I truly appreciate your thinking. We must secure our borders. We must be charitable towards the millions of illegals currently living within our borders. We must separate political demagoguery from real hospitality to the illegal immigrants who truly should and need to be here. Unfortunately, it is going to be a difficult and long road . But such it is always when the true way of being and acting are called for.
Peace and God Bless, and may Christ be the center of your life.

I understand the irresistible attraction of the American economy, and I understand that for most of the last 25 years, border jumpers were not seen as much more than a harmless nuisance. But the effect changes with scale. One graffiti artist is a nuisance. Twelve million graffiti artists would be a intolerable scourge. Illegal immigration is not a scourge, yet, but it is intolerable at the current level. You can't run a modern nation with 12 million completely anonymous people running around. The local parish sees about 12, in the pews. The rest of us see 12 million in the shadows. Not tolerable.

Thanks for the insightful article.

How about....
1) Small few to help cover processing costs ($25, $10 ??)
1) Proof of country of residence
2) Two Valid proofs of identification
3) Contact information for while in the the country
and/or, a monthly "check-in" where they call to state their location.
4) Time limit given before they must leave. (6 months?)
5) Criminal offense would prevent return for some time period,
depending on severity of offense.

Sounds like a work visa. Why isn't that system being utilized/expanded?

Perhaps we could have a better "legal worker" process.
While working here legally, they could be working towards full legal citizenship someday.

Your Eminence,

Your ideas are generally wise, but allow me to offer three friendly amendments.

First, I probably need not tell you about the galloping criminalization of immigrants. It is awfully hard to live here without violating various "malum prohibtum' laws, like laws against using fake social security numbers and laws against driving without a license and without insurance. Yet such violations are often felonies. Categorically barring "felons" without considering the nature of the violation might lead to good decisions in 90% of the cases, but that leaves a lot of unfortunate people.

More broadly, it seems to me that plans to legalize the millions of undocumented tend to overshadow the principle of making our laws rational. I suggest that a better principle would be (a) amending our laws to make them rational, allowing more less-educated immigration in an orderly fashion, and then (b) allowing people already here to retroactively apply for those visas. I am not saying this to be judgmental (to not "reward" lawbreaking) but because we ought to focus on long-term solutions.

Finally, while I do not doubt that your recommendation for something nonpartisan would be better than the alternative, I don't see how that can possibly be a principle. I would rather that opposition to abortion was non-partisan, but it's (unfortunately) not, and I certainly wouldn't want to say as a principle that we shouldn't do anything about it until everyone agrees. Waiting for a hotly disputed issue to become non-partisan is another way of saying "do nothing" - something I don't think you wish to say. I don't doubt that we'd be better off in a less partisan world, but regardless of whether that's ever a realistic hope, I can't see why this issue in particular ought to be one where we wait for some sudden consensus before acting.

People will be generous towards illegal immigrants once the borders are secured. I believe that those who might be amnestied should never be granted citizenship or voting rights and should be expelled if they commit a felony or assist others to violate our immigration laws.

Our Lord's injunction to welcome the stranger is not a license to disobey just laws controlling immigration. Nor does it require us to change just laws to make them more welcoming to the stranger. Turning the other cheek does not mean compelling others to do the same. Generosity to the poor does not mean taxing others to redistribute wealth.

As a legal immigrant, I agree with chuck, above, that rationalizing immigration law must be the first step. I think that the principle of attempting to take partisan political considerations out of the equation is important if good reform is ever to be achieved...and those of you voting citizens can take that step by informing your political representatives of your desire to see just and thoughtful reform and your willingness to challenge partisan friends and family to contemplate this issue outside of the lens of political oneupmanship.

Once immigration laws our rationalized, it will relieve the pressure at the borders and make border enforcement both more practicable and more just. After all, no border guard wants to be in the position of possibly shooting hungry and desperate people alongside drug mules and gang members. Then, as chuck said, we can work to manage the undocumented immigrants already present.

"America's growing demand for labor?" Then why are there so many unemployed AMERICANS. In my opinion, it is wrong to let any immigrants in as long as a single American can't find a job. American's would do the jobs illegals currently do if the illegals didn't drive down the wages.

