The Catholic argument against Catholic immigration

The nation is a God-given institution which must be preserved

Everything must be done so that people can remain in the countries that saw their birth.

- Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

…the very idea of ‘native land’ presupposes a deep bond between the spiritual and the material, between culture and territory.

— Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Personal Reflections

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Those within the Church who support mass migration harm the faith of migrants and the faith of the nations which migrants move between. This occurs through two mechanisms: moving people from high-faith to low-faith societies, and undermining the natural institution of the nation which is necessary infrastructure for the formation of faithful cultures.

I will quote extensively from popes and prelates of the Church to demonstrate that the following logic is entirely supported by Catholic teaching:

1. The nation is a natural and just institution;

2. Ethnicity, as ‘extended family’, is a fundamental basis of the nation;

3. The integrity of the nation is essential for propagating a culture of faith;

4. The Church supports nations prudently limiting immigration;

5. Therefore, it is just to limit immigration in order to maintain the ethnic and cultural coherence of the nation in order to maintain the Faith.

While recognizing the ethnic basis of the nation, Catholic teaching emphasizes that more important still is the ability of the nation to provide a spiritual inheritance to all its children - regardless of ethnicity - through the transmission of a culture oriented towards God.

I will show that in our present civilization, high levels of immigration - even those that flow from Catholic countries - harm the formation and propagation of such a culture. This implies that the Church should support nations in radically stemming such immigration.

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In Memory and Identity: Personal Reflections (2005), Pope John Paul II meditated on his native Poland, and the future of his people in a post-war period increasingly skeptical of loyalty to a particular nation.

His conclusion, informed by his faith, is subtle but clear: the aggressive nationalism of the Axis powers was destructive, but this should not cause us to reject a belief in the permanent validity of the nation as a righteous entity. The nation is a God-given institution.

Yet it still seems that nation and native land, like the family, are permanent realities. In this regard, Catholic social doctrine speaks of ‘natural’ societies, indicating that both the family and the nation have a particular bond with human nature, which has a social dimension. Every society’s formation takes place in and through the family: of this there can be no doubt. Yet something similar could also be said about the nation. The cultural and historical identity of any society is preserved and nourished by all that is contained within this concept of nation.

— Pope Saint John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Personal Reflections

Throughout these reflections, the pope recognizes the validity of the ethnic substrate of the nation, even as the ‘spiritual inheritance’ of the nation - the passing of their unique cultural forms of the Faith from one generation to the next - takes primary importance.

Cardinal Sarah has explained that we must recognize that the extended family of the nation necessarily implies a ‘natural’ (ethnic) component.

Men do not resemble one another. Nature, too, is multifariously rich, because God ordained it so. Our Father thought that his children could be enriched by their differences. Today, globalization is contrary to the divine plan. It tends to make humanity uniform. Globalization means cutting man off from his roots, from his religion, from his culture, history, customs, and ancestors.

— Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

Speaking on this subject of migration, Pope Benedict XVI clarified that these two fundamental components of a nation - ethnicity and culture - are inseparable. The ethnicities which compose a society cannot be replaced without a commensurate revolution in identity and culture - and thus in the destruction and replacement of the nation itself.

Europe… seems to have become hollowed out, paralyzed in a certain sense by a crisis of its circulatory system, a crisis that endangers its life, which depends, so to speak, on transplants, which then, however, cannot help undermining its identity. This interior dwindling of the spiritual strength that once supported it is accompanied by the fact that Europe appears to be on the way out ethnically as well.

— Pope Benedict XVI, Europe: Today and Tomorrow

Why is this? What is the theology of the link between family, ethnicity, native land, and the nourishing of the Faith? Here Pope John Paul II helps us again:

The Latin word patria is associated with the idea and the reality of ‘father’ (pater). The native land (or fatherland) can in some ways be identified with patrimony, that is, the totality of goods bequeathed to us by our forefathers… Our native land is thus our heritage and it is also the whole patrimony derived from that heritage. It refers to the land, the territory, but more importantly, the concept of patria includes the values and the spiritual content that go to make up the culture of a given nation.

— Pope Saint John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Personal Reflections

Because of this recognition of the integral relationship between family and nation, we can understand our duties to our nations within the framework of the Commandments:

…the concept of patria and its link with paternity and with generation points towards the moral value of patriotism. If we ask where patriotism appears in the Decalogue, the reply comes without hesitation: it is covered by the fourth commandment, which obliges us to honour our father and mother. It is included under the umbrella of the Latin word pietas, which underlines the religious dimension of the respect and veneration due to parents.

— Pope Saint John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Personal Reflections

This in turn necessitates that we understand patriotism - preferential loyalty to our particular nation - as fundamentally virtuous: