christians assume that hospitality trumps the many and various virtues required to preserve a just and ordered community.

You say limits on immigration deny that foreigners are neighbors, citing the Parable of the Good Samaritan. But that parable simply enjoins charity to those within our sphere of moral concern, not a dissolution of Samaria’s borders with Judaea! It’s a singular, proximate act—binding a wound—not a summons to treat all, near or far, kin or stranger, with equal practical regard. 

Charity does not end at home, but it does begin there. Paul urges the Christians in Galatia to do good to all, but especially to the household of faith (Gal. 6:10). Love, in other words, is radial; and love’s intensities must be ordered if we finite and fallen creatures are to love all our neighbors well.  

Your dilemma presents a false dichotomy: The foreigner can be my neighbor situationally, but that does not mean he enjoys perpetual parity of moral regard with those tied to me by kin, culture, or citizenship. Deportation is a loving act insofar as it upholds justice by protecting the innocent. Nowhere is this truth plainer than when the deported are criminals like the gang members and people-traffickers of Tren de Aragua, notorious for their murderous violence and callous commodification of human life.

Reconciling love for humanity and love for one’s own is a moral challenge that will often be freighted with difficulty, but no Christian should treat it as insuperable.  

Warmly,
James

***

Dear James,

Do you have in mind a right to “seek” asylum that a government could fulfill without a functioning asylum program? That’s a pretty miserable little right. But no matter. We have bigger (theological) fish to fry.

Back to the Good Samaritan. You wrote that the parable “simply enjoins charity to those within our sphere of moral concern,” not “to treat all, near or far, kin or stranger, with equal regard.”

I take it you’re describing the ordo amoris, the notion that Christians should love those closest to them—family, friends, countrymen—before strangers and foreigners. You’ve rightly noted before in First Things that Augustine is often credited with Christianizing the idea. But in coming to grips with the Good Samaritan, Augustine didn’t put human beings in rank order by how tightly natural ties bound them. Instead, he asked in De Doctrina Christiana: “Who can fail to see that there is no exception to this, nobody to whom compassion is not due? The commandment extends even to our enemies.” Augustine didn’t jive well with our modern ordo amoris.

His conclusion is rooted in the parable itself. Some readers will know that Samaritans—descendants of the exiled northern kingdom of Israel (2 Kings 17)—had built a counter-temple on Mount Gerizim. A century before Jesus’s birth, Jews burned that temple, sacked their cities, and enslaved the population. Samaritans could hardly fail to remember this. For their part, Jews saw Samaritans as a cultural pollution: heretics at best, traitors and idolators at worst.

So Jesus’s Samaritan had far weightier natural reasons to bypass the wounded Jew than American Christians today have to summarily deport their neighbors without papers. These two didn’t know each other. The Samaritan doubtless had kin and friends with pressing claims on his affections, time, and money. Their peoples hated each other.

And yet he showed mercy. Doing likewise, Jesus said, is the path to eternal life (Luke 10:25, 37).

Joel

***

Dear Joel,

No one contests the basic principle of asylum. But the mass importation of tens of millions of unvetted aliens—some deserving asylum, but many not—has shattered public trust in such systems all across the West. It has hardened citizens against the truly needy and replaced charity with resentment, especially among society’s most marginalized. 

You misunderstand the ordo amoris. Love for all could not possibly entail equal practical concern for all. That way lies moral paralysis and social collapse. Proximity is the criterion for calibrating compassion. No one would have faulted the Samaritan for failing to care for the victim had he decided not to take the road to Jericho that day. If you think that the message of the Parable of the Good Samaritan is that Samaria should welcome and care for all of Judaea’s dispossessed, think again. 

In the passage you cite, Augustine tells us that compassion is due to all, not that it is due to all to the same degree. He also correctly insists the duty extends to enemies, but note that he uses the word inimicos (personal enemies), not hostes (public enemies). The command to forgive and love a personal foe does not mean we should embrace those who are hostile to the common good. And if you’re not clear that unvetted mass migration swells the ranks of public enemies, ask the grieving families of Laken Riley, Mollie Tibbetts, Kate Steinle, Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin, or Aiden Clark.

Strangers deserve kindness within the constraints of reason and justice. Aquinas rightly insists that prioritizing the common good means barring alieni who threaten it, a position plainly rooted in Scripture: Deuteronomy 23:3–4 excludes Moabites for their past hostility; the fate of the Gibeonites in Joshua 9:21–27 for deceitful entry is servitude not membership; Leviticus 19:34 applies only to sojourners who honor their host nation, as Ruth the Moabite so movingly does (Ruth 1:16); Hebrews 13:2 and Matthew 25:35 urge personal kindness to strangers; and so on. None of these justifies the immense social upheaval and demographic chaos that mass migration has unleashed. 

Yours,
James

The post Is the Foreigner My Neighbor? A Christian Dialogue on Immigration appeared first on First Things.