I've got a better solution - how about we arrest and deport every single illegal alien along with their anchor-baby children? And not just send them across the border, but dump them off in the Yucatan so they'd have to travel another 1,000 miles to get back to our border. In my opinion, any solution has to include deportation.

Cultures are always enriched by immigration? Ask the Romans if barbarian "immigration" enriched the. 30 million illegals? This is not immigration but invasion, and I wish bishops would cease their love-affair with illegal aliens.

I think it is worth noting that illegal immigration from Mexico (roughly half the total number of illegals, and more than half of the relatively unskilled illegals are from Mexico) began with, and as a consequence (of?), two policy changes in the United States. The first was the end of the bracero program that allowed for substantial seasonal back and forth movement. The second was the establishment in the 1964 immigration legislation of Western hemisphere quotas for the first time. it may be that prior to 1964 the phenomenon of immigrants entering without inspection (EWI) at the borders was much less common. More than half of the current flow of illegals are those who enter without inspection making it more difficult to control the entry of criminals and those with serious communicable diseases

If I were to condemn this article in the terms it actually deserves, First Things would not publish the comment on account of the bad language. The American bishops’ position on the illegal immigrant problem is preposterous, consisting of nothing but sanctimonious and self-assured fence-sitting masquerading as “charity,” and disclosing a collective weakness of will unworthy of clerics, of Americans, and of men. Of all the choking darnel seeds that Satan sows into the Church Militant’s humble fields, there is none so destructive in its effects, none so nauseating in its visage, as the sunken priest—the prating sentimentalist and lickspittle who, while mouthing a bunch of pious nonsense about “helping the poor” and “loving thy neighbor,” does endless damage to the good conscience of the faithful, deprives them of their self-respect, ignores their needs and hardships, undermines their nation’s institutions, destroys their domestic tranquility, and works indefatigably for the benefit of their enemies. And why do they do this? That is question I will address below. Have no doubt that I will lay bear the real wellspring of clerical tone-deafness on this issue. But first it is necessary to dispel some of the many myths which haunt this debate; that is, it is necessary to criticize those conceptions and definitions which comprise the metaphysical furniture of the discussion.

1. To begin with, let me state categorically that to subsume an unchecked invasion of 12 million criminals under the rubric of Jesus’ command to “welcome the stranger” is, without doubt, as high a pitch of nonsense as human folly is capable of devising. These illegal aliens are not travelers, or sojourners, or wayfarers, or traders, or pilgrims, or refugees, or exiles, or anyone else who might have a legitimate claim upon our hospitality; they are squatters, thieves, trespassers, and parasites who need to be removed from our midst (or failing that, subjected to our unquestioned dominion). Their very existence here is itself a breach of the law; their first breath of American air was taken in bad faith. Simply to deport them humanely would itself fulfill the demands of charity; to beat them out of the country with brickbats is quite in keeping with justice.

2. The argument that Americans “benefit” from illegal immigrant labor is a boomerang that comes round to whack the sentimentalist upside his own silly head. To the extent that we actually benefit from unskilled immigrant labor, we do so precisely because it is illegal—because it must exist in the shadows, must accept the low wages offered to it, and cannot organize politically in order to demand more favorable treatment. The legalization of the immigrants, whether by outright amnesty or through a guest worker program, would mean the end of all that, in which case the immigrant labor would be in direct competition with American labor at American-style wages. With so many Americans already unemployed, it is simply treasonous to even entertain this possibility. Now apply the same reasoning, mutatis mutandis, to the demands placed upon the health care system, the school system, etc. by illegal aliens. Is this what the Church is proposing? If so, then American Catholics have every right to demand the ouster of their bishops and insist on their replacement by shepherds who will actually care about THEM. If not, then the argument from “benefits” actually becomes an argument for the continued enslavement of illegal Mexicans. It is a separate question whether or not any complex society can exist without some form of slavery, and the weight of all recorded history leads me to believe that the answer is “no.” Neither the Scriptures nor Sacred Tradition nor the natural law has any word to say against slavery, and therefore I am in favor of the enslavement of the aliens. But this should be done explicitly and with vigor. Those who have no rights should be made to feel that they have no rights, lest they even dream of agitating. We will never hear an American bishop so much as breathe a word of this, but that is only because they refuse to follow their own logic to its natural conclusion. They fail to survey the situation accurately. Notice also that the humanitarian argument (i.e. “We need to legalize the immigrants so that they can come out of the shadows and live decent lives”) breaks down for the same reasons. We cannot resolve this situation without doing harm to at least one group of people—us or them. It is utterly absurd to choose to do more harm to ourselves for the benefit of the invaders who are already harming us.

