Groucho Marx once observed, “All people are born alike – except Republicans and Democrats.”
The U.S. Constitution doesn’t mention political parties but, to the dismay of George Washington, they quickly developed and have been fighting ever since.
For example, while both parties have often spoken positively about legal immigrants, consider this political party platform excerpt about immigration:
“For years … Washington talked tough but failed to act. … Drugs flowed freely. Illegal immigration was rampant. Criminal immigrants, deported after committing crimes in America, returned the very next day to commit crimes again.”
The platform credits the president – who was running for reelection – and his administration for having “removed thousands of illegal workers from jobs across the country … arrested more than 1,700 criminal aliens and prosecuted them on federal felony charges because they returned to America after having been deported.”
The year was 1996. The president was Bill Clinton, a Democrat.
By 2016, the new Democrat platform emphasized the need to “fix our broken immigration system” because families were being torn apart, and to promote a path to citizenship for law-abiding families.
Meanwhile, that same year, the Republican Party platform stated that “our highest priority” must be to “secure our borders” and “enforce our immigration laws.”
“The presence of millions of unidentified individuals in this country,” it stated, “poses grave risks to the safety and sovereignty of the United States.” It also advocated for English as “the nation’s official language.”
But, only a few years earlier, after Republican Mitt Romney lost his bid for the presidency, the so-called GOP “autopsy” counseled the party to support the legalization of undocumented immigrants.
As coalitions with shifting power bases, political parties respond to changing circumstances, evolving demographics, unseen developments, new information and a host of other factors. An issue as complicated as immigration deserves honest and open debate.
Well-meaning and intelligent people can disagree about how to control the border, the economic effects of immigration, the criteria for refugee status, the path to citizenship, the dispute over state vs. federal authority and so on.
Too often, though, some politicians and overly partisan media outlets thrive on self-serving combat and vilifying others. (Another quote sometimes attributed to Groucho: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.”)
Nonetheless, the top priority in any immigration debate was expressed well by Republican President George W. Bush in 2007 when he was arguing for immigration reform. “When I was the governor of Texas,” he said, “I used to say family values did not stop at the Rio Grande River.”
A bedrock American principle is that Groucho was half right: All people are born equal. The Declaration of Independence states that all people – logically, all people regardless of country of origin – are equal. It follows that a person who crosses a national border does not leave his or her human rights behind.
For people of faith, regardless of political party, the obligation to see migrants as beloved by God, and not merely as problems, is even stronger. Catholicism is not synonymous with any political party, but it is unequivocal about how to treat others. In 2018 when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was implementing a policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border, Pope Francis called it “cruelty of the highest order.” The U.S. bishops’ Migration chairman stated, “Children are not instruments of deterrence.”
In 1992, Tom Metzger, a former KKK member and founder of the White Aryan Resistance, explained to reporters at the U.S.-Mexico border his simple plan for stopping illegal immigration: “Shoot to kill.” Since then, more mainstream figures have talked about the use of firearms as a deterrence.
For Christians, this is a simple fact: Everyone eventually becomes a kind of migrant – in dying, we each cross the same border.
Death, as described by Hamlet in his “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy, is “the undiscovered country, from whose bourn [region] no traveller returns.”
Shakespeare’s most famous character expresses his “dread of something after death,” because he believes, as the Church teaches, that we are all under judgement.
When the Son of Man comes in glory, Jesus said, there will be a separation, not to prosperous or poor countries, but to eternal life or eternal punishment. He said that the damned – those he characterized as “the righteous” – will protest that they did not recognize him when he was “a stranger and you gave me no welcome.” (Mt 25:31-46)
Carl Peters is former managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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