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In this episode Trent discusses what the Church teaches about immigration and analyzes the claim that deportation is intrinsically evil.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. And today I want to talk about the Catholic church’s teaching on immigration. Now, immigration is a political issue that when people talk about it, you can often generate more heat than light and that’s not what I want to do in this podcast, obviously. So I want to talk about that, but I want to focus in particular on an incorrect view on the church’s teaching on immigration. Where really if you look at it, there are two extreme views that a person should not hold. So what I want to do first is I’m going to read to you what the catechism says. I believe it’s paragraph 2241, what it talks of immigration. Because it’s laid out in a very sensible way to understand all the interests that are involved. So here is basically what the church teaches on immigration.
Trent Horn:
It says, “The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him. Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical considerations, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.”
Trent Horn:
So this is a very moderate and sensible view when it comes to the issue of immigration. That on the one hand, you have the rights of migrants, that there is a genuine right to migrate, to be able to provide a better life for yourself and for your family. And so someone who says that there is no right to migrate, or that a country should be able to shut out immigrants and refugees for any reason or no reason whatsoever, that is incorrect. There is a moral right to migrate. And for those who say, “No, I don’t believe anyone ever has a right to migrate.” I would offer just one clear counter example. And that would be the case of refugees who are fleeing ethnic cleansing or genocide. It’s very sad. There are cases of German refugees during World War II who made it all the way to the shore of the United States and were turned back and they were sent back to Germany and they died in concentration camps there.
Trent Horn:
And so there, I think, it’s very clear a person has a right to migrate, at the very least to flee genocide or ethnic cleansing. So there is a right to migrate. And I would say that when we balance all of these rights and interests, migrants should take a special place. Jesus cares very much about the poor, the downtrodden. In the church we talk about the preferential option for the poor in social teaching. So being able to help people to migrate to better themselves, that’s something that we ought to do. There is a right to do that. However, that takes us to the other extreme. The other extreme would be the claim that all borders should essentially be open, that people have a right to migrate whenever they want, under any circumstance.
Trent Horn:
And this has led some Catholic authors to take the position that deportation is intrinsically evil. Not just that deportation can be evil. I agree that it can be. That taking someone, let’s say, who is brought to the United States as a child. They’re brought as a baby, and they were fleeing from a country with violence and persecution and things like that. And then they were brought here illegally. They’re brought here illegally as a baby, they grow up and then it’s discovered that they’re an illegal immigrant. And then they are deported back to a country where they’ll be a victim of religious persecution or ethnic cleansing or genocides, something like that. I mean, that should be another clear example. Deportation can be evil.
Trent Horn:
But there are Catholic writers who go much further. There’s an article at the website Where Peter is talking about deportation and it says, “It is worth recalling that deportation is evil, and that Catholics affirm that all human beings possess a God-given right to migrate.” And I have seen others. There’s an article from the Catholic Health Association saying this. It says, “The Catholic moral tradition has identified deportation, not simply mass deportation, with strong, morally objectionable language.” So some people say that it’s evil, maybe in general, I don’t know.
Trent Horn:
But the very strong view would be that it’s intrinsically, I agree deportation can be evil, but that doesn’t mean that it’s always evil. So just the same way, I agree that sometimes incarceration can be evil. Like incarcerating someone for a petty crime like shoplifting $5 worth of stuff. Then they’re a nonviolent offender and it’s their first time offense, even whatever it might be. Clearly incarceration can be evil and unjust, but it doesn’t mean incarceration is intrinsically evil because sometimes you ought to incarcerate people who are violent and a danger to society. So some people make the claim, however, that deportation is intrinsically evil. That it’s always wrong, if someone illegally immigrates to a country to deport them back to their home country of origin. They say it’s intrinsically evil. You can never do that. And why would somebody say something like that?
Trent Horn:
Well, usually it comes from an analysis of Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor, which is on moral theology, where it quotes the Second Vatican Council document, Gaudium et Spes. So in Veritatis Splendor 80, John Paul II talks about actions that are intrinsically evil. He says that there are actions that radically contradict the good of the person made in his image. These are acts which in the church’s moral tradition have been termed intrinsically evil, like rape, for example, directly killing an innocent human being. Contraception is intrinsically evil. There are things… I would say the act of contraception, by the way. If you’re unmarried and you take birth control pills for your acne or something like that, that’s not the act of contraception. Talking about the act of sterilizing the marital act. So then it goes on to cite other examples of things that are intrinsically evil.
