President Donald Trump’s pro-American immigration policy is “a crusade which comes from the darkest parts of our American psyche and soul and history,” according to Pope Francis’s new Archbishop of Washington, DC.
“The pathway of crusade and mass deportation cannot be followed in conscience by those who call themselves disciples of Jesus Christ, and we must work to make sure that that does not happen,” Cardinal Robert McElroy said in a speech to the Jesuit Refugee Service organization in D.C.
McElroy called for welcoming policies similar to those established by President Joe Biden’s border czar, Alejandro Mayorkas, saying:
The first pathway — which Catholic social teaching would support — is to change our laws so that they have secure borders and dignity for the treatment of everyone at those borders and a generous asylum and refugee policy … I actually believe most Americans would be in favor of that pathway.
McElroy’s use of the “crusade” term suggests Trump’s policies are driven by zealotry, not by sympathy for Americans. Ironically, the term exists because McElroy’s predecessors in the Catholic Church launched the Crusades in 1096 to liberate Christians from the Muslim conquest of the Middle East, starting in the 800s.
McElroy justified his anathematization of Trump’s policies by citing the biblical story of the Good Samaritan, which describes how a man from the Samaritan ethnic group aided a wounded traveler of a different ethnic group after he had been attacked by robbers. This story about one act of personal kindness on the roadside should be a guide for the U.S. government as it deals with global migration, according to McElroy. He said:
Pope Francis talks about the victim lying by the side of the road. What desperation and hopelessness must be sinking in for him. Each of us, Francis says, at times in this world, is the victim in which we feel others are merely passing by, not paying attention. And it is important, Francis says, to understand, to recognize this experience in our lives, because only when we do so can we see ourselves in right relation with the good Samaritan, the one who comes to action, the one who saves us.
Then there are the figures of the robbers. We don’t see them, but we see what they have done. And Francis says, “Each of us in our own lives, is also the robber.” Each of us, at times, victimizes others, consciously in a variety of different ways, [each] will replace our own interests and well-being ahead of others and truly cause harm. We must be in touch with that side of ourselves and with the darkness which is the robber inside every one of us, and recognize that is one of the great calls of Christian conversion, to root out that darkness, to face it where it lies, and to fight against it always.
However, the vast amount of money moved by migration has long ago blurred the lines between travellers, robbers, and helpers.
Under Mayorkas and Biden, the U.S. government used citizens’ taxes to openly invite and covertly fund the migration of roughly ten million migrants to the United States, so exposing many Americans to robbery and victimization by migrants and their employers.
On their road north, many of the invited and supported migrants were also robbed and raped by gangs, or died in jungles, deserts, roads, and rivers. “There were two images of his treacherous journey north that he couldn’t get out of his head,” Albinson Linares from Telemundo.com wrote in January 2023 about a Venezuelan migrant named Johan Torres:
The first was how a [migrant] person who resisted a robbery in Mexico was killed with a machete; the other happened in the jungle, when he saw a man leave behind his young daughter, waist-deep in mud.
“He left her there, lying in the mud and crying. And I couldn’t do anything because I was dying of exhaustion. But I can’t forget that,” he said with tears in his eyes.
The death toll was so high in Panama’s Darien Gap jungle that Mayorkas pushed Panama to create a safer coastal route via high-speed boats that delivered migrants to buses funded by Mayorkas.
In Mexico, the northward flow of migrants paid off the cartels and coyotes with billions of dollars in loans. Those robberies were made possible by Mayorkas’s decision to allow migrants to quickly get the U.S. jobs that would pay off their smuggling debts to the coyotes. That conveyor of cash to the cartels was only possible because Mayorkas imposed catch-and-release policies on the border patrol, which is required by law to detain migrants until their asylum claims are judged.
Mayorkas and his political allies also enabled the smuggling of 550,000 youths and children by forcing the U.S. Border Patrol to knowingly relay the young migrants to unidentified labor traffickers and illegal migrant parents in the United States. Many of the young people were predictably employed in abusive workplaces as government inspectors failed to enforce age and safety rules.
The northward flow of legally “inadmissable” migrants inevitably included many criminals and murderers, as well as reckless drivers who have collectively killed many Americans.
Biden’s officials invited the migrants partly because they wanted to goose the economy before the 2024 election — regardless of the huge damage done to Americans and the people left behind in the migrant-sending countries, including the Catholic country of Nicaragua.
Throughout the four-year process, government officials downplayed the vast human and economic cost of their engineered migration, as did the media, progressives, and the Catholic Church. Groups closely affiliated with the Catholic Church were paid huge sums to hide the migrant inflows delivered to American communities and workplaces.
The Catholic hierarchy defended this ruthless economic policy of Extraction Migration amid massive opposition from ordinary Catholics.
In his defense, McElroy celebrated the migrants but downplayed the migration system, with all of its vast incentives for exploitation, arbitrage, abuse, and cruelty:
They are exactly the type of people that we wish to come to our nation to help build it up, to make it more beautiful, to make it a place where so many of the values which are atrophying in our society with its secularism, are replaced by faith and by a sense there is something greater than the individual here ….
This really is the greatest challenge: That we come to understand once again and reclaim our heritage as our nation, that we are a people that were built by immigrants of every generation who came in that very same way, all of them desperate, in so many ways, seeking a new life for themselves and their families. We must make that the centerpiece … of how we respond to this.
But the intricate, complex, and often hidden migration system determines the costs and benefits, not the individual migrants.
Because of Mayorkas and his Catholic allies, 300 million blue-collar and white-collar Americans lost power in the labor and housing markets, and they lost workplace investment, productivity, and training once enabled by employers.
Citizens also lost civic stability to government-imposed social diversity, and they lost political power to the expanding blocs of ethnic voters who demand benefits for their particular communities, cultures, and home countries.
Americans also lost the attentions of left-wing politicians and the sympathy of left-wingers who now prefer to focus their powerful empathy on grateful migrants instead of on alienated, poor, discarded, and normal Americans:
Americans also grew disgusted at their government’s migration policy as it spent billions of dollars to extract human resources from poor countries for use in the U.S. economy, regardless of the massive loss of life among migrants and Americans and the damage done to sending countries.
Yet McElroy seems oblivious to the vast damage Mayorkas helped cause to ordinary Americans as he focused his empathy on the migrants:
[The migrants] are the good Samaritan. They sacrifice for their families. They work hard, and they build up our society. They bring good values to our nation. They bring a sense of solidarity, a strong sense of family, of what it means to give up, so that your child can have a better life.
The undocumented are victims of this moment and of these [Trump] policies, and we as a church need to advocate continually for our solidarity with them and their dignity as human persons. We must not only advocate, but we must act in support of them in every way possible.
But the archbishop’s choice to act “in every way possible” for migrants — and also the migration system — had predictable consequences for his cause in a democracy.
Trump won the November election because he promised to end the mass migration invoked by McElroy’s allies. And after January 20, Trump — who says he is empowered by his survival of an assassination attempt — closed down the USAID foreign aid agency that McElroy supported.
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