Santa Clara University

From the Center Director

When the editorial staff of explore first selected this issue’s theme on immigration and Catholic higher education, Congress was debating comprehensive immigration reform which included a path to legal status for 12 million undocumented immigrants. That was big news! But when Congress failed to enact a broad immigration bill, reform fever on the national level waned, and the three remaining presidential candidates soon lowered the volume on immigration. Notwithstanding Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s ongoing campaign against undocumented workers in Maricopa County, AZ, and Lou Dobbs’ unrelenting efforts on CNN to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment nationwide, deepening economic woes and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have demoted immigration to a minor political and policy issue.

That was until Pope Benedict XVI visited our country for six days in mid-April. Aside from his denunciations of the sexual abuse scandal in the church, arguably the visit’s most eye-catching theme was Benedict’s plea for compassion toward immigrants. The pope returned to the theme several times over the course of his trip, stressing the need to protect immigrants’ human rights and family unity while carefully avoiding any specifics of the American immigration debate. Before national and international audiences, and with a genius stroke of rhetoric, Benedict made clear again what the church teaches: “While an action or immigration status can be illegal, a person can never be ‘illegal.’”¹For that reason, “You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt” (Lev. 19:34). The biblical mandate, and so the church’s, couldn’t be clearer.

Because Benedict was consistently on message—the alien already here should be treated no differently than the native—let’s hope, in the wake of his visit, that robust public debate on immigration reform resumes. In that case, this issue of explore can only help.

Peace,

Kevin P. Quinn, S.J.