U.S. Catholic Bishops are citing Nazis, slave catchers, and replacement babies as they try to slam President Donald Trump’s popular immigration policies.
The bishops are also urging open borders, parroting cheap-labor demands from business groups, and pretending that illegal migrants are not illegal.
One Bishop is even endorsing President George W. Bush’s “Any Willing Worker” migration policies as an alternative to Trump’s pro-prosperity policies.
The slave-catcher and Nazi argument was pushed by Bishop Mark Brennan, the Bishop of Wheeling-Charleston in West Virginia.
ICE agents and other officials “cannot escape personal responsibility for an unjust action with the excuse that it was ordered by their superiors,” he wrote to Catholics in his diocese, according to an August 7 report:
That defense was not allowed during the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals at the end of World War II. The judges held that a soldier, guard or official, who authorized or engaged in gross violations of human rights, was personally responsible for his acts.
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We the people should also remember our history. The Fugitive Slave Act, passed by Congress as part of the Compromise of 1850 — an attempt to calm the tensions between slave states and free states — required not only local police but ordinary citizens to assist federal marshals in returning escaped slaves to their Southern masters or face heavy fines and jail time.
His language echoes the elite-funded, pro-migration Cato Institute.
Trump’s deportations are wrong because business needs cheap labor, according to Archbishop Thomas Wenski, the Archdiocese of Miami.
“You can ask the farmers; you can ask the hotel managers; you can ask those that run nursing homes and health care institutions around the country — and they’ll tell you that their best workers, in many cases, are immigrants,” he said, according to an August 5 report in AmericaMagazine.org.
Those are the people that we should advocate for — that there should be a path for them to stay in this country — because they’ve already contributed some sweat equity. They’re contributing to the country. Our country needs their labor, so they should be allowed to stay — and that’s what we should advocate for. I think there’s a lot of people that are open to that argument.
Wenski also endorsed the cheap-labor, high-rent amnesty bill pushed by a GOP representative whose husband employs farm workers:
There is a proposal in the House by Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, who is a Republican from Miami. And I will say that’s a good first step at a proposal that would provide a path for legalization for a number of people.
His comments echo the condescension and ruthlessness of Democratic politicians. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, for example, told Katie Couric in June:
My biggest fear is the impact that all Angelenos will begin to feel when the labor of immigrants is absent We’ll feel it in the construction industry. We’ll feel it in hospitality. We’ll feel it at grocery stores … [I] think about the mothers who have nannies and housekeepers. They will feel it when there’s nobody to do childcare and there’s nobody to take their kids to school. You know, you will feel it when your gardener goes away, and you don’t know where he or she is. So Angelenos will feel the absence of immigrant labor.
Many bishops echo the cheap-labor pitch from business groups who argue that their claimed right to cheap employees supersedes American families’ right to decent wages on a level playing field in the national labor market.
“We should reform legal immigration policies to ensure that our nation has the skilled workers it needs,” wrote Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles. He also justified an amnesty for illegals by citing their labor, as if migrants should be allowed to buy citizenship by undercutting Americans in the labor market:
The vast majority of “illegal aliens” are good neighbors, hardworking men and women, people of faith; they are making important contributions to vital sectors of the American economy: agriculture, construction, hospitality, health care, and more.
Brennan, however, outdid Gomez by endorsing Bush, who actually proposed a plan that would allow employers to hire “Any Willing Worker” worldwide when Americans asked for higher wages:
The main problem is that our immigration laws discourage legal immigration… Republican President George W. Bush presented an acceptable if imperfect plan to reform immigration laws, but his own party shot it down.
The bishop’s economic arguments against deportations conveniently ignore the gains for American families — higher wages, more benefits, more jobs, and greater workplace productivity.
Brennan also endorsed migrants as government-delivered replacements for the children sought by underpaid families in the United States:
Immigrants tend to be younger, marry sooner and have more children than the average American-born couple. In a nation whose fertility rate is now only at 1.6% when 2.1% is needed just to maintain the current population level – and especially in West Virginia, which has been losing population for many years – we should welcome immigrants because we need them and the vitality they bring.
Neither Brennan nor the other bishops have credited Trump — and his voters — for saving many thousands of migrants from being murdered or raped and for ending the Wall Street economic strategy of extracting human resources from poor countries.
The Bishops are also trying to suggest that illegal migrants who do not commit additional crimes are exempt from the nation’s popular border laws.
“It is becoming clearer that this is a wholesale, indiscriminate deportation effort aimed at all those who came to the country without papers,” Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., told the New York Times.
McElroy was appointed by the now-deceased Pope Francis and is one of the most aggressively pro-migration bishops. Trump’s pro-American immigration policy is “a crusade which comes from the darkest parts of our American psyche and soul and history,” he said in March.
Brennan told his flock that Americans are responsible for illegal migration because Congress is divided. Migrants “feel obliged to enter our country without legal documents [and] now our government is overreacting by trying to force them out,” he wrote.
“We Catholics must welcome the stranger and feed and clothe him,” said Brennan, without noting the huge costs to Americans and to the many millions of poor foreign people who suffer when their energetic youth are extracted northwards to expand the U.S. consumer economy.
In contrast to the bishops’ overreaching, the new American-born pontiff, Pope Leo IX, sticks to the religious and moral aspects of the migration debate and so far has ignored the economic claims, Nazi analogies, and Bush endorsements. In a July 25 message, he wrote:
In a world darkened by war and injustice, even when all seems lost, migrants and refugees stand as messengers of hope. Their courage and tenacity bear heroic testimony to a faith that sees beyond what our eyes can see and gives them the strength to defy death on the various contemporary migration routes.
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At the same time, the communities that welcome them can also be a living witness to hope, one that is understood as the promise of a present and a future where the dignity of all as children of God is recognized. In this way, migrants and refugees are recognized as brothers and sisters, part of a family in which they can express their talents and participate fully in community life.
“The bishops of the United States have been unanimous, really, in their support of immigrants and immigration reform,” said Wenski, adding: “Sometimes, in some parts of the country, they take a lot of heat for their pro-immigrant stance.”
The bishops also understand that their influence in American politics is waning.
“We as a church unfortunately don’t have the kind of megaphone that the administration does,” Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, told the New York Times. “It’s a real challenge to reach even Catholics, especially when maybe one out of five who identify as Catholic make it to Mass on Sunday.”
“No person of good will can remain silent,” Broglio said while sidestepping the voter polls supporting Trump’s deportation policies and the voters’ voice in the November 2024 election.
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