3. Virtually none of these illegal Mexicans “pray beside us at Mass.” Weekly Mass attendance among adult Catholics in Mexico is about equal to America’s dismal rate of 25%, and among the immigrant population it is even lower. I must take issue with those who claim that the Church’s pro-immigrant stance is rooted in its desire to replenish its dwindling ranks and coffers with fresh Catholic immigrants plucked from the fields of Mexico. This isn’t born out by the facts; plus, it falls prey to same sentimental idea that motivates the pro-immigrant stance in the first place. (Again, the real reason—seditiousness and cowardice—will be discussed below.) If we could once get the idyllic image of “Pedro the pepper-packer” and his toothless grin out of our minds, we would see what kind of people we are really dealing with. The Mexican border is controlled by criminal cartels who traffic in every sort of obscenity. 30,000 gangland murders have been committed there over the past 2 years—five times the number of deaths sustained by American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bounties are being place on the heads of American law enforcement officers. Are these really the people we want to “welcome” into the country?

4. The idea that we are “culturally enriched” by such miscreants is vapid and ridiculous. If Slattery is saying that the benefits accrued to our language and cuisine somehow outweighs the loss of sovereignty and the breakdown of order in our country, I can only shake my head in disgust. And even if this were true, it would do no more than render us in the role of modern day Esaus, having sold our birthright for a taco grande.

5. Finally, the reason the bishops are so intransigent on this issue has nothing to do with any heartfelt desire to follow Christ wherever He may lead. It has to do with the decline of Western civilization generally, the peculiar association of Roman Catholicism in America with the Democratic Party, the corruption of the Church with social-progressivist ideology since the Second Vatican Council, and the emasculation of the priesthood. Most men of the cloth today are delicate little creatures who, having grown up in decidedly Democratic households and environments where labor unions and the New Deal formed the basis of moral philosophizing, reflexively side with the underclass and riffraff of the world, and mistakenly believe that this romanticization of the wretched and the alien is what Jesus Christ actually commanded. On top of these social factors in their formation, most priests today are, as individuals, unimpressive specimens who are obviously nursing a grievance against the world and would fain command others to give up what they themselves were never capable of possessing—legitimacy, authority, property, and respect. Between one quarter and one half of them have pronounced homosexual tendencies. They are weak-willed and conciliatory, shy of confrontation, and blithely dismissive of the challenges, goals, needs, and desires of ordinary people. What’s more, their focus now lies entirely in the earthly plane and upon earthly goods. They have forgotten the holy battle to which we are called, and do nothing to advance the Kingdom of God. Alleviating pain and winning approval for themselves amongst the secular authorities are their new missions. Thus they are dragged by their own inclinations to that nadir of holiness and moral responsibility known as apostasy. We no longer have bishops in this country; we have mitre-queens playing dress-up, prostitutes of palliation. But with the renewal of authentic Catholic thought now being pioneered by the Holy Father, I wonder whether the defenestration of renegade priests is not another venerable custom whose return we shall soon be privileged to see.

Oh, Phillip. Silent contemplation of our Lord's suffering might lead you to a gentler response to the problem. Realism must temper our empathy, but also an understanding of the roots of the problem, and our own (Americans' own) desire to have our cake and eat it, too.

Your reference to the Romans may be apt, I fear. America's cultural degeneration—especially as evidenced by the *human sacrifice* of more than a million unborn per year to the false gods of pleasure and narcisim—has dramatically weakened the nation. Those unfortunate enough to be poor in Mexico can't be blamed for dreaming of a better future. And we may indeed be enriched by their presence. Change is urgently needed, but any solution that contemplates deporting ten million people is utterly misguided and doomed.

May God have mercy upon us.

A slightly different slant on this problem:

Century ago there were no illegal aliens because there was essentially no restriction on entry as long as you were not carrying tuberculosis. We are all descended form non-legal immigrants. The issue is one of social cohesion, the Christian doctrine makes clear. As an especially diverse sort of fellow, I can afford to be rather catholic about this, but it is real.

There is however a much more pressing problem: legal immigration. Having spent a large part of my life hanging around the halls of academe, as have many of you, I can attest that at the highest levels of society we have systematically discriminated against native Americans -- I mean the Polish and Italian and seasoned Chinese ones -- in favor of the foreign-born. The reason is that the elite want to toady to the elites of third world countries, and one way to do that is to take in their children and educate them in our universities. This is not a scheme we invented. The European powers have been doing it for a long time, but the magnitude of the flow into America is unprecedented.

I don't blame the immigrants. They come here trying to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. But the effect remains: it is a policy to reject our own children and especially our sons in favor of the sons and daughters of the world elite. It is why our public schools are so bad.

The working class public sense that in a very real sense, Barak Obama doesn't feel any attachment to the American people. His attachment is to the ruling class of the New World Order. This perception has fueled a crisis of legitimacy in the nation which manifests itself in many ways, some of the appealing and some of them repulsive, but all of the genuine and understandable. The American people want to have their own government, and they think they are entitled to one. My wife is a Filipina, and her father fought in our Army in 1942 in the defense of Corregidor. She like so many Filipinos feels a real kinship with Americans. They are shocked at the loss of sense of national identity in America.

Mr. Beck, you come across like an Old Testament prophet, ready to exsanguinate the priests of Baal! I think many will agree with a kernal of your views. Most, however, will consider them mostly unreasonable and outrageous. I would suggest that Luther was probably even more outraged—and look where that got him.

You owe your bishop obedience. Prayer, penance, and humble Christian witness are called for, not uncontrolled rage. Your considerable intellectual and rhetorical skills would be more influential if you couched your criticism in the terms you'd use if speaking to someone you really believe to be your superior. Consider it.

Matt Beck:
Harsh but accurate.
Thank you

Your Excellency, having looked in more detail at your views on this and other subjects, I would like to express my gratitude to God and to Pope John Paul II for your presence in the Church. You are clearly a man with a backbone, a brave servant of our Lord. In this case, you touch a raw nerve, I fear. We have a hard time letting go of our physical possessions, be they money, territory, or perceived rights. You help me, at least, to recall that I will one day, God willing, when all my earthly wealth is dust, face the poor—Jesus—and He will either thank me for feeding and clothing him . . . or not.

Godspeed (and happy birthday),

Robert Hill
San Leandro, CA

Dear Don Roberto,

As to the comparison with the Old Testament prophets, I can only say that I'm flattered and that their zeal is exactly what's needed now, but I take your point about respecting my bishop. Unlike Martin Luther, I will never break faith with Rome; but I have tried for several years to respect my bishop, and the effort has left me exasperated and, well, ticked off.

There is nothing I would like so much as a bishop I can truly respect. Indeed, I am well aware of the allegiance I owe to the Magisteriam, and that knowledge has often been the only thread binding me to Holy Mother Church. But the American Episcopate's conduct of late has been so egregious that I fear their competence must be called into question.

Since I live in the Archdiocese of Denver, my bishop is none other than the illustrious Charles Chaput, darling of the First Things pages and silver-tongued fence-sitter extraordinaire. Regrettably, he declined me the courtesy of a response when I wrote to him about this issue directly. Chaput has the reputation of being one of the most doctrinally straight-laced bishps in the country, but that is only because he hides his essentially progressivist leanings with greater diplomacy and tact. Believe me, if you heard some of the Hauerwasian horse hockey that makes it into his homilies, your skin would crawl just as mine did.

You may have noticed a recurrent theme cropping up in various bishops' public appearances lately. Oftentimes, when speaking before an audience or giving a television interview, they will recount a certain generic instance the pedagogical value of which they assume to be self-explanatory. They tell about how, after being approached by a persistent layperson about a nagging problem within the Church and his or her demand that he (the bishop) "do something about it," they replied to the aforesaid person, "Well, why don't YOU do something about it? That's your job. My job is to lead the Church, and I'm doing a good job at that."

By this the bishops presumably mean that laypersons should be working to strengthen the Body of Christ as much as possible. In and of itself, that is assuredly correct, but it fails to catch the meaning of the supplicant's concern. The reality behind the question is that the bishops' own political leanings, their insober talk, and their dubious actions (or, more generally, the lack thereof) are what is engendering the problem in the first place. We cannot have it both ways. The bishops cannot command the assent of the will while at the same time failing to take action on what is the matter. Moreover, their blase assurance that they are doing a "good job" leading the Church is quite unwarrented at a time when the Church has suffered an unprecedented meltdown in the Western world.

Catholicism is drowning in diluted doctrine, sentimentality, infiltration, corruption, and cowardice. I have tried help reverse the tide, but I have learned after repeated failures at the parish level and on up, that my concerns are not being taken seriously by anyone. I am frustrated and sick of it all, hence my tone.

I am also a convert to the faith, and perhaps that accounts for much of my seriousness. I was drawn to the Church for its philosophical rigor, its unassailable tradition, and its uncompromising metaphysical and moral stance. Now that is all being attacked. I wanted to join the Roman Catholic Church not the Rotary Club, and it will not be taken from me.

Milton Friedman is credited with the observation that a country cannot simultaneously have open borders and a welfare state. If we continue on our present course, we will be at grave risk of not being able to discharge the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid obligations which we have to our own citizens, much less to a continually increasing number of illegal immigrants.

Like all of you, I wish to treat illegal immigrants with compassion and legal fairness, but we need to begin an honest examination of our country's ability to discharge the obligations we have undertaken toward our citizens and legal immigrants and then ask what are the implications for the future of offering benefits to persons which we may not be able to afford without doing tremendous damage to our private economy.

The Cardinal-Archbishop of Los Angeles and many other Catholic “leaders” have made claims that Jesus the Christ would have supported open-borders and free immigrations into the USA.

That is a lie!

First, Jesus' kingdom was NOT of this world. How do I know? He said so himself! There is very little in the Gospels with direct application to government as opposed to the great number of verses addressed to the redemption of individuals and preaching His Word to the nations.

The most direct statement as to government was the classic “Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's”. At the time of Jesus citizenship and residency in the Empire did, in fact, belong to Caesar and the Roman Senate. Through time that, in the USA, has passed to the Congress and the Legislature of the Several States (Yes, the States still have some residual power over citizenship, a power which may be increased when the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution is finally enforces.)

The material that follows is something I put together for another purpose a few weeks back. Perhaps it is a useful contribution to the debate sparked by Bishop Slattery’s paper

Vernon Briggs of Cornell has researched and written on immigration to the US since the 1970s. In 2003 he authored "Mass Immigration and the National Interest: Policy Directions for the New Century."  His view of immigration is shaped by his concern for the economic problems of low wage unskilled native African-Americans. He argues that unskilled immigrants increase labor supply in unskilled labor markets leading to lower wages and reduced employment for these unskilled natives. Thus, he believes immigration policy should be shaped by labor market needs, and directed at stopping or slowing down the inflow of unskilled immigrants for whom there is no real need in the US labor market. He believes jobs would not go unfilled in the absence of the immigrant inflow. He also believes employer groups encourage the inflow, but not because of gross inability to find workers to take the jobs, but because the increase in supply makes relatively docile labor available to them at lower wages. Thus, he holds that rational immigration policy should be based on labor market needs primarily. He is convinced the fundamental problem with existing legal immigration policy is a mismatch between the skill characteristics of the immigrants, and the needs of the United States labor market.  Immigration has swelled the pool of low skilled workers and depressed the employment and wage rates, and income levels of low wage natives. In this way our current law on immigration contributes to the increasing inequality of income in the US.

Briggs believes illegal immigration makes this bad situation worse. Most illegal immigrants lack skills and have little in the way of formal education or English speaking abilities. They are desperate to leave their homelands and will do whatever it takes to obtain a job. Briggs concern about the labor market effects of low skilled immigration is the consequence of his deep concern with achieving the full integration of poor black native Americans into the mainstream of economic life. In US history the only periods in which low skilled black Americans have improved their relative positions in the economy have been when labor markets are tight, e.g., as in WWII. He believes the current law on immigration, and its administration, contribute to the widely noted increasing inequality in the distribution of income in the U. S., and stands in the way of improving the labor market situation of many black American males who have much higher unemployment rates than white males, much lower labor force participation rates, much lower annual earnings from labor, much higher rates of incarceration, and more frequently than whites  do not live in intact husband wife families. 

Briggs argues that immigration policy has been captured by special interest groups, and does not serve the public interest. He notes also that mass immigration re-emerged in the 1970s just as the nation’s labor market entered a period of radical transformation with respect to the skill requirements of its labor force. In relative terms labor demand in the U.S. is growing for high skilled labor and declining for low skilled labor. He believes mass immigration, especially the immigration of those who have entered illegally is a major reason for the revival of sweatshop enterprises and the upsurge in child labor law violations reported in the nation’s urban centers.
The points listed below are taken verbatim from a report entitled  “The Impact of New Immigrants on Young Native-Born Workers, 2000-2005.”  They appear to support Briggs’ views. The authors are Andrew Sum, Paul Harrington, and Ishwar Khatiwada.  Sum is the Director, Paul Harrington the Associate Director, and Ishwar Khatiwada an Associate at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.   In my opinion Sum and Harrington are among the most knowledgeable people in the Boston area about the nuts and bolts of labor market issues.

1. Over the 2000-2005 period, immigration levels remained very high and roughly half of new immigrant workers were illegal. [Their] report [concludes] that the arrival of new immigrants (legal and illegal) in a state results in a decline in employment among young native-born workers in that state. [Their] findings indicate that [in the United States] young native-born workers are being displaced in the labor market by the arrival of new immigrants.

2. Between 2000 and 2005, 4.1 million immigrant workers arrived from abroad, accounting for 86 percent of the net increase in the total number of employed persons (16 and older), the highest share ever recorded in the United States.

3.  Of the 4.1 million new immigrant workers, between 1.4 and 2.7 million are estimated to be illegal immigrants. This means that illegal immigrants accounted for up to 56 percent of the net increase in civilian employment in the United States over [2000 – 2005].

4.  Between 2000 and 2005, the number of young (16 to 34) native-born men who were employed declined by 1.7 million [and] at the same time, the number of new male immigrant workers increased by 1.9 million.

5. Multivariate statistical analyses [indicate] that the probability of teens and young adults (20-24) being employed was negatively affected by the number of new immigrant workers (legal and illegal) in their state.

6. The negative impacts tended to be larger for younger workers, for in-school youth compared to out-of-school youth, and for native-born black and Hispanic males compared to their white counterparts.

7. It appears that employers [substituted] new immigrant workers for young native-born workers. The estimated sizes of these displacement effects were frequently quite large.

8. The increased hiring of new immigrant workers has been accompanied by important changes in the structure of labor markets and employer-employee relationships. Fewer new workers, especially private-sector wage and salary workers, are ending up on the formal payrolls of employers, where they would be covered by unemployment insurance, health insurance, and worker protections.

Matt Beck,
Time will not permit a more thorough response tonight, but let me say that your argument is profoundly disturbing. Your obvious contempt for "weak-willed and conciliatory" priests is closer to the Nietzschean Antichrist than to the Savior. Ditto for your appalling statement that immigrants could be justly "beaten out of the country with brickbats." Maybe a reflexive identification with the poor and the stranger isn't always the best policy. But when you're living in Babylon, as the late Fr. Neuhaus claimed we Americans are, then there are worse worldviews to inhabit. If whatever we do "for the least of these" we do for Christ (note that the biblical text makes no exceptions for dangerous criminals or illegal immigrants), then I think it behooves us to show some compassion to our immigrant brothers and sisters in Christ, regardless of their legal status.

