Santa Clara University

In the first years of the American republic, Catholics had modest expectations about the future of their religion in the new nation. The small post-colonial Catholic community consisted primarily of British immigrants anchored in Maryland where the first Catholic bishop (John Carroll) and the first Catholic colleges took root (Georgetown in 1789 and Mount St. Mary’s [Emmitsburg, MD] in 1805). Catholicism strongly influenced the surrounding regions of French Canada, Louisiana, and the Spanish colonies in Florida, California, and the Southwest, but on the English-speaking northeast seaboard anti-Catholicism, encouraged by some Founding Fathers, flourished. The assumption seems to have been that Catholics would find their niche as a minor religious group in an overwhelmingly Protestant nation.

At the founding of the Republic, there were only about 35,000 Catholics. Who could have predicted that by the time of the Civil War there would be three million? Catholics swiftly became the largest single religious denomination in the United States. By the end of the 19th century there were 63 Catholic colleges and universities across the country.

Immigration propelled this astonishing growth. Most of the colleges were established after 1840, coinciding with the massive movement of immigrants into the United States that continued for decades. These schools were founded and funded by first- or second-generation immigrants. Poor immigrants would form the core of American Catholicism during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but some Catholics prospered in the United States. They were able to help finance Catholic educational institutions and they could afford their children’s tuition. Some colleges tended to attract students from these wealthier families while other schools offered less expensive fees that benefited students from the larger immigrant pool.

The institutions sought to differentiate themselves from public, secular, and other denominational colleges by emphasizing the Catholic faith and the Catholic intellectual tradition. Catholicism and academic studies went hand in hand. To strengthen the faith of the immigrant student was, at least implicitly, recognized by most of the colleges as an important part of their mission. These Catholic educational institutions became instruments for preserving the Catholic intellectual tradition in American higher education while preparing new generations of students for civic life in America. The colleges, like the Church itself, provided important avenues for the socialization of immigrants. In a retrospective sense, theses colleges became victims of their own success. The descendents of these immigrants gradually entered the American mainstream, as did the institutions themselves. Eventually most of Catholic higher education lost its special connection with immigrants.

Colleges and Immigrants Today

If we fast forward to the 21^st century, Catholics continue to make up the largest single denomination and we find the United States facing another immense immigration influx. The number of foreign-born in the United States today almost equals the proportion around the beginning of the last century. On average, since the 1990s, a million persons per year have been legally entering the country. As in the 19^th century, most of these newcomers are Roman Catholics under the age of 35. Most immigrants come from countries with significant Catholic populations. Hispanics, mostly Catholics, have surpassed African-Americans as the largest minority in the United States. Filipinos, overwhelmingly Catholic, closely follow the Chinese as the largest Asian community in the country. But unlike the 19^th century, the response of Catholic colleges and universities to these new immigrants has been tepid.

Many of the Catholics who attend, fund, and administer the institutions have a limited understanding of their own families’ immigrant roots and experiences. Educating immigrants no longer figures into the mission or even consciousness of most Catholic universities. Irish-American Catholics today are the most affluent religious group in the country, surpassing the Jews and the Episcopalians. One of the great achievements of Catholic higher education in the 20^th century was the creation of a cadre of Catholic intellectual and social leaders whose parents and grandparents were immigrants. Sadly these Catholic descendents of immigrants often ignore or are sometimes even hostile to the present-day immigrants. Fully assimilated into American life, Catholics have let slip their social and religious memory.

When a professor at a Catholic university today speaks of the “American Catholic,” she usually means the white, post-Vatican II, English-speaking middle-class citizen Catholic. She rarely puts into that category the newly arriving young African or Asian Catholics, or the Mexican, Peruvian, and Colombian Catholics who are the demographic future of the U.S. Catholic population. Although recognized as part of the global Catholic family, these newcomers have religious, social, and cultural traditions that seem “alien” in the mainstream American parish and in the elite Catholic academic circles. The religious issues that preoccupy Catholic lay and religious leaders in the United States today rarely reflect the social priorities and religious concerns of these young Catholic immigrants.

