Good Catholic Common Sense Must Prevail

by Thomas A. Droleskey

There are few issues more fraught with emotion than that of illegal immigration. The Natural Law teaches us that nations have both a right and a duty to secure their borders. Nations have both a right and a duty to protect themselves and their citizens from a flood of immigrants seeking to enter their borders in full violation of just laws that have been enacted to prevent an influx of people who are intent on showing contempt for those just laws and then to act as though it is their "right" to live in a country while seeking every privilege and benefit possible. It is a dereliction of the duty owed to one's country to refuse to make and/or to enforce just laws seeking to secure the borders and to assure the orderly flow of immigration in accordance with those laws.

Although Catholics can disagree with each other and with other citizens about the prudence of specific measures taken to secure their country's borders and to assure, as far as is humanly possible, the orderly immigration of people from other nations into that country, what is inarguable is the teaching of the Natural Law, which is derived from the right of national self-defense that is but a collective expression of the right of personal self-defense, that nations do indeed have a right and and a duty to secure the borders and that no one but no one who is not a resident of nation has any "right" in the Natural Law to seek entry to a particular country by any means other than those that are legal.

Putting Aside All Emotion

Catholics must put aside all emotion on the explosive issue of illegal immigration in order to look at the concrete principles (the right and duty of nations to defend their borders and to control the flow of immigration according to just laws) as they seek how to apply those principles in a prudent manner that is conducive to national security and at the same time takes account of the actual circumstances in which those who have heretofore entered one's country illegally find themselves.

Many there are, especially among Catholic "bishops" and priests/presbyters who are of the "leftist" bent of naturalism, who have served as nothing other than demagogues on the issue of illegal immigration, seeking to encourage non-Americans, especially from Mexico, and then to serve as their ready enablers so as to lobby Federal, state, and local officials for various social services for these illegal immigrants. Some even going so far as to say that one cannot consider himself "pro-life" unless he believes in a national policy of "open borders" and then for a full panoply of social services to be extended to those who have entered our country without following a just and orderly process of immigration. Men such as Roger "Cardinal" Mahony, the conciliar "archbishop" of Los Angeles, have been egregious in their open support of the flaunting of the just laws of the United States of America, daring to assert that the cause of defending those who have deliberately and willfully broken the just laws of this country are victims of "oppression" and that theirs is a "human rights" cause founded in the "dignity of man."

Other Catholics, especially those who are committed to one or another of the "rightist" bents of naturalism, engage in no small bit of demagoguery on their own parts, demonstrating in some instances a nativist mentality towards non-Americans that is eerily and most ironically similar to the nativist mentality exhibited by Freemasons and white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against Catholics who were emigrating from Ireland and Italy and parts of Central and Eastern Europe, including what is again today the nation of Poland that what was then divided among the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, in the Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Centuries.

Various laws were passed to discriminate against Catholic immigrants.

The General Court state legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at the behest of the Unitarian named Horace Mann, created the first state department of education in 1837 as a means of "standardizing" educational standards in public schools so that the children of Catholic immigrants would learn the ways of religious indifferentism and egalitarianism and democracy.

One author, evidently not a Catholic, put the matter this way:

There were no government schools in any modern sense of that term until the 1840s, when Horace Mann’s Unitarians started them up in Massachusetts as what were then known as common schools. Mann had been to Prussia where he learned of a far different view of the relationship between central government and its citizens than our own tradition which sees the individual as special both morally and economically. Prussian schools considered children property of the state, and educated them accordingly. They were raised to be obedient to the state, their purpose being to advance the interests of the state.

Shortt also cites Robert Owen, one of the Anglo-American world’s first influential socialists, who developed a similar philosophy of education. Owen believed that children should be separated from their parents as early as possible and raised by the state. He believed people were exclusively the products of their social environments, and that if nurtured properly by the state, could be molded into whatever was desired. A key to the thinking that went into forming the official ideology of state-sponsored education was that human beings are innately good, not sinful, and that human nature could be perfected by the right kind of educational system. The ideology that eventually developed would hold that children could be molded into willing consumers of the products of big business and obedient servants of government. In short, the aims of state-sponsored schools were to transform thinking, highly individualistic and very literate citizens into an unthinking, collectivized mass. The slow but steady decline in literacy of all kinds was a by-product.

Why did nineteenth century Christians go along with this scheme? One of the central reasons was that most were Protestants who hoped common schools would slow the spread of Catholicism in the new world. What mattered most about Horace Mann was that he wasn’t sympathetic to Catholicism! It mattered less that he and his Unitarian colleagues were preaching that man could perfect himself through his own efforts, and that compulsory education was a means to this end. So Protestant Christians, including many clergy, supported government schools thinking they could control them.

