Maryland's Dream Act: The Inalienable Right to Migrate

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

The Inalienable Right to Migrate

The Bible speaks about immigrants about 200 times, putting them in a protected class with widows and orphans. And the Catholic Church today continues to assert the rights of immigrants. The Church asserts migration in search of better economic conditions is a right.

The Catholic Church today has factions and internal squabbles; there is a left and right in the Church, as in American politics. Some Catholics brandish the rich “social Gospel” teachings of the Church about solidarity and peace, while other Catholics pound on the clear teaching of the Church about personal morality. The official teaching of the Church does not support such schizophrenia: the entire history of the Church is filled, generation after generation, with prophetic calls for justice and morality. (That’s AND, not OR.) Still, it is interesting where we find the Church’s recent teaching on immigration. It’s in the teaching on morality, the right-wing documents. It’s in the documents about family life.

In Familiaris Consortio, Pope John Paul II opposes abortion, opposes contraception, defends a right to religious education, denounces government intrusion into family decisions. He says that “the Church openly and strongly defends the rights of the family against the intolerable usurpations of society and the State.” That’s all good old familiar on-the-one-right-hand stuff. It’s in that letter that he lists specific rights, including a lefty: “the right to emigrate as a family in search of a better life.”

The right to migrate is not an absolute right which can never be abridged, like the right to life. It’s more like property rights, which have to be balanced with other rights. Still, it’s a right, not a privilege, says the Catholic Church. It’s a God-given right, not an arbitrary arrangement provided by the government.

We should help immigrants because we should be generous as God has been generous to us. But more: we are required to help immigrants, because it is a matter of justice. The Catholic Church, following the teaching of the Law and the Prophets and the Gospel, states firmly that when people uproot and move in search of a better life, they are exercising a God-given right.

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Intro

There are about 12 million immigrants in the United States without legal documentation. Numerous efforts to solve the challenge of illegal immigration have failed. One such effort is the Dream Act. The federal Dream Act addresses the national challenge, but there are other state efforts as well, including the Maryland Dream Act. The Maryland law deals with a very small piece of the overall issue: it would provide in-state tuition rates at community colleges and in-state tuition rates for juniors and seniors at four-year state colleges and universities, to undocumented immigrants who meet a list of conditions. The law passed in April 2011, but opponents of the bill collected signatures to force a referendum on the issue in the 2012 election. Polls in late 2011 indicated that voters were split, but the bill was likely to go down in defeat.

Many of the leaders of the opposition to the Dream Act are conservatives who identify themselves as Christian. My intent to is open and maintain a civil argument among Christians on the issue. It is not my intention to exclude anyone from the debate; I am focusing on a debate among Christians because that’s who I am.

I am convinced that Christians who oppose the Dream Act have overlooked the clear and forceful teaching of Bible and the Church throughout the ages.

The easiest example: nearly everyone makes a mistake in discussions of the Last Judgment as described in Matthew 25. Nearly everyone makes the SAME mistake -- and it’s an interesting one. (See "9 of 10 ...")

So let’s talk.