Because of their high private tuition and alumni base, most Catholic universities and colleges today are educating middle- and upper-income Americans. Some Catholic immigrants can afford to send their children to Catholic colleges but the majority of new immigrants are cut off from Catholic higher education. Surprisingly, even when scholarships are available, the schools do little to try to recruit from the forty different non-Hispanic Catholic ethnic groups establishing themselves in the United States. Successful and devout Korean Catholic immigrants, for example, are more likely to send their brightest children to Princeton, Harvard, and Stanford. Most immigrant students attend public high schools where Catholic colleges may not enter into the usual consideration by students and their families. Most Catholic immigrants never set foot on a Catholic campus. Unlike the earlier connections between specific immigrant communities and certain colleges, immigrants today often feel no particular attachment to any Catholic college. There are, of course, notable exceptions. St. John’s University in New York continues its long, distinguished tradition of educating lower-income immigrants. Some schools in California, New York, Texas, and Florida have large immigrant student populations, but usually not because of any strategic Catholic intentionality. The multicultural student body in these institutions simply reflects the shifting demographics of a globalizing region. All schools in those urban areas, public and private, will have similar diverse rosters of students.

Catholic bishops and pastors in the U.S. have been much more welcoming and responsive to the new immigrants than the Catholic colleges. Many of the bishops and cardinals continue the strong tradition laid out in the 19th century by such leaders as Archbishop John Hughes, who forcefully tried to protect and care for the immigrants in New York City. Because the Church is both local and global it can play a key role as a transnational bridge for Catholic immigrants. The bishops are gradually coming to terms with the fact that the immigrants are redefining U.S. Catholicism. But the Church has to struggle with the changing dynamics of migration. Many of the newer immigrants bypass the traditional gateway cities of Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Chicago, and Miami. Because of jobs, lower living costs, less crime, and family-friendly communities, they are settling in the American South and rural Midwest where Catholic pastoral structures for dealing with new immigrants are weaker than in Northeast or West Coast urban centers. The anti-immigrant forces in these areas can be more intense than in the older immigration cities. Heavy proselytism by certain Protestant groups can undermine their Catholic faith. Most big Catholic institutions of higher education remain outside this new immigration zone. The chances of an immigrant finding a local and affordable Catholic college are not good.

On top of the phenomenon of massive legal immigration, there is the parallel problem of immigrants who enter or stay without legal authorization. Experts estimate 12 million persons now live without legal permission in the United States. Most of them are embedded in mixed-status families where, for example, the father may be undocumented but the mother has American citizenship. Undocumented students pose a special challenge for higher education when, legally cut off from public scholarships and in-state tuition, they must forgo tertiary education even when they are in the top of their high school graduating class.

The complete collapse of the Kennedy-McCain immigration reform legislation and President Bush’s proposals last year, coupled with the escalating distortion of the problem by some media leaders and politicians, have made a reasonable national dialogue unlikely. Greater enforcement of existing laws seems to be the only change capable of being implemented in the current climate. Our broken federal immigration system will have to remain in place for the foreseeable future. Out of fear of detention and deportation, most of the undocumented immigrants, if they do not return to their countries of origin, will fade ever more deeply into the social shadows of our country. The hidden nature of their lives will present major challenges to civic life: labor and sexual abuses, children kept out of school, poor reporting of public health problems, driving without licenses or insurance, and the expansion of a dual labor economy where one sector has been criminalized and moved further underground.

Given these extremely difficult public policy problems, what is the role of Catholic higher education in responding to the phenomenon of global migration and contemporary mass immigration to the United States? Can Catholic higher education reconnect with immigration? There are multiple pathways for such engagement and response.

Social Justice Action

Clear and unbiased analysis is often a more important contribution to social justice than front-line advocacy. In the area of immigration, where Cardinal Mahony and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops tread, the Catholic colleges would be wise not to follow. Universities ought to focus primarily on teaching, research, and the life of the mind. They should not normally engage in extensive social and political advocacy at the institutional level. The public role and responsibility of a bishops' conference has to be separated from the public role and responsibility of a university. The Catholic social values that the schools stand for—protecting human dignity, enhancing the common good, promoting human solidarity, taking the side of the poor—must be inculcated through teaching, research, and reflection, not through extensive institutional lobbying. This institutional restraint in no way limits the civic engagement of individual teachers and students who can be encouraged to support the Catholic Church in its direct immigration advocacy. Social action can be an important element of a student’s moral and political education. Particularly as future lay leaders, young Catholics need to learn how to live out the social teachings of the Church in the public square. The University can help them do that but it should not, in the process, lose sight of its institutional mission, which is not advocacy.