Very slowly, Pandora’s Box opened. A creeping secularization began. A few theologians (R.L. Dabney is an example) warned of the emerging dangers of state-sponsored education. Dabney, who was no friend of Catholics, was surprisingly prescient. He warned that the danger was not Catholicism but secularism, and that if the common school movement continued unchecked, government schools would end up entirely secular institutions. Christianity – in whatever form – would eventually be driven from them. At the heart of the danger was the transference of responsibility for education from the home to the government, an inherently secular institution. (Steven Yates, A Book Review of Bruce Shortt's "The Harsh Truth About Government Schools," The Harsh Truth About Government Schools by Steven Yates.)

An entire political party, the Know Nothing Party (or American Party), was formed in 1845 to protest the influx of German and Irish immigrants to the United States of America. Part of the larger "Know Nothing" movement (named not for fictional Sergeant Hans Schultz of Hogan's Heroes, but for members of this movement saying that they "knew nothing" about its activities when questioned) that sponsored mob riots against Catholics in various areas, including the attacking and killing of individual Catholics and the burning of Catholic church buildings and schools. Know Nothings won control of the Massachusetts General Court in the elections of 1854, being successful as well in electing their candidates as mayors of the cities of Chicago, Illinois, and San Francisco, California. Ohio was a particular stronghold of the Know-Nothings, who nominated former President Millard Fillmore, who had succeeded to the presidency of the United States of America upon the death of President Zachary Taylor on July 9, 1850, and served the remainder of Taylor's term (which ended on March 4, 1853), for president in 1856.

The Blaine amendments, named after the virulently anti-Catholic James G. Blaine (R-Maine), who, in additional to being the Republican Party nominee for President of the United States of America in 1884, served in the United States House of Representatives (where he was the Speaker of the House from 1869 to 1875) and the United States Senate and served two different terms in two different presidencies as the United States Secretary of State, prohibited the use of public funding of any kind to subsidize schools operated by religious organizations.

Members of the Grand Orient Masonic lodge of Oregon, using all of their considerable clout, joined forces with their great ally, the Ku Klux Klan, and others to sponsor an initiative (a referendum that, if approved by voters, becomes law as though it had been passed by a state legislature) to amend the Compulsory Education Act to, in effect, outlaw Catholic schools in the State of Oregon by mandating that all children be "educated" in public schools. This effort was rendered unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Pierce v. Society of Sisters, June 1, 1925. (See America's Concentration Camps).

The State of North Dakota, long a den of Masonic activity (Freemasons in the newly formed state legislature in 1889 sought to "liberalize" existing divorce laws as a means of destabilizing the family, something that was fought by the founding bishop of the Diocese of Jamestown (later Fargo), North Dakota, John Shanley), passed an anti-garb law in 1947 to require priests and consecrated religious to wear lay clothing when teaching in public schools. The Freemasons of North Dakota hoped to force a crisis of conscience for priests and religious that would prompt the two bishops of North Dakota from prohibiting their clergy and religious to teach in public schools. Bishops Leo Dworschak of Fargo and Vincent Ryan of Bismarck got permission from the Holy See for the clergy and the religious to wear lay clothing, thereby avoiding that crisis of conscience:

When the "anti-garb" campaign was waged in North Dakota in 1948, Bishop Ryan led in the defense of the rights of those wearing religious garb to teach in the public schools of the state. The opposition was well organized and had carried on vigorous campaign before the Catholics of the state were aware of their activities. Bishop Ryan rose to the challenge, and his efforts to defeat this measure were very nearly successful. In conjunction with Bishop Leo Dworschak of the Fargo Diocese, he appealed to the Holy See for permission for the sisters to teach in lay clothing. The victory for the anti-Catholics and the bigots was rendered empty when the Holy See granted their request. Friends and enemies alike had a new admiration for Bishop Ryan following this campaign. (History of Bishop Vincent J. Ryan.)

 

Did I hear anyone out there chant the slogan of "states' rights"? (See God's Rights or States Rights?)

Catholics, therefore, should be the last ones on the face of the earth to resort to any kind of nativism whatsoever as it is wrong for those of us who are disciples of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His true Church that He founded on the Rock of Peter, the Pope, and was brought to her birthday on Pentecost Sunday to lose sight of the fact that Our Lord died to redeem the soul of each and every human being on the face of this earth, and that we are treat every human being as we would treat Him in the very Flesh. What would we say to Our Lord, "Get out of America, you Nazarene, you. America is for Americans, not Nazarenes"?

Yet it is that, fallen human nature being what it is, Catholics have practiced bigotry, sometimes upon their very arrival to these shores. A former graduate student of mine from Saint John's University in Jamaica, Queens, back in the 1985-1986 academic year told me the story of what his maternal grandmother said upon her arrival fresh off the boat from Ireland when she realized that her neighbors in Floral Park, Queens, were Italian-Americans: "Look, there's foreigners living next to us!" Bigotry has no place in the heart of a believing Catholic as the only "foreigners" to Our Lord at the General Judgment of the living and the dead on the Last Day will be those who had persisted until the end outside of the Catholic Church and/or who died in a state of final impenitence.