Trent Horn:
And so he says, “Whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, and trafficking in women and children.” Now right here on the base of it, I think that it seems clear that this is somewhat of an imprecise list. That whatever John Paul II is trying to say here about things that are evil, we shouldn’t read it too literally because otherwise it wouldn’t make sense. So for example, I agree prostitution and arbitrary imprisonment are intrinsically evil, they’re never good. Now, I mean, Aquinas even talks about tolerating prostitution to prevent greater evils. I don’t think that’s the great case anymore that we need to do that.
Trent Horn:
But other things here like subhuman living conditions, I’m not sure what that means. Imagine you’re in a very, very poor country, and you’re a missionary there and you have homeless people. And you do your best to create a shanty town for them to live in. All right. Is that wrong? Well, your shanty town would probably count in the modern world as subhuman living conditions. But that wouldn’t mean it’s intrinsically evil to build the shanty town, if that’s all the resources you have at your disposal and the alternative is just homelessness.
Trent Horn:
So I don’t see how some of these things could be intrinsically evil. Subhuman living conditions are wrong, but in some cases around the world, that’s all the people are able to manage at that time. It doesn’t mean that it’s intrinsically evil to live in them. Slavery would be another example. I think slavery is an evil, but there could be cases, and there have been cases throughout history where slavery could be tolerated or allowed or required. If you live in the ancient world, and another clan or tribe or group invades your area and tries to slaughter you and you defeat them in battle, to maintain the common good, you might enslave the fighting men of that group to order them to rebuild what they’ve destroyed and to keep the social order. So if slavery are intrinsically evil, you couldn’t do that, but that would seem to make sense in those conditions.
Trent Horn:
So when it says here deportation… So already, we need to be careful about reading this too, in an overly literal way. But so it says deportation. And so Paul the second is saying it’s intrinsically evil, does that mean that if someone illegally immigrates to a country, lies on their immigration form, illegally crosses the border, overstays a visa, that it is intrinsically evil to send them back to their country of origin. Well, no, that’s not intrinsically evil. And what’s important to understand is what is the meaning of this word? You have to define this word deportation. In Latin, it’s deportatio. I’ll link to it in the description below, my friend and fellow colleague, Jimmy Akin, senior apologist of Catholic Answers. He wrote a whole article dedicated to this on, is deportation intrinsically evil? And Jimmy makes really a good case. No, you have to understand, what is the language that the Magisterium is using? So I want to share a little bit about what Jimmy wrote in that article. And then I’ve written a second article that should be up pretty soon at catholic.com where I expand upon Jimmy’s argument.
Trent Horn:
So he goes through and Jimmy shows that the word deport and the Latin word deportatio have the same basic range of meaning. That means to send someone out of a country, basically. And so if we’re going to say, well, if deportation is being condemned in Gaudium et Spes in 1965, what do they mean the broad view that just removing someone from one country and sending him somewhere else? Is the church talking about that or is it talking about a narrower view? In order to understand that, well, we should ask, how does the Magisterium use the word, deport? Not how we use the word, how does the church use that word? So to build on Jimmy’s essay, I went to the Vatican website and I searched for the word deport and found as of this recording, it comes up 91 times in various documents, whether it’s papal addresses encyclicals, the word deport comes up 91 times.
Trent Horn:
So I actually made a spreadsheet and read every single instance where the word deport is used in a Magisterium document, or even in any document on the bag. Doesn’t mean it’s necessarily magisterial. If the Pope says something in a press conference, that’s not a magisterial statement, but it’s on the Vatican website. So magisterial and non-magisterial, something related to what the Pope has said or something like that, I have listed it in a spreadsheet, 91 instances to see, all right, what does the church mean by the word deport? So John Paul II says deportation is intrinsically evil or it’s evil, what do they mean by that word? And what I discovered… Here are a few things I discovered. First, prior to the Second Vatican Council, prior to Gaudium et Spes in 1965, the word deport was never used in an immigration context. Instead, it was used as a synonym for the word comportment, like how you handle yourself.
Trent Horn:
Pope Leo the 13th talked in Fin Dal Principio. He said, “What sad effects would not arise if that gravity of conduct which belongs to the priest, should be in any way lessened, if he should deport himself with pretentious indocility towards his superiors.” Got to love 19th century verbiage. He is saying here if he should comport himself with pretentious indocility. You’re not being obedient. So prior to Gaudium et Spes, deport was never used in an immigration context. It was used to talk about comportment. However, immigration was talked about prior to the Second Vatican Council.
