Toward a More Just and Generous Immigration System
I began this short series on immigration by quoting from Amy Pope’s 2025 article, “Migration Can Work for All: A Plan for Replacing a Broken Global System.” She can write with authority on this topic, since she is the Director General of the UN’s International Organization for Migration. Recall that she argued that illegal migration is on the rise; that there is currently a political backlash worldwide against receiving these immigrants; but that it is very possible to set up a new system that is both fair and beneficial to all sides, especially if one considers the dismal labor shortages in high-income countries, in healthcare and agriculture to start with.
Here I want to highlight a short article by lead researcher Tara Watson, Director of the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institute (a bipartisan think tank, in fact the most quoted think tank internationally) entitled, “The impact of immigrants on the US economy.” Watson and her colleagues take Pope’s analysis much further because they can point to studies specifically conducted on one nation—the United States.
She begins with the statement that “Immigrants bring with them a range of mostly positive demographic, fiscal, and economic impacts.” Since 2010, just under a million people entered the U.S. per year (after subtracting the number of departures), including typically half a million of legal permanent residents coming back from abroad, around 100,000 refugees, and large numbers of people entering on temporary student or work visas. Finally, a large number arrived without visas, “either by entering without going through official channels or by coming as parolees or asylum-seekers”—a number that peaked significantly from 2022 to 2024 (up to 3 million).
Yet for the first time in at least 50 years, she noted, the U.S. experienced a “net negative” increase in immigrants in 2025. At the time of writing (March 2026), Watson and her colleagues were still working on the final figure for 2025, but they knew it was in negative territory, somewhere between -295,000 and -10,000. This year promises to be worse.
Specifically, “inflows are well below historical norms,” due to the following: the Trump administration ended the refugee program, mostly stopped processing asylum claims at the border, banned entry for citizens of a number of countries, threw a monkey wrench in the processing of green cards for both students and workers, and finally, it increased the number of deportations and through scare tactics, of voluntary exits.
What might be the results of such a policy?
· The demographic picture: this is happening while the U.S. “is entering a period of population aging and declining.” More specifically, “the ratio of the number of working-age people (ages 18-64) to those 65 and older has fallen from 5.7 in 1970 to 3.4 in 2024 and is projected to fall to 2.7 in 2040.” Then too, since 2025, the United States is becoming a much less desirable destination for many scientists and intellectuals (see this NY Times article, “The World’s Best and Brightest Are Moving, but Not to America”). All of this is converging toward a first ever decline in the American population: “The Census Bureau estimates that, in a zero-immigration scenario starting in 2022, the U.S. population would fall by over seven million by 2040.” This is alarming, because the Social Security and Medicare systems rely on a much higher ratio between workers and retirees.
· The fiscal picture: a February 2026 study released by the right-leaning Cato Institute (“Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994-2023”). In each of those 30 years, “immigrants paid more in taxes than they received in benefits. This resulted in a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 U.S. dollars over that period, including savings on interest payments on the national debt.” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that recent immigrants who arrived legally as well as undocumented ones, though they are eligible for very limited federal services, “have higher rates of labor force participation, compared to U.S.-born individuals,” and therefore significantly contribute to shoring up Social Security:
“Immigrants are a critical part of the U.S. workforce and play a key role in strengthening Social Security’s finances. Like other workers, immigrants contribute to the trust fund through payroll taxes. Even if they themselves will not become eligible to receive benefits in their lifetimes, immigrants improve the solvency of a program that provides almost all workers with a foundation of income for their retirement. . . Without immigrants and their U.S.-born children, the prime working-age population (age 25-54) would have shrunk by more than 8 million people between 2000 and 2023.”
· The macroeconomy: Watson and her colleagues also calculated that “the decline in migration from 2024 to 2025 will reduce GDP growth by between 1.9 and 0.26 percentage points and lower consumer spending by $40 billion to $60 billion in 2025.” That is because immigrants not only produce goods and services, but they are also consumers of them. “Cutting off immigration flows harms American economic growth.”
· The big picture: boosting the economy is only one of the many benefits immigrants offer the United States. Additionally, they directly tap into and enrich the American national identity rooted in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution: “pluralism, openness, and the rule of law . . . the civil rights of immigrants, the notion of birthright citizenship and restraints on executive powers”—all ideals that strike at the heart of what has inspired many other nations. Watson especially emphasizes the rule of law. She challenges Congress, which has neglected immigration reform for three decades now, to take bold action. Two recent bipartisan bills on immigration reform never even came up for a vote: the 2013 comprehensive bill and the DIGNITY Act. Watson ends with this warning: “Unless Americans insist on adherence to the rule of law, the economic, political, and social effects of eroded institutions are likely to persist even if we reopen our borders.”