Discrimination in the Making and Enforcement of Just Immigration Laws

All of this having been noted, it is important to point out that nations do have the right and the duty to make and enforce immigration laws on the basis of a just discrimination, which is different than "bigotry," which is an irrational hatred of a group of people. Permit me a word a thousand to explain.

Discrimination is part of daily life. That is, those reviewing a student's application for admission to a particular school or college or university or graduate program are required by the dictates of the Natural Law to assess his qualifications. This is a process of discrimination, a just discrimination, you see, as those who are less qualified are excluded from qualifying for admission or placed on a waiting list or told to undertake some program of remedial studies before reapplying if they desire to do so. Mind you, there is no place for invidious racial bigotry in this process nor is there any place for the reverse bigotry known as "affirmative action." There is neither racial segregation or "affirmative action" in Heaven.

As one who taught in college classrooms for over thirty years (and yes, I miss it very much; I must accept the will of God for me that those days are probably over forever), I had to discriminate when assigning a grade to a particular essay written by a particular student. Did the student express himself intelligibly in the mother tongue? Did the student present factual points accurately? Did the student understand the philosophical or even theological points at work in a particular issue? As I told my students at the start of every semester and frequently thereafter until the conclusion of a course, they must write their essays as though I, the reader of the essay, know nothing about the subject matter. They must "teach" me about the subject, being careful to be explicit and thorough in their presentation. I told them that I would not "read into" their essays what they wanted to write but not do so explicitly. They had to be explicit. (Most people, especially in these days of instant communications, write or speak to others as though the people to whom they are addressing do indeed know the contexts of their various references without even bothering to give a brief description. Some people will write, "Joe said this and that the other day. This troubles me." That's nice. Who is Joe? That might be a helpful bit of information to pass along.) I had to use my own imperfect abilities to assess the competency of these essays. This is a process of just discrimination.

Similarly, discrimination must be used by employers when seeking to fill a particular job vacancy. Applicants with better qualifications are identified and then invited for interviews. Those who are considered to be less qualified get form letters of rejection wishing them well on their careers. (I am just a bit familiar with that kind of letter. Humiliation is good for the soul. I get a lot of it as my sins deserve so richly.)

Managers and coaches of professional, collegiate, scholastic or amateur sports teams must discriminate on the basis of judgments concerning the ability of various individuals to discharge the skills required of them to succeed in competitive sports.

Judges of, say, a contest of piano performances or at a dog show must use a process of discrimination to choose a winner.

Just discrimination is simply part of ordinary daily living. We even discriminate on the basis of our food tastes and/or dietary needs, do we not? Those who equate the word "discrimination" with "bigotry" are entirely misinformed.

Thus it is that just discrimination plays a very important role in the process of devising and enforcing immigration laws that are meant to secure a nation's borders and to provide for skilled workers at a time of need for them and to provide a legitimate refuge for those suffering from proven political oppression or severe economic distress, perhaps caused by a natural disaster (a tornado, earthquake, fire, flood, hurricane). No one has a right founded in the Natural Law to enter a particular country and to stay there as long as he wants. Those desiring to reside permanently in a country must submit themselves to a process of just discrimination to determine their eligibility for admission.

 

Contemporary Immigration Problems as the Result of the Protestant Revolution and the Social Revolutions of Modernity

Alas, this whole process of devising and enforce just immigration laws has been rendered exceedingly complex, if not almost entirely perverted and distorted, by the rise of the contemporary pluralist state that is not composed of a very heterogeneous population. Again, permit me a chance to explain.

Although even European countries whose people have a strong sense of national identity and culture cannot claim a "pure" race of people as invasions of barbaric tribes in Europe over the centuries resulted in all types of ethnic and even racial mixtures over time, it is certainly true that there was a sense of national personality, as termed by the late Father Denis Fahey in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, that developed in the Catholic Middle Ages. Ireland, England, Scotland, France, the various regions within what are known today as Germany and Italy, Hungary, Poland, Spain, and Portugal, to name just a few countries, developed, despite the faults of their citizens and the bad example given on many occasions by those in civil and ecclesiastical positions, a strong national personality during their long years of their allegiance to the banner of Christ the King. Other than missionaries, such as Saint Boniface (Winifred) or even Saint Patrick himself, who were sent from their native places to convert pagans and barbarians elsewhere, there was no need for large numbers of people to migrate during the Catholic Middle Ages. They were proud of their national identities and how they were able to express the Catholic Faith within the context of those identities.

Father Fahey explained this in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World:

In proportion as the Mystical Body of Christ was accepted by mankind, political and economic thought and action began to respect the jurisdiction and guidance of the Catholic Church, endowed, as she is, with the right of intervention in temporal affairs whenever necessary, because of her participation in the spiritual Kingship of Christ. Thus the natural or temporal common good of States came to be sought in a manner calculated to favour the development of true personality, in and through the Mystical Body of Christ, and social life came more and more fully under the influence of the supreme end of man, the vision of God in Three Divine Persons.

Accordingly, Catholic Social Order, viewed as a whole, is not primarily the political and social organization of society. It is primarily the supernatural social organism of the Church, and then, secondarily, the temporal or natural social order resulting from the influence of Catholic doctrine on politics and economics and from the embodiment of that influence in social institutions. If instead of Catholic Social Order we use the wider but more convenient expression of Kingdom of God, we may say that the Kingdom of God on earth is in its essence the Church, but, in its integrity, comprises the Church and the temporal social order which the influence of the Church upon the world is every striving to bring into existence. Needless to say, while the general principles of social order remain always the same, social structures will present great differences at different epochs. No particular temporal social order will ever realize all that the Church is capable of giving to the world. The theology of history must include, then, primarily, the study of the foundation and development of the Church, and secondarily, the examination of the ebb and flow of the world’s acceptance of the Church’s supernatural mission. . . .

The organization of the Europe of the thirteenth century furnishes us with one concrete realization of the Divine Plan. It is hardly necessary to add that there were then to be seen defects in the working of the Divine Plan, due to the character of fallen man, as well as an imperfect mastery of physical nature. Yet, withal, the formal principle of ordered social organisation in the world, the supremacy of the Mystical Body, was grasped and, in the main, accepted. The Lutheran revolt, prepared by the cult of pagan antiquity at the Renaissance, and by the favour enjoyed by the Nominalist philosophical theories, led to the rupture of that order." (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, p. 10.)

The unity and cohesion of Europe was, of course, rent asunder by the Protestant Revolt in the Sixteenth Century. Peoples who shared a common national identity become enemies one to another. Half of the German states were lost to the Holy Faith. The countries of Scandinavia were lost to the Holy Faith. Irishmen were now divided against their fellow Irishmen. Catholics were hunted down and killed in England by their former friends, sometimes even by their own relatives, eager to prove their "loyalty" to the crown.

Catholics in England and Ireland were particularly hard hit in economic terms by the Protestant Revolt. Catholics in England who had been living as hereditary tenant farmers on the lands of monastery and convents were expelled, forcing them off the land into unfamiliar lives in urban centers, where they lived in poverty and hunger. Catholics in Ireland were oppressed severely. The nearly three centuries of persecution and temporal misery that followed made some more than willing to seek refuge in the new world of pluralism that was the United States of America, a country that had been formed by the union of thirteen British colonies, most of which under colonial rule had their own laws to persecute Catholics.

The social revolutions that began with the French Revolution on July 14, 1789, and thereafter, revolutions that were but the result of the aftermath of the Protestant Revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church, introduced more upheaval and enmity in the formerly Catholic countries of once proudly Catholic Europe. Class warfare replaced the religious differences engendered by the Protestant Revolt as a new fault-line to divide families and friends, to drive wedges of hatred against Holy Mother Church and to lead people into lives of agnosticism, if not complete atheism. People became refugees in their own countries, fleeing sometimes from one country to another in Europe to avoid the chaos.

The social revolutions in Central Europe in 1848 produced a great wave of immigration specifically to the United States of America from the then still divided German states and parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Another wave of immigration followed after the Franco-Prussian War on May 10, 1871, as Catholics suffering from the Freemasonic anticlerical Risorgimento in Italy and the Freemason Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf in the now united Germany fled to the shores of the United States of America. Modern immigration was in full swing in the era between 1871 and the beginning of World War I in Europe on August 3, 1914, when the United Kingdom declared war on the German Empire.

Although anti-Catholic nativism was far from dead in the United States of America after the War Between the States, there was a need for both skilled and unskilled laborers to do the work required of the industries that were coming to full bloom during the American version of the Industrial Revolution. These new Catholic immigrants, although they faced the overt hostility and persecution described earlier in this commentary, were seen as a valuable source of labor to increase American wealth and power, and it is for this reason that they were welcomed into this country.

Many of the industrialists, inheritors of the ethos of Calvinist materialism, viewed the presence of these new immigrants as a "necessary evil" to help them make money. They could be tolerated if they were kept in their places. Professional politicians, especially those in the Democratic Party in the Northeast and industrial Midwest saw these new immigrants in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century in exactly the same terms that many of their predecessors had viewed the Irish and German immigrants to these shores in the 1820s and 1830s: an invaluable resource of voters who could be, in effect, bribed with jobs and favors--and even an easy path to citizenship--in exchange for becoming loyal members of the Democratic Party who would vote (sometimes in multiple voting precincts on the same day) and organize in behalf of their candidates, which might involve intimidating opposition candidates and spreading disinformation about them (sound familiar?). (See Dialectical Americanism for a more protracted discussion of the co-opting of Catholic loyalties by the Democratic Party and Americanism.)

Large numbers of Jewish refugees came to the United States of America in the latter part of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, emigrating from the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian Empires. Lutherans from Nordic lands such as Norway and Sweden came here in large numbers at around the same time. More came from parts of the Middle East, including parts of Lebanon and Syria and Palestine. The American pluralist state was expanding greatly with no true principle of national unity, that is, without the principle of national unity desired by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ: Catholicism.