Trent Horn:
And I want to say it was 1947, 1948, Pope Pius the 12th gave an address to members of the US Senate. And this is what Pope Pius the 12th said in the 1940s. This is of course after World War II, when he was talking about refugees, migrants. And here he does not say deportation. He doesn’t mention deportation at all. And he definitely doesn’t say that it’s intrinsically evil or that it’s evil. He says here, “The question of immigration today, however, presents wholly new problems. As always the welfare of the country must be considered as well as the interest of the individual seeking to enter, and in the nature of things, circumstances will at times dictate a law of restriction. But by the same token, circumstances at time will almost cry out for an easing of the application of that law. Wise legislation will ever be conscious of humanity and the calamities, distress and woes to which it is heir.”
Trent Horn:
So he was talking in the context just a few years after the Holocaust, saying, look, immigration new problems today. He recognizes the right to restrict immigration, which would imply if you break immigration laws, you can be deported. But also that in mercy, we should ease these laws, when circumstances require it, like if someone is trying to escape the Holocaust or something like that, or a Holocaust or genocide. So that’s probably what he’s talking about here. So then after Gaudium et Spes, how is the word deport used? About seven or eight times in documents it’s used, it’s just quoting back to Vatican II. And it’s used in these other cases. 25 times, it is used to refer to biblical exile to when the Israelites were essentially deported from Jerusalem into Babylon in 586 B.C. Or when St. John was exiled to Patmos, it’s described as he was deported to the island of Patmos. So 25 times, it’s talking about exile, essentially. Not anything about modern immigration debates.
Trent Horn:
But most often about 50 cases, the word deport is used on Vatican documents, papal addresses, magisterial teachings, it’s used to talk about mass deportations that are part of an organized campaign to commit genocide or ethnic cleansing. This would be an ideal, like Pope Francis, what would’ve been back in 2013. 2013, not 20… Obviously 2023 hasn’t happened yet. 2013. He gave an address at the 70th anniversary of the 1943 deportation of Jews from Rome. And that’s where they’re deported. They’re rounded up and sent to concentration camps. So mass deportations here talking about taking a group of people who are innocent and sending them somewhere to die. That is what deportation means in… That’s probably what is being referred to in Gaudium et Spes and Pope Saint John Paul II. That is certainly intrinsically evil. If you were taking a group of people, rounding them up and sending them somewhere to die, that’s intrinsically evil Pope.
Trent Horn:
Pope John Paul the second refers to this as well. He talks about heroism in a 1978 address. He says, “Courageous men must be sought not only on battlefields, but also in hospital wards or on a bed of pain. Such men could often be found in concentration camps or in places of deportation. They were real heroes.” So we’re talking here about people being innocent. People being sent somewhere to die. Not people being removed from a country because they violated immigration laws.
Trent Horn:
This can also describe, not just the Nazi regime, but also in the Soviet Union. Innocent people would be rounded up and sent places for the purpose of killing them. It was a horrible case. The Cannibal island case in the Soviet union, where are 5,000 people, and these were petty criminals or dissidents, rounded up, sent to this little island, I think it was like, Nazino Island was what it was called. It was just a mile wide, two miles long, tiny little island in the middle of a marsh, guarded with soldiers. And they were deported there and sent there with a few bags of flour like, “Okay, here’s where you go.” And nearly all of them died. And the ones who survived resorted to cannibalism. That’s mass deportation. That is intrinsically evil. Pope John Paul II talks about this. He says, “Liberation from Nazism marked the return of a regime,” like the Soviets, “which continue to trample on the most elementary human rights, deporting defenseless citizens.”
Trent Horn:
So there that’s what it’s clearly talking about. Pope Francis refers this deportation as well. He went to Estonia in 2018. He says, “I went to the monument to the memory of those who were condemned, killed, tortured, deported.” The Compendium of the Church’s Social Doctrine in paragraph 158. It only mentions deportation once in the entire Compendium on Catholic Social Teaching and it connects it to genocide. It says, “The solemn proclamation of human rights is contradicted by a painful reality of violations, wars, and violence of every kind, in the first place, genocides and mass deportations.” So there the word deportation, if it was intrinsically evil, we would think it, would file it under the discussions of immigration or migrants. Instead, the word deport only shows up once and it’s connected to genocide. Mass deportations is what is being discussed here.
Trent Horn:
The Catholic Health Association article, even that talks about deportation being evil, it actually admits this. It says, “Theological scholarship must grapple with the Second Vatican Council’s mentioning of deportation. John Paul II’s identification of it as intrinsically evil and subsequent references to mass deportation. Might the qualification of mass deportation be akin to moral distinctions between direct and indirect abortion? If so, is this distinction sufficient, or does moral wrongdoing linger in at least some instances of deportation per se?” So very clear here. You look at all 91 instances so far I’ve found on the Vatican website, only two of them, I should say, two of them referenced deportation in the modern way, we debated about immigration policy. And in both cases, it’s a reporter asking the Pope a question about deportation. One was from a reporter asking about President Trump building a border wall and deporting people. And here, Pope Francis said, “A person who thinks only of building walls, not of building bridges is not Christian. This is not the gospel. What you were asking me, who to vote or not vote for, I won’t interfere.”
Trent Horn:
So he was talking about Donald Trump and building walls, but he doesn’t follow up on the question of whether you can deport people or not. What’s more interesting is on a flight from Columbia to Rome, a reporter asks the Pope about young people. The Pope said young people need to find their roots in America. And the reporter said, “Those young people can be deported from the United States.” And then this was how Pope Francis replied to that reporter’s question, what about young people getting deported from the United States? Pope Francis says, “True enough, they lose a root. It is a problem. But really I don’t want to express an opinion on that case because I have not read about it, and I don’t like to speak about something I haven’t first studied.”
Trent Horn:
The notice is really interesting here that when asked about people being deported because of their immigration status, Pope Francis doesn’t say that’s evil, that’s wrong, or that’s intrinsically evil. He says, “Well, I haven’t read about it. I need to understand the issue a bit more.” Which all lines up to show the Magisterium prohibits mass deportations designed to kill people. But it certainly allows for deportation of not allowing a foreign national to live in a country, if they’re not lawfully allowed to reside there. If deportation were intrinsically evil, you couldn’t have borders. You couldn’t have borders in a meaningful sense because people could just move to a country and then just take up shop there, essentially. All of the Magisterium statements about the right to restrict immigration or other things like that, they would be meaningless if you couldn’t exercise appropriate legal punishment for foreign nationals, by not allowing them to live in a country anymore that they’re illegally living in.
Trent Horn:
In fact, as Jimmy notes, in 1929, the Vatican signed an extradition treaty with Italy to return alleged criminals there. So there the Vatican deports people. Now some people who defend the view that deportation is intrinsically evil, they say, “Oh, well, extradition is not deportation.” They try to define deportation differently than extradition. Like sending someone back to a country, to face justice for a crime they committed there. That is not deportation. They try to say that that’s like how murder is intrinsically evil, but killing is not because you can kill in self defense. But this doesn’t work because the church has laid out specific conditions of what murder is, it’s the direct killing of an innocent person and when you are allowed to kill people. But those who say deportation is intrinsically evil, they have not laid out where the church has said, you can send people out of a country or you can’t do that.
Trent Horn:
They can’t even define deportation under their view because what would be allowed and what wouldn’t. If I overstay my visa in Australia, because I think it’s a cool place, I’ll get deported. Is that intrinsically evil? They might say, “Well, it’s only if you are trying to seek a better life for yourself and you’re trying to find financial stability.” Blah, blah, blah. Okay, what if I’m an American who goes to Australia for their healthcare, and I overstay my visa and I want healthcare I can’t get in the US? And I will get deported. Is that intrinsically evil? Those who defend the view deportation as intrinsically evil, I just feel like they’re not truly appreciating the Magisterium language. They’re imposing their own personal views on immigration onto what the church teaches. So I would say that that’s very clear that the church does not say, oh, there’s just… Well, you can say there’s just and unjust deportation.
Trent Horn:
The unjust is when you have mass deportations of innocent people for the purpose of killing them. But when it comes to the question of whether you can deport someone simply because they have an illegal immigration status, the church would say, it’s not always wrong. It could be wrong, like a case that I gave earlier about someone brought here is as a baby, being sent back to a dangerous country, but it’s not always wrong. And the church recognizes that when it talks about restricting the right to immigrate, how even the Vatican will extradite people and send them out of their country if they’re not allowed to be there. The Vatican today will send you out if you go there illegally. So I think that this is helpful. But I think honestly what’s important is to void the two extremes when it comes to immigration.
Trent Horn:
One extreme is what I’ve talked about right now. Deportation being intrinsically evil. No, countries have the right to restrict immigration, but mercy demands that they respect the right of migrants. And I think they should do whatever they can to accommodate migrants and preserve the common good. In between these two views of you can’t deport people ever and nobody has the right to migrate, there’s a lot of different views you could have. So it’s a prudential judgment. Some people may be in favor of more restrictive immigration policies. Some people may be in favor of less restrictive immigration policies. The church allows you to hold a wide variety of views between these two, as long as you respect the basic right to migrate and the right of governments to maintain their sovereign borders. And then we, as Catholics, should dialogue and discuss with each other, what immigration policies best serve the common good and the intrinsic dignity of the human person. So hope it was helpful for you guys. And I hope that you all have a very blessed day.
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