I now conclude this short series by echoing Watson’s concerns about “the erosion of our institutions.” Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is to recount what happened in Minneapolis in January and February 2026 as the result of the DHS’s Operation Metro Surge (deployment of over 3,000 ICE and U.S. Border Patrol agents in that city; see this timeline of events with a list of the “50 biggest sources of immigrants to Minnesota, ranked”). The whole nation was shocked by the killing of Renee Good in her car by an ICE agent (Jan. 7) and the failure of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to fully investigate it. Crowds of protesters continued to fill the streets, and in even greater numbers after the killing of Alex Pretti (Jan. 24), when Secretary Noem claimed that the agents acted in self-defense. During these two months, Governor Tim Walz, the Minneapolis mayor and police chief maintained their opposition to what they considered an unlawful federal operation in their state.
Meanwhile, many churches launched into high gear, counseling, guiding, giving, and even feeding and caring for children if parents were taken by ICE. But tensions rose a couple of weeks ago when some court filings in the U.S. District Court of Minnesota unveiled the spying by federal agents posing as community members to arrest anti-ICE activists in churches:
“This case involves an unprecedented campaign by DHS to spy on Minnesotans. During Operation Metro Surge, undercover agents posing as protesters surveilled community meetings at churches, parks, libraries, schools and union halls. These agents surreptitiously recorded dozens of conversations with ordinary people who were simply exercising their First Amendment right to protest ICE’s lawless rampage in our state. The agents gathered information about Minnesotans from law enforcement databases and internet searches, and created dossiers that are apparently now available agency-wide.”
One of the churches surveilled by DHS is University Baptist Church, affiliated with both the American Baptists and the Alliance of Baptists. Jack Jenkins of Religious News Service (RNS), tells us that these two denominations joined about fifty faith groups “that have filed four separate lawsuits challenging the trump administration’s decision to rescind an internal policy discouraging immigration enforcement agencies at ‘sensitive locations’ such as schools, hospitals, and churches.”
In February, the judge who was overseeing the lawsuit that included the two above denominations, ruled that DHS should refrain from any “warrantless enforcement actions” inside or around their churches. Then in March, “University Baptist Church hung up signs that declared federal agents are not permitted on the premises and even cited the specific order.” But the above court filing just revealed the following:
“[A]n undercover DHS agent attended a Mixed Martial Arts class in May, which was organized by a liberal group called “Left Jab” and held in the gymnasium of University Baptist Church. The agent had a hidden audio recording device that apparently fell to the floor “due to the physicality of the event,” and the DHS official only noticed it missing after leaving the gymnasium. The agent returned minutes later to retrieve the device from the gym floor, according to the court filing.”
All of this points to “the erosion of our institutions,” wouldn’t you say? What about the erosion of those ideals inspired both by our religious faith and basic human moral compass? Let me single out two groups we are morally obliged to protect—Haitians, first, because the chaos, poverty, and violence in their nation is to a large extent caused by our neglect and selfish interventionism of the past. President trump rescinded the Temporary Protected Status, TPS, for 300,000 Haitians announced by President Biden in 2024. Springfield, Ohio, for example, has 10,000 Haitian immigrants among a total population of 58,000. Kathryn Post, a reporter for RNS, writes that many Haitians belong to evangelical, Pentecostal, mainline Protestant and Catholic churches. When on August 4, the termination of their TPS was announced, . . .
“faith leaders and congregations from within and beyond the Haitian community have emerged as pivotal actors in the support networks for affected families. Now, those networks are adapting in real time to respond to what they see as a human-engineered spiritual, moral and humanitarian crisis, especially as ICE activity stepped up over the weekend.”
Another population that had even more reason to be spared from this merciless and callous government repression are those who fought and risked their lives for Americans in Afghanistan. After the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the State Department issued 160,000 Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) to those Afghans whose “efforts ranged from custodial jobs at the U.S. embassy, to technology and engineering roles with U.S. contractors and companies. Some were on the frontlines of combat as interpreters.” Now, writes Ximena Bustillo for NPR, “five years after the U.S. left Afghanistan, hundreds of people who came with SIVs and now have green cards have received notices from the federal government warning them that the basis for their visas has been revoked or denied.” Apparently, this administration has no shame or human decency when it comes to fulfilling promises to people who served our nation while at war.
We can do better than this. We could and should come together in bipartisan fashion to craft a new immigration policy than is both just and compassionate. By all means, we should secure our borders, but we should also do more than previous administrations by doubling or more the number of asylum seekers we process, keeping in mind the UN refugee convention we signed. We should also find ways to issue more temporary work visas for all the sectors in which we lack workers, and ramp up again the number of student visas. After all, being generous when it comes to immigration is not just the right thing to do. It is also to guarantee the prosperity of the next generations.
Faith Leaders Stand Up for Immigrants
The Trump administration announced its goal of arresting 2,000 immigrants daily, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS, which is in charge of ICE) has never been able to reach that number. But its agents have been using new tactics recently, “from arresting academics at airports to setting up a checkpoint at a popular creek in a National Forest,” in order to boost their numbers. And, in fact, they arrested 51,000 immigrants in July, their highest number of arrests so far.