The world created by the Protestant Revolution and the social revolutions that followed a few centuries later disrupted such basic elements of social order as national identity and character, making it more possible for the devil to use his various minions to promote the concept of a "global new word order" as a means of dealing with the "global interdependence" caused by massive shifts of peoples from one place to another and by the economy of the post-industrial revolution that relies upon the dictatorship of the corporate elite in multinational corporations and the outsourcing of most manufacturing jobs from "first world" countries such as the United States of America and those in the socialist enclave that is the European Union to countries such as Red China, where workers are paid very substandard wages to manufacture most of the world's consumer goods in largely unsafe working conditions. This is a world of chaos and dislocation, not the world of order and national cohesion of the Catholic Middle Ages.

Social Engineering and American Immigration Law

American immigration law has varied from time to time. There have been efforts to preserve a "white European heritage" by seeking to establish quotas from non-European countries. And there has been an effort in the past forty-five years to encourage immigration from non-European nations so as to change the social, political and economic composition of the United States of America.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese immigration to the United States until its repeal in 1948. This more or less continued United States immigration policies first established in 1790 to bar all but those who were deemed to be "white" from being naturalized as citizens, although non-whites could live as permanent residents without the privileges of citizens.

The Immigration Act of 1924 limited immigration from European to countries to two percent of number of people from a particular country that had already emigrated to the United States and barred the immigration of Asians almost entirely. The two percent quota was an effort to reduce the numbers of people coming from eastern and southern Europe. Those from Latin American countries were permitted to emigrate to this country without any limitations or quotas whatsoever. Although there were changes made to the quota system and racial restrictions were removed by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the first sweeping measure of true modern social engineering by means of American immigration law occurred with the now infamous Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which was signed into law by then President Lyndon Baines Johnson on October 3, 1965.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was a sweeping measure of social engineering designed by the socialists of the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey to alter the demographics of the United States of America so that those of a white and "Christian" background would be in the minority of the population--and hence of the electorate--within a hundred years or so. These social engineers could be confident in their success as the Johnson administration oversaw passage of legislation in 1967 that mandate the states and localities to implement "family planning" programs, knowing that the more affluent white population would be inclined to accept contraception in order to "enjoy" their material success while those in the non-white population could be told that the use of "family planning" would be helpful to their own economic stability. Despite all of the loud protestations at the time, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was an effort to reshape the American electorate so as to institutionalize the sort of social engineering being implement by means of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" and "Great Society," both of which were responsible for the large increase in the size and scope and power of the Federal government of the United States of America since the "New Deal" of the thirty-third degree Freemason Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s.

Oh, yes, the protestations were loud. They were also entirely disingenuous.

Consider these comments made by the late United States Senator from Massachusetts, Edward Moore Kennedy:

"First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same.... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.... The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs." (U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 1965. pp. 1-3.)

 

Quite the anti-prophet, wouldn't you say?

Lyndon Johnson himself, ever the liar and cheat and scoundrel and all around fake, phony and fraud, was equally disingenuous in the comments he made at the signing ceremony of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965:

This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power. (President Lyndon Baines Johnson, October 3, 1965.)

 

Indeed, the election of someone along the lines of Barack Hussein Obama is exactly what the social engineers who gave us the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (named after the late United States Senator Philip Hart, a Democrat from Michigan, and the late United States Representative Emmanuel "Manny" Celler, a Democrat from Brooklyn, New York, who was the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee from 1949 to 1953 and again from 1955 to 1973) had in mind when this law passed in 1965. (See an article in the Boston Globe from 2008 that discussed the effects of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 on the election of 2008: Obama victory took root in Kennedy-inspired Immigration Act of 1965.) There is no turning back the effects of the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Our situation is what it is, and it has certainly helped produce a political climate favorable to the election of statists such as Barack Hussein Obama.

Our lives have been revolutionized by the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and as the counterfeit church of conciliarism in the United States of America made its own "reconciliation" with the goals in this act as it celebrated "diversity" and "pluralism" in the "free" United States of America, the land of "religious liberty."

This "reconciliation" involved sometimes very subtle efforts to de-emphasize Catholicism on the campuses of traditionally Catholic colleges in order not to "offend" non-Catholic students from Asia and Africa. I was told by a colleague of mine at Saint John's University in Jamaica, Queens, upon returning to adjunct teaching there in January of 1991 after an absence of about two and one-half years from the campus, "Be careful, Tom. Things have changed. You can't be as Catholic now as you were before. The study body is different. No more prayers at the beginning of class." This was advice, not "official" policy. I ignored the advice (and I haven't taught there since the Spring of 1992). Conciliarists used "sensitivity" for the "diverse" nature of the once Catholic colleges in their control to prevent Catholicism from being taught by the few professors interested in teaching their subject matters in light of the Holy Faith and interested in helping their students to get home to Heaven as members of the Catholic Church, no less to exhort non-Catholic students to convert.

