Human Dignity Does Not Mandate Unlimited Immigration

I converted to Catholicism after years of misgivings over what I perceived as its readiness to excuse all manner of sinfulness in the name of ideas such as “human dignity” which, though theologically legitimate, could easily be manipulated to left-wing political ends. Eventually, however, I embraced Catholicism after coming to recognize the disparity between the Catholic Church’s formal teaching versus what Catholics, including what priests, bishops, and popes, say and do.

This incongruity has come to the fore lately on the issue of immigration—specifically the deportation of illegal aliens. Whether it’s Pope Leo XIV, some of the American cardinals, bishops, and priests, or other Catholics, day in and day out we hear the invocation of “human dignity” as a counter to the deportation of illegal aliens. Two recent essays in Church Life Journal and Public Discourse , respectively, exemplify how “human dignity” can be used to pervert justice.

The first, “On the Illegality of Illegal Immigration,” argues that the U.S. should simply make illegal immigration legal because what truly matters is the “need” and “dignity” of the illegal alien. Although Terence Sweeney, a professor at Villanova, concedes that illegal aliens who commit crimes and those who are financially secure but have overstayed their visas can be deported, he argues that fundamentally there are only two considerations: the needs of illegal aliens, and their intrinsic human dignity. Their very poverty, he claims, gives them a moral right to immigrate, because doing so is analogous to stealing food to feed one’s starving family.

This line of argument assumes that the act of illegally immigrating is intrinsically excusable when in flight from poverty. The author seems to imply that the poor and migrants have become holy, their actions sanctified, based only on their status as poor migrants. However, there is nothing in Christianity that divinizes anyone based only on their economic status as such. This perspective, by making it impossible for poor people to sin by entering the U.S. illegally, makes an idol of the poor, and abuses “human dignity” as a political tool to legitimize mass migration. If any poor person anywhere in the world can manage to make it to the U.S., or any first world country, does Christianity really teach that they are intrinsically owed the benefits of citizenship?

On the French Revolution, Hannah Arendt wrote that what ultimately “unleashed the terror and sent the Revolution to its doom” was the transition by Maximilien Robespierre and the most radical Montagnards of the Jacobin faction from advocating for the rights enumerated in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, a document even critics of the French Revolution can appreciate, to the more radical 1793 Declaration, which was predicated on the rights of the sans-culottes, the urban working class. When the universal alleviation of all poverty replaces the maintenance of freedom as the government’s guiding principal, the stage is set for perpetual revolution. This was, as Arendt wrote, “the abdication of freedom before the dictate of necessity,” and in Karl Marx it “had found its theorist.” She writes:

Politically speaking, one may say that the evil of Robespierre’s virtue was that it did not accept any limitations. In Montesquieu’s great insight that even virtue must have its limits, he would have seen no more than the dictum of a cold heart. Thanks to the doubtful wisdom of hindsight, we can be aware of Montesquieu’s greater wisdom of foresight and recall how Robespierre’s pity-inspired virtue, from the beginning of his rule, played havoc with justice and made light of laws.

Everything was done in the name of le peuple (the people)—the “key words” of the revolution, “the term became the equivalent for misfortune and unhappiness.” The legitimacy of Robespierre and the Montagnards rested on their fanatical commitment to compassionate zeal. That is, they legitimized their power on the “capacity to suffer with the ‘immense class of the poor,’ accompanied by the will to raise compassion to the rank of the supreme political passion and of the highest political virtue.”

The second essay, “The Dignity of the Family and American Democracy” by Fr. Mike Johns, argues against the separation of families amid deportations. Johns is right to argue that families should be kept together, even if the children were born here and are juridically U.S. citizens. Unfortunately, Johns goes further, claiming that basically all deportations are intrinsically evil because they go against “the dignity of the human person.”

The author quotes Pope John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor, published in 1993, wherein John Paul II cites Gaudium et Spes, a document of the Second Vatican Council. But these Church documents must be read in harmony with the Bible, the Catechism, and other Church documents. The Catholic Church specifically says the state has a right and duty to protect its own sovereignty, and that the right to emigrate is not absolute. It follows that the “deportations” those two documents identify as part of the list of intrinsic evil are referring to the deportations of citizens from their own countries. Reading “deportation” to mean any and all deportations would invalidate laws enacted by our democratic process, thereby undermining sovereignty, by setting the “rights” of illegal aliens above those of citizens.

The only way to make it work is to call what is unjust just and what is illegal legal. The use of “human dignity” has become an ultimate thing , an idol that has displaced our literal neighbors and the wholeness of the biblical message. In this capacity, it has become a political tool in the service of those who advocate for open borders.

There are many ways good and godly things can become idols, not because an idea like concern for the poor isn’t true and good, but because it is not the only thing that is true and good. We tend to think of idolatry as worship of power, money, celebrity, beauty, sex—the obvious idols our culture worships, but we rarely think something true and good can become an idol—morality, theology, ministry in the church, serving the poor, ad infinitum.

Advocating for “human dignity” and “humanization” is easy compared to caring for all those Americans whom God gave us as our fellow countrymen—our literal neighbors. One cannot claim to care about the human dignity of billions of people around the world when they despise, scorn, disenfranchise their fellow citizens, advocating for laws that negate them, usurp them, and bring all sorts of injustices down upon them. God calls on us to embody universal love, but that love must be extended from the particular families, polities, and nations we inhabit; Christian love does not call upon us to negate our own nation for the sake of the global community but to express universal love through our embodied particularity. If everyone can be an American simply by setting foot on our soil, then solidarity with our fellow Americans is meaningless. To the credit of Robespierre, at least he was seeking the wellbeing of his fellow Frenchmen before that of the world, however imperfectly.