Teaching

The global movement of people will characterize the rest of the 21^st century. Teaching students about its many dimensions will require the routine involvement of many different parts of an academic institution. Professional schools of law, medicine, nursing, business, education, communication, journalism, and the liberal arts colleges can all offer distinct perspectives on migration. Because the teaching of migration is often buried inside different departments and disciplines, it is difficult to get a perspective on the current situation. But undergraduate minor and major concentrations in migration studies could become “signature” offerings at Catholic colleges. More Catholic universities could distinguish themselves by establishing chairs and interdisciplinary graduate programs in migration.

Migration lends itself particularly well to academic service-learning courses where an endless variety of multidisciplinary topics can bring a student into direct contact with an immigrant or an immigrant community. Examples might include engineering for refugee housing, legal rights of asylum seekers, immigrant oral history, sociological and anthropological studies, immigrant businesses, immigrant literature, and the public and/or psychological health of immigrants.

Migration can concentrate the mind of an entire college. Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, for example, used its Bellarmine Forum structure last year to focus an entire week of student and faculty cross-disciplinary discussions, lectures, and media presentations on immigration.

Research

Migration is by its nature an interdisciplinary phenomenon. There is no general theory that fully explains why people move. Economists, sociologists, historians, demographers, political scientists, and philosophers all have explored theories of migration. Within each field there are many uninvestigated gaps in our knowledge. Human mobility is so complex that it will take decades of collaborative studies before we can begin to understand it in a more comprehensive light. Catholic universities, if they worked together, could become the academic front line for the interdisciplinary study of migration. The vast global network of Catholic educational and pastoral institutions offers scholars an unmatched entry for field research. U.S. Catholic colleges and universities could actively support incipient research networks such as the Jesuit Migration Academic Network (JMAN), which is trying to link faculty from the 28 U.S. Jesuit colleges and universities and encourage collaborative research on migration. It links to a similar Jesuit network of scholars based in Central America, Mexico, and Canada.

Specific social action research is another area where Catholic university scholars could shine. The U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops and the Catholic social service organizations have a constant need for specific data on immigrants. They have little time or resources to carry out such research themselves but they understand that when contentious immigration issues arise, factual data and rigorous research can have a powerful impact on policy makers.

Public Education

The national debate on immigration has been intensely polarizing and coarse. Catholic colleges and universities could fill the need for calmer, more informed, and balanced public presentations on the issues, including outreach through the media.

A school could also do more to educate the public about the Catholic Church’s unusual perspective on immigration and the special place that migration occupies in Jewish and Christian faiths.

Schools could offer the public more opportunities to meet immigrants and their families. Hearing an immigrant’s story can play an invaluable role in humanizing the immigration debate and changing the public’s perception of newcomers in their communities.

Immigrant Admissions and Scholarships

More Catholic colleges and universities should create specific scholarships for legal immigrant students. In tandem with these scholarship programs, much more direct recruiting needs to be done within the many ethnic communities. Schools can foster the development of long-term linkages with these communities by regularly offering special cultural and language programs on campus. These programs can be connected to the previously mentioned public education efforts.

Some of the brightest, most hard working high school students are undocumented and ineligible for public scholarships. Unlike public universities, private colleges can legally offer scholarships to these students. These scholarships, however, have to be handled discreetly. Students naturally fear exposing themselves or their families to deportation. Is it unrealistic to suggest the creation of a national Catholic endowment of scholarships for the undocumented?

Theology And Spirituality of Migration

To study and teach migration at a Catholic school comes down to a kind of Christian anthropology that asks not only why human beings move but also what God has to do with it. Probably only Catholic colleges and universities have the academic capacity for a sustained focus on the religious dimension of migration. For Catholics the challenge of immigration must be rooted in theology and spirituality. Catholic scholars and others have been developing a body of excellent analyses of the relationship between migration and God, but the theological depth of this topic has only begun to be explored. The question of how migration becomes a “theologizing” experience for the immigrant or refugee has not yet been answered. Nor have we adequately grasped how physical migration, as a human experience, mirrors our common migration through life to God. The centrality of migration for the Jewish Old Testament experience of God and the migratory impulse of Christianity are other dimensions offering a rich vein for scholarship, teaching, and reflection.

Conclusion

Migration, an ancient phenomenon, is all about decisions made by the human person. The ultimate test for U.S. Catholic colleges and universities will lie with the young immigrants themselves. The bonds they form with Catholic colleges will necessarily differ from those of their predecessors. But if the schools reach out to them and help the American people understand them, the new immigrants will bring the gift of renewed life to Catholic higher education for the new century. e