American immigration law has been used in the past forty-five years to make it difficult for Europeans (what few of them are left, that is) to emigrate to this country as those from traditionally non-Christian nations have permitted to come here in droves and thus take their place in American society. This has indeed changed the social, political and economic landscape of the United States of America quite a lot.

Contraception and Abortion as the Driving Force to Spur Illegal Immigration from Mexico and Other Parts of Latin America

Prompted the the pandemic corruption of Mexican government and industry, millions of people from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America have entered the United States of America illegally since the 1970s. Nearly seven million Mexicans have come here in the past ten years ago, constituting a total of fifty-seven percent of all illegal immigrants, who number around eleven million, now in the United States of America. The problem was so bad in the 1980s that even the administration of then President Ronald Wilson Reagan surrendered to the realities of the situation at hand and agreed to grant amnesty to a large number of illegal immigrants who had been in this country continuously since before January 1, 1982, and created a means by which some illegal immigrants who worked on farms or other agriculture-related fields could be legalized.

What were the realities at hand that prompted the "conservative" Reagan administration to agree to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986? Simply this: contraception and abortion had taken their toll on the supply of available workers for jobs, especially those menial, backbreaking jobs that so few Americans want to take. Many of our restaurants and hotels and other service industries would have to shutter their doors were it not for the fact that so many illegal immigrants are now in this country to take the jobs that do not appeal to most Americans. Other industries relied on this supply of labor as well. Employers needed these workers. Many of these employers made hefty campaign contributions to members of the two organized crime families of naturalism in the United States of America, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and one of the many things that unite the naturalists of the false opposites of the "left" and the "right" is their deep and profoundly held personal desire for ready campaign cash.

Additionally, of course, the Democratic Party and their enablers in the network of Alinsky "community organizations" from whose ranks sprang Caesar Barackus Ignoramus and in the ranks of the "leftists" elements in the counterfeit church of conciliarism (Catholic Charities, Catholic Campaign for Human Development) wanted a new supply of eager voters who would express their "gratitude" for easy access to permanent residency as a means to become naturalized citizens at the ballot box, thus replicating the exploitation of Catholic immigrants to these shores a century earlier.

As mentioned earlier in this commentary, many conciliar "bishops" and their chancery factotums and other all-around no-goodniks have made the cause of illegal immigrants one of the pillars of the "consistent ethic of life," bestowing near martyrdom status upon those who knowing broke the just laws of the United States of America and entered this country illegally without bothering to get their immigration status legalized. Do not underestimate the role that Democratic Party operatives, Alinsky "community organizers" and conciliarist revolutionaries have played in reaffirming illegal immigrants in their "right" to be here and in their demands for special "rights" and privileges from the Federal, state, and local governments. This witches' brew of people who have no true regard for the legitimate sovereignty of the United States of America or of the Natural Law right of nations to secure their borders and to make and enforce just laws providing for the orderly immigration of people have succeeded in convincing many cities (among them being the City of New York, New York,  the City of Washington, District of Columbia, the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, California, Dallas Texas, Minneapolis, Minnesota, et al.) to name themselves as "sanctuary cities," which means that law enforcement officials in these cities cannot ask anyone about their residency or citizenship status or report anyone to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security (formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the United States Department of Justice).

The American border with Mexico is porous. It is badly protected. The economic and political factors cited above have prevented policy-makers at the national level from dealing with a serious problem that has threatened quite literally the physical safety of many Americans as some of those who have entered illegally have gone on wanton crime sprees and/or joined gangs or drug cartels to wreak violence with almost utter impunity. (See (Immigrant Crime High in Border States.)

The issue is further complicated by the fact that the lion's share of those who enter the United States of America are, apart from having broken the just immigration laws of this nation, very hard working people who even, at least for the most part, pay their taxes. The issue is fraught with the kind of political dynamite that the naturalists of both major organized crime families of naturalism hate to have to face as the Democrats do not want to lose the votes of those who are concerned about the issue of illegal immigration and the Republicans do not want to alienate the growing bloc of voters who are of Latin American or Hispanic origins.

Enter Arizona

The political paralysis on this explosive issue at the Federal level is why legislators in the State of Arizona, which has had a plague of illegal immigration in the past decade, passed a bill to make it possible for law enforcement officials there to do precisely what is prohibited in the aforementioned "sanctuary cities," namely, to question, under very strict conditions, persons suspected of being illegal immigrants.

There has been much demagoguery on this issue. The worst kind of sloganeering imaginable is being employed by the profession hacks of "left" who seek to find "hatred" in the hearts of those who simply want to protect the national borders and to secure, as far as is humanly possible, the safety of American citizens.

Additionally, of course, there have been outright lies and distortions and misrepresentations on the Arizona statute, the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, which was signed into law by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer on April 23, 2010. These lies and distortions and misrepresentations have come from, among others, President Barack Hussein Obama, United States Attorney General Eric Holder (who still has not given clear, coherent answers concerning his role in obtaining a presidential pardon for fugitive financier Marc Rich in 2001 as the nefarious administration of William Jefferson Blythe Clinton and Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., was drawing to its close), and United States Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who was the Governor of Arizona from January 6, 2003, to January 21, 2009.

It is interesting to note, of course, that each of these three--Obama, Holder and Napolitano--refuse, absolutely refuse, to admit that there is any such thing as "Islamic terrorism." They, steeped in the muck and the mire of political correctness and of a self-hatred for the legitimate national security interests of the United States of America that defies accurate description, just cannot bring themselves to utter those two words at all. They have no problem, however, about distorting and misrepresenting the text of The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.

To correct these distortions and misrepresentations an Arizona state representative, John Kavanagh, wrote an op-ed commentary for USA Today, which published Representative Kavanagh's editorial on April 27, 2010:

Arizona's new anti-illegal immigration law is an effort to "crack down" on illegal immigration and the harm it causes Arizona, including crime and back-breaking public expenses to incarcerate, educate, medically treat and provide other services to illegal immigrants and their children. Arizona has been forced to assume responsibility for immigration enforcement because of the federal government's refusal to secure the border and conduct adequate internal enforcement.

Some fear that the law will empower police to challenge the legal presence of all Hispanics, legal and illegal, based solely upon their appearance, but that's not correct. Police officers may only question the immigration status of a person when they have "reasonable suspicion" to believe that the person is in the U.S. illegally. This provision merely extends to immigration offenses a half-century-old tool called "stop and question," created by the U.S. Supreme Court. To prevent racial profiling, the law states that in constructing "reasonable suspicion," police officers "may not solely consider race, color or national origin."

Another misconception is that the law requires residents to carry identification papers. Not true. This mistaken belief stems from a provision that creates a presumption of legal presence, if a person voluntarily presents specified forms of government-issued identification. Failing to present identification papers is not grounds for arrest.

Nor will the law divert police resources from more pressing matters. Police officers are only required to make "reasonable" legal presence inquiries "when practicable," so that officers will be free to prioritize their time. Likewise, no questioning is required when it would "hinder or obstruct an investigation," so that the police do not have to question all crime victims and witnesses about their immigration status.

The sad fact is that the Bush administration dropped the ball on immigration enforcement and that the Obama administration cannot even find it. The primary responsibility of government is to protect its citizens, and illegal immigration poses a growing threat to safety. Until such time as the federal government secures the border and adequately enforces immigration laws internally, Arizona and other states will have no choice but to protect their citizens. (Arizona is Protecting Its Citizens.)

 

The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act passed by the state legislature of Arizona is a just law. It is a just, prudent effort to deal with a crisis that has been enabled at the Federal level by naturalists in both the Republican and Democratic parties for reasons outlined earlier in this commentary. While part two of this commentary will focus on recommendations for how these problems would be handled in a Catholic world, wherein allowances would be made for those who have overstayed a once valid visa and have shown themselves to be good members of society who have sought to advance the common temporal good in light of man's Last End (the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity) and in certain circumstances for those who have entered illegally (more on all this in tomorrow's commentary), perhaps it would be useful to consider how one nation does indeed seek to protect its borders with strength and vigor.

The name of that country? I am so glad that you asked: the United Mexican States.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has accused Arizona of opening the door "to intolerance, hate, discrimination and abuse in law enforcement." But Arizona has nothing on Mexico when it comes to cracking down on illegal aliens. While open-borders activists decry new enforcement measures signed into law in "Nazi-zona" last week, they remain deaf, dumb or willfully blind to the unapologetically restrictionist policies of our neighbors to the south.

The Arizona law bans sanctuary cities that refuse to enforce immigration laws, stiffens penalties against illegal alien day laborers and their employers, makes it a misdemeanor for immigrants to fail to complete and carry an alien registration document, and allows the police to arrest immigrants unable to show documents proving they are in the U.S. legally. If those rules constitute the racist, fascist, xenophobic, inhumane regime that the National Council of La Raza, Al Sharpton, Catholic bishops and their grievance-mongering followers claim, then what about these regulations and restrictions imposed on foreigners?

— The Mexican government will bar foreigners if they upset "the equilibrium of the national demographics." How's that for racial and ethnic profiling?

— If outsiders do not enhance the country's "economic or national interests" or are "not found to be physically or mentally healthy," they are not welcome. Neither are those who show "contempt against national sovereignty or security." They must not be economic burdens on society and must have clean criminal histories. Those seeking to obtain Mexican citizenship must show a birth certificate, provide a bank statement proving economic independence, pass an exam and prove they can provide their own health care.

— Illegal entry into the country is equivalent to a felony punishable by two years' imprisonment. Document fraud is subject to fine and imprisonment; so is alien marriage fraud. Evading deportation is a serious crime; illegal re-entry after deportation is punishable by ten years' imprisonment. Foreigners may be kicked out of the country without due process and the endless bites at the litigation apple that illegal aliens are afforded in our country (see, for example, President Obama's illegal alien aunt — a fugitive from deportation for eight years who is awaiting a second decision on her previously rejected asylum claim).