At the risk of sounding atavistic and perhaps oversimplifyng the situation, as a soldier I have been perplexed that a military service option has not been explored (at least not that I have seen). Simlar to the Irish circa 1860 (though admittedly they entered legally, and it should be noted with far less bureacracy to deal with), today's south of the border illegal immigrants enter our country while we are at war. Why not form several Mexican Brigades, a Salvadoran Brigade, etc. a la the Irish Brigades ofthe Civil War? Want a short track to be a citizen, fine pony up the blood tax and after a successful completion of four years of service, you, your spouse, children and parents will be granted citizenship. This would also have the benefit of taking militarty aged males out of the illegal labor market, exerting economic pressure to push wages higher for the jobs they are doing (perhaps prompting actual jobless citizens to take teh work). Just an idea. Brought to you LIVE from Sharana Afghanistan!

I commend Matt Beck for his "outburst" - yes he sounds enraged, but there are reasons for that. While I try to temper my own anger towards the clergy, I have to agree with him that the bishops that I know are weak, very very weak. They are not in touch with the reality of the lay person's everyday life and they live in a "bubble zone" out of which they don't wish to emerge.
So while Matt may be angry and needs to channel that constructively, I cannot fault him for his conclusions. The Church is in the state it is precisely because of the lack of moral character on the part of our bishops.

"America has benefited from every wave of immigrants that has come to these shores." This is a platitude, not a fact on which sound arguments can be based. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when transocean transportation had become safe and cheap, the US was inundated with migrant workers whenever there were economic troubles in Europe. Wage levels for native-born Americans were dramatically and negatively impacted by these periodic waves, leading to a popular demand for numerical restrictions on immigration, which were enacted in the early 1920s, in response to the deep recession that followed WWI. Today the threat to American workers is even greater because the quantum of foreign workers able and willing to move to the US numbers, not in the millions, but in the hundreds of millions.

The current crop of illegal workers does not reflect an unsatisfied "demand" for labor. It reflects the age-old desire of a certain type of American businessman (going back to the days of indentured servitude and slavery) to avoid having to offer wages and working conditions that would attract workers who aspired to a decent living. Certain production activities, such as manufacturing, can these days readily be moved overseas, and we have therefore lost a large part of our manufacturing base to countries where labor is dirt cheap. As a result, native-born Americans increasingly depend for their standard of living on the sorts of jobs that cannot be exported, such as construction and health care. If we open those jobs to foreign workers, we are implicitly choosing to have a much larger, but much less prosperous, population within our frontiers. In a democracy, the whole people should decide on so momentous a matter--the fact that so much immigration today is illegal is the best proof that the whole people would not have deliberately wished this fate upon themselves and their descendants.

I feel sorry for illegal immigrants, who indeed were effectively "invited" to come and stay by our greediest businessmen, our race-bating "civil rights community," and our feckless government. Still, the undocumented workers have benefitted from their stay here, making much more money than if they had not come. With a 10% unemployment rate, it is time for them to go home, and we should not be ashamed to ask and even force them to leave. Every year tens of millions of foreigners enter the US for a period of a few weeks or a few years, and when their visas expire, we expect them to leave. Compare a Mexican who came here legally three years ago on a work visa that is about to expire with another Mexican who entered illegally at the same time. Supporters of amnesty are demanding that the first one go home and the second be invited to remain for the rest of his life. Where is the logic or justice in that?

Briggs argues that immigration policy has been captured by special interest groups, and does not serve the public interest. He notes also that mass immigration re-emerged in the 1970s just as the nations labor market entered a period of radical transformation with respect to the skill requirements of its labor force. In relative terms labor demand in the U.S. is growing for high skilled labor and declining for low skilled labor. He believes mass immigration, especially the immigration of those who have entered illegally is a major reason for the revival of sweatshop enterprises and the upsurge in child labor law violations reported in the nations urban centers. First, I probably need not tell you about the galloping criminalization of immigrants. It is awfully hard to live here without violating various "malum prohibtum' laws, like laws against using fake social security numbers and laws against driving without a license and without insurance. Yet such violations are often felonies. Categorically barring "felons" without considering the nature of the violation might lead to good decisions in 90% of the cases, but that leaves a lot of unfortunate people.

Immigration is a tough problem. But these people are human beings. We should be doing more to help them.