Our betters tell us that mass migration is a moral imperative. “Love has no borders,” they croon. They use this facile sentimentality to bully us into assenting to the dissolution of shared culture and a collective identity.

It is hard to muster courtesy toward the Better Sort who consciously conflate the word immigration with migration. The first is a legal process, in effect a contract between arrivals and the state. In current context, the second assents to illegal entry by the brute force of overwhelming numbers. It conceives of Western nations as a multinational messianic project. The U.S. in particular is deemed a redemptive font of indiscriminate global charity.

A question for the Better Sort

Virtucrats remind me how much I miss a hard-headed inquisitor who—were he still alive—would have known how to greet enthusiasts of open borders. The father of a mathematician friend, he delighted in asking: “Why is it that there are more horses’ asses than there are horses?”

Part prank, part ambush, the question set the tone of acquaintance from the get-go. An impatient Vermonter, Nick’s father was fond of putting it to anyone he met for the first time. Less a query than a test, the answer to it determined whether the man was interested in further conversation with the interrogatee.

His question comes to mind with painful regularity when I read the latest Bergoglian pensées on migration amplified by Catholic media and management class. [However rude, horse’s ass is a term too mild—almost jocular— to describe the high priests of globalist, multicultural displacement of the European-based cultures and institutions that sustain us. But it is as close as I can come in print to more convincing profanity.]

Western nation’s respect for their own borders is sinful

On August 28, our Pope of the World used the bully pulpit of St. Peter’s Square to pressure nations of the West to keep their borders open, no matter the consequence to their native populations. The USCCB reported:

“It needs to be said clearly: There are those who systematically work by all means to drive away migrants, and this, when done knowingly and deliberately, is a grave sin,” he said during his general audience Aug. 28.

The pope began his audience in St. Peter’s Square by explaining that he would “postpone the usual catechesis” — he currently is in the middle of a series of talks about the Holy Spirit — to discuss “the people who — even at this moment — are crossing seas and deserts to reach a land where they can live in peace and security.”

Alert to the power of theatre, the USCCB illustrates its reportage with Francis kissing—but of course—a baby-of-color.

Without irony—and short on historical sense—the USCCB reports:

Reflecting on the seas and deserts migrants many cross to reach their destinations, Pope Francis noted the biblical significance of such areas as “places of suffering, of fear, of despair, but at the same time they are places of passage to liberation, to redemption, to attaining freedom and the fulfillment of God’s promises.”

The USCCB removes the “biblical significance of sanctuary” from its cultural context in the ancient Near East in order to dress it in modern politics. James K. Hoffmeier, a leading Egyptologist and scholar of biblical archeology, lays the groundwork for understanding the tension between biblical emphasis on hospitality to sojourners and dual emphasis on requiring submission to the law of the land. As he explains, the concept of sanctuary was instituted to ameliorate the consequences of lex talionis, the law of retaliation practiced by most ancient societies.

Sanctuary in ancient Israel, in designated locations scattered about, was to provide places where someone who had unintentionaly killed another—what we might call involuntary manslaughter—could be protected from arbitrary retaliation. A defendant could flee to a specific sanctuary and “state his case before the elders of that city” (Josh. 20:4). The purpose was to insure a fair trial. It protected an offender from culturally admissable vigilante justice.

This biblical idea of sanctuary, entrenched in Old Testament law, was rooted in a particular hour—and place—of history. It was devoid of modern sentimentality. Any sanctuary seeker judged guilty of malicious, deliberate murder according to biblical law would be expelled from the temporary haven and duly punished. By contrast, our own so-called sanctuary cities and states are wild cards that can shelter whatever ideological agenda is on the table, from illegal migration to abortion and transgender surgery.

In sum, biblical sanctuary represented a refinement of established law. Today’s sanctuary protocols are a partisan end-run around established law.

The utopian One-World fallacy did not begin with Francis.

John Paul II sanctified non-Western migrants and undermined U.S. immigration law in 1987. David Simcox discussed “The Pope’s Visit” in a 1995 essay in The Social Contract:

In Texas in 1987 he publicly endorsed the sanctuary movement. Sanctuary activists, many sponsored by churches, were then smuggling and harboring illegal aliens from conflict-torn Central American countries as a condemnation of allegedly unresponsive U.S. foreign policy and refugee law.

In a dismaying burst of conceptual overkill, the pope equated immigration restrictions with abortion. To refuse aliens is as sinful as killing the unborn. Portraying prudent immigration restriction as a moral crime set the stage for denying Western nations control over their own borders. Simcox’s summary of John Paul’s posture, overlooked three decades ago, is presently in high relief: “Church pronouncements now affirm immigration as a virtually absolute right, while they have qualified the regulatory rights of [Western] states to the point where they are emptied of any legitimate scope of action.”

The U.S. hierarchy’s creeping radicalization of church teaching on immigration blurs the distinction between the state’s first obligation to the welfare of its own citizens and the obligations it may have to all humankind. Rejected is the primacy of the contractual obligations among members that has been at the heart of the democratic nation-state. National interest as a basis for immigration and population policies is deeply suspect in the hierarchy’s view. . . .

The hierarchy only muddles the debate and confuses the faithful by finding a moral mandate for mass immigration in highly selective and narrowly interpreted biblical verses. One result is the portrayal of the ancient Israelites, because of their mandate of kindness to the stranger, as liberal cosmopolitans deserving our emulation.

But the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is far more ambivalent about strangers and aliens. Indeed, the theme of the Old Testament can be seen as a proto-nationalistic struggle of a people to capture and retain their own territorial space wherein they can assert the primacy of their most cherished collective values.

While at times viewed as a needy stranger, the biblical alien was often seen as a usurper or a threat to the community and its unique values. Jeremiah groans: “Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens” (Lamentations: 5:2). Joel’s (3:17) proclamation is unabashedly exclusionary: ” . . . then shall Jerusalem be holy, and there shall be no strangers pass through her any more.” Borders were important to the ancient Israelites, as the logical dividing lines between radically different ways of life and worship: the Bible contains 129 references to borders and their location.

 

There is nothing Christian about facilitating erosion of national identity.

The human right to emigrate—leave one’s homeland—neither entails nor implies a right to enter— immigrate to—whichever country the emigrant chooses. Immigration is subject to the law of individual nations. Nowhere is it written that God promised any people the right to gate crash another country and demand social services. No divine initiative has intervened to promise one people, however difficult their circumstances, the right to violate the sovereignty of another. To do so is to rob natal citizens of the fruits of their own labor (today’s tax-supported services e.g. education, housing, medical care, waste collection, public safety, etc.), and continuity of the spiritual and historic dimensions of their own culture. It also undermines, if it does not dissolve, the ethical core of our basic institutions.

One stunning example of such dissolution is Christopher Rufo’s recent investigation “DEI Captures the Treasury Department.” The nation’s financial system is twisted to serve DEI mandates. Janet Yellen’s Treasury advances left-wing racism—euphemistically dubbed racialism—funneling billions of dollars to favored [non-European] racial groups. It hires “radical race ‘experts’ to cement the new orthodoxy within the department, and considering potential auditees’ race in IRS tax investigations.” Rufo writes:

Secretary Yellen appointed a left-wing academic named Rhianna Rogers as the department’s Chief Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Officer. Rogers is a lifelong DEI activist whose “scholarship” reproduces boilerplate critical-theory claptrap. In one paper, she laments the “demonization” of “pagan practices” through “eurocentric ideas of cultural supremacy.” In another, she idealizes the “reciprocating system of duality existing between men and women in Aztec life and religion,” as compared with the “Spanish patriarchal agenda.”

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Welcoming the stranger, is a hazy, kindly-sounding phrase that distorts—to the point of obliterating—actual behavior by ancient kingdoms.  In Israel and throughout the biblical world, territorial boundaries were closely maintained legalities. “Cursed is the man who moves his neighbor’s stone” (Deut. 27:17).

By enshrining anarchic migration—distinct from legal immigration—Francis and his liegemen encourage an entitlement mentality among migrants: “You owe me!” The cult of open borders justifies the demand for services by migrants who disregard the law of the land from which they seek benefits.

Equally appalling, it denies moral agency to those nations—failed or malfunctioning states—from which  migrants come.