— Law enforcement officials at all levels — by national mandate — must cooperate to enforce immigration laws, including illegal alien arrests and deportations.

The Mexican military is also required to assist in immigration enforcement operations. Native-born Mexicans are empowered to make citizens' arrests of illegal aliens and turn them in to authorities.

— Ready to show your papers? Mexico's National Catalog of Foreigners tracks all outside tourists and foreign nationals. A National Population Registry tracks and verifies the identity of every member of the population, who must carry a citizens' identity card. Visitors who do not possess proper documents and identification are subject to arrest as illegal aliens.

All of these provisions are enshrined in Mexico's Ley General de Poblaci¢n (General Law of the Population) and were spotlighted in a 2006 research paper published by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy. There's been no public clamor for "comprehensive immigration reform" in Mexico, however, because pro-illegal alien speech by outsiders is prohibited.

Consider: Open-borders protesters marched freely at the Capitol building in Arizona, comparing GOP Gov. Jan Brewer to Hitler, waving Mexican flags, advocating that demonstrators "Smash the State," and holding signs that proclaimed "No human is illegal" and "We have rights."

But under the Mexican constitution, such political speech by foreigners is banned. Noncitizens cannot "in any way participate in the political affairs of the country." In fact, a plethora of Mexican statutes enacted by its congress limit the participation of foreign nationals and companies in everything from investment, education, mining and civil aviation to electric energy and firearms. Foreigners have severely limited private property and employment rights (if any).

As for abuse, the Mexican government is notorious for its abuse of Central American illegal aliens who attempt to violate Mexico's southern border. The Red Cross has protested rampant Mexican police corruption, intimidation and bribery schemes targeting illegal aliens there for years. Mexico didn't respond by granting mass amnesty to illegal aliens, as it is demanding that we do. It clamped down on its borders even further. In late 2008, the Mexican government launched an aggressive deportation plan to curtain illegal Cuban immigration and human trafficking through Cancun.

Meanwhile, Mexican consular offices in the United States have coordinated with left-wing social justice groups and the Catholic Church leadership to demand a moratorium on all deportations and a freeze on all employment raids across America.

Mexico is doing the job Arizona is now doing — a job the U.S. government has failed miserably to do: putting its people first. Here's the proper rejoinder to all the hysterical demagogues in Mexico (and their sympathizers here on American soil) now calling for boycotts and invoking Jim Crow laws, apartheid and the Holocaust because Arizona has taken its sovereignty into its own hands:

Hip¢critas. (Michelle Malkin, Police state: How Mexico treats illegal aliens.)

 

And an Assistant Secretary, John Morton, of homeland security for the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency thinks that the Protect Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Acts of the State of Arizona is not the "solution" and that ICE should not process as potential deportees those who might be arrested under this law? (See Top Official Says Feds May Not Process Illegals.) Talk about a dereliction of duty and a callous lack of regard for the security of American borders and the security of American citizens. This dereliction of duty borders on treason.

Naturalists of the "leftist" bent, such as those in the Obama administration, live in the fantasy world of one self-made delusion after another. The world must conform to their own delusional predilections. Those who explode their lives of delusional fantasy are the ones who must be denounced as demagoguery is used to deal with an issue of vital importance to a nation's legitimate security interests.

Alas, those who do not believe in the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ exclusively to His Catholic Church for their eternal safekeeping and infallible explication are ill-equipped to secure their own nation's borders.

Those who do not believe in the Sovereignty of Christ the King over men and their nations will wind up believing themselves to be "sovereign" of all external authority while at the same time expecting others to bow and scrape before them as the omniscient, if not infallible, experts on all issues.

Those who believe that men have the right to prevent the conception of babies and to kill those who manage to be conceived will have no regard for the legitimate national good.

Those who believe in their statist schemes to increase the size and power and scope of the Federal government of the United States of America by means of restricting the legitimate liberties of citizens as they grab control of more and more of the national economy and as they seek to de-legitimize any criticism of their plans or programs whatsoever by the use of various slogans need to increase their influence at the ballot box by rewarding those who have entered the country illegal with a "path to citizenship."

There is a word for all of this: madness, the madness of a world shaped by the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen.

Part two of this commentary will, as noted earlier, focus on specific recommendations (which are nothing more than recommendations that are not at all received from the hand of God and carry no weight of any authority at all) for dealing with the problem of illegal immigration by attempting to apply the precepts of the Faith, including true charity for one's neighbor, and the demands of the Natural Law that nations protect their borders and their sovereignty, to the situation at hand.

In the meantime, let us pray to God the Holy Ghost during this Octave of Pentecost to ask for His guidance to see the world always through the eyes of the true Faith, seeing the Divine impress in all others as we seek to perform the Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy for them, being careful, as always, to pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits as we seek to make reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary for our sins and those of the whole world, giving honor and glory to the Most Blessed Trinity by living such a penitential life in fulfillment of Our Lady's Fatima Message in our own lives.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!

Saint Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Pope Saint Gregory VII, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints