New Haven Register Publishes Commentary by Rev. Richard Ryscavage

Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good Commentator Rev. Richard Ryscavage recently wrote an editorial that appeared in the New Haven Register on January 24. The commentary asks our leaders to move beyond "simplistic solutions and ugly rhetoric" when working towards comprehensive immigration reform.

Father Ryscavage is a professor sociology and international studies at Fairfield University and director of its Center for Faith and Public Life. Read on to view the editorial.

A Global Vision on Immigration

Robert Frost once wrote about barriers that divide us and questioned the assumption that “good fences” make good neighbors. These days if you believe some presidential candidates or the xenophobic ranting of media pundits like Lou Dobbs, more fences offer the best solution to the complex challenges posed by immigration.

This myopic view ignores the factors that motivate millions of human beings who migrate in search of better lives and fails to offer a serious policy response to an issue that will not go way simply with tough talk. While the strains over immigration are most pronounced in border states, Hartford and Fairfield County have joined a growing number of unlikely places where immigration has brought wrenching changes. In Fairfield County, tensions over new immigrants has charged emotional debates over the number of Latino employees at fast-food restaurants, day laborers sites in Stamford, and even pick-up volleyball games among Ecuadorians in Danbury. New Haven’s favorable policies toward the undocumented contradict the policies of its neighboring cities.

When Albert Einstein observed that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, he could have been talking about our failed approach to immigration reform. Over the last twenty years, the federal government has spent 10 billion dollars on beefing up security along the U.S.-Mexican border. Nonetheless, immigrants have found new and more dangerous routes into the U.S. Stopping migration’s socioeconomic engine requires much more than a wall. It requires a systematic response to the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants already here who now make up a vast underground economy. Employers and U.S consumers benefit from the labor of these immigrants even as immigrants themselves have no protection from exploitation.

Comprehensive immigration reform should include an earned path to citizenship, appropriate worker protections and policies that keep families from being torn apart. The failure of Congress to pass reform legislation has forced states to enact a hodgepodge of punitive local ordinances. Thousands of immigrants have been rounded up in raids. The National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute report that two-thirds of children split up from their parents in these crackdowns are U.S. citizens. Ironically, the Mexican birthrate is dropping dramatically and the U.S. may soon find itself needing the labor force that it is now deporting.

The Global Common Good

As former director of the Jesuit Refugee Service and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services office, I have witnessed firsthand the many forces that propel people to migrate. Globalization – especially the liberalized flow of trade and investment -- has encouraged the movement of people from farms to cities and from cities to other countries.

Political instability, religious and ethnic persecution, and natural disasters also contribute to migration. An estimated 200 million people now live outside the country of their birth. The Catholic Church has long been on the front lines of serving immigrants by offering sustenance to the body and spirit, as well as advocating for more humane and practical policy solutions. The U.S. bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services office is the nation’s largest refugee resettlement agency. The Catholic Campaign Against Global Poverty raises awareness of how trade, development and debt are central to understanding the reasons for immigration.

Migration is a global phenomenon that must be approached globally. What happens to our brothers and sisters in Mexico or Malawi is not alien to us. In an interdependent world, we must recognize how our government’s massive domestic farm subsidies limit poor countries from trading with us, and how flawed immigration policies undermine the needs of our own labor market. Above all, the dignity of every human person and the shared destiny of nations demand that we measure our policies by whether they advance or diminish the global common good.

If we hope to move beyond simplistic solutions and the ugly rhetoric that define our polarized immigration debate, we need deeper conversations and bolder leadership. In this election year, voters can start by judging those candidates seeking the most powerful office in the world by whether they have the courage and prudence to tackle this defining political and moral challenge of our time.

Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good commentator Richard Ryscavage, S.J., a professor of sociology and international studies at Fairfield University and director of the university’s Center for Faith and Public Life, wrote the following op-ed. It appeared in the New Haven Register on Jan. 24