On the other end, over 2,000 detainees have been freed every month, mostly because “many federal judges, some of them Trump appointees, have ruled against the Trump administration’s policy of mandatory detention for many immigrants.” And even though DHS says its goal is “to arrest and deport pedophiles, murderers, rapists, and other criminals,” 40 percent of those arrested have no criminal record apart from “non-criminal immigration violations.”
Pope Leo’s strong advocacy for migrants
As El Paso Catholic Bishop Mark Seitz declared, “Our immigrant brothers and sisters, from those who are undocumented, to those who are naturalized citizens, are living in a deep state of fear.” Thomas Reese, Jesuit priest, a seasoned journalist and editor with a PhD in political science from UC Berkeley, and now Senior Analyst at Religion News Service (RNS), describes the Chicago-born Robert Prevost’s choice of a papal name: he “took the name Leo in honor of his predecessor, Leo XIII, who was the founder of Catholic social teaching and defended workers who were being exploited during the Industrial Revolution.”
Pope Leo XIII (pope from 1878 to 1903) was the first Catholic leader to reflect on modern society and, in so doing, became the founder of “Catholic social teaching”: a central focus on reducing inequality and social justice, solidarity with workers and the poor; finally, the idea of subsidiarity—urging that sociopolitical decisions should be decentralized and made as locally as is possible. Pope Leo XIV issued his first apostolic exhortation in October 2025, Dilexi Te (“I have loved you”), a little book which argues mostly from Scripture that God cares first and foremost for the poor and enjoins his people to do the same. Here is Thomas Reese again:
“Leo inherited what would become his first apostolic exhortation from Pope Francis, whose views he embraced while revising it to reflect his thoughts. But both pontiffs felt that those who did not see care for the poor as ‘the burning heart of the Church’s mission … need to go back and re-read the Gospel.’ . . .
The document’s fundamentally scriptural argument is that ‘contact with those who are lowly and powerless is a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history.’ The Gospels make clear that through the incarnation, Leo argues, God chose ‘to share the limitations and fragility of our human nature, he himself became poor and was born in the flesh like us.’
Later in [Chapter 2] he says, ‘Wanting to inaugurate a kingdom of justice, fraternity and solidarity, God has a special place in his heart for those who are discriminated against and oppressed, and he asks us, his Church, to make a decisive and radical choice in favor of the weakest.’”
It is not surprising, then, that Pope Leo received Bishop Mark Seitz and a delegation from El Paso at the Vatican in early October 2025. After listening to them, Leo urged them “to be more vocal against the deportations.” Months later, on the United State’s 250th birthday, Leo chose to spend part of the day on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, “a symbol of the immigrant influx polarizing the political debate in Europe.” As the picture above illustrates, he chose to honor in particular a child named Joussef, one of thousands buried there. Within the last decade, over 30,000 migrants are thought to have died at sea.
That day too he issued a letter to the United States, “reminding the country of its duty to uphold religious freedom and respect for human life, including the unborn and immigrants.” At one point he writes, “Defending human life also includes welcoming, protecting and assisting immigrants, whose hopes, sacrifices and contribution have formed part of the history of this country from its very beginning.”
Back in June, the pope made a detour while visiting Spain and gave a speech at the port town of Arguineguín, part of the Canary Islands. He was addressing organizations that work with migrants (see this picture of him blessing a migrant recently rescued from a boat that had left the West African coast). In his speech, he assured the migrants present of “their worth and dignity even as they suffer at the hands of traffickers and mafias.” He then stated, “Human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border.”
People of faith defending and caring for immigrants in the U.S.
I mentioned Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso. Another Catholic leader heavily involved in calling attention to the plight of immigrants is San Antonio Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller who himself crossed into the U.S. from Mexico at age 23. As a priest in California, “he would walk alongside farmworkers who worked bent over in fields and who slept in farmhouse garages to avoid being deported.” He later learned community organizing in Chicago as auxiliary bishop “and boarded deportation buses to hand out prayer cards.”
I am reading from an August 7th article in RNS (“How grief made Archbishop García-Siller a prophetic voice on immigration”) by a member of the Vatican committee on “Integral Human Development” and the executive director of Hope Border Institute in El Paso, Dylan Corbett. He writes about García-Siller’s new pastoral letter (“We Will Come to You”) just released. In it, he opens up on the grief he experienced while trying to console mostly Latina mothers who had lost their children in the Uvalde school shooting. This was ”another massacre in a strip of land with a long history of violence against those of Mexican descent.” Then a month later, he witnessed the tractor-trailer in which 53 migrants bodies were found. As Corbett puts it,
“In pursuit of the American dream, the migrants had suffocated in metal darkness. In five weeks, he had moved between two forms of American erasure: the sudden obliteration of childhood via school shootings and the slow suffocation of people who migrate. Both communities had been abandoned. Both experiences would stay with him”
Now in his letter, he mourns the more than fifty deaths of immigrants in ICE custody and the more than a thousand documented instances of abuses in these detention centers. What is more, 73 percent of these people have never been convicted of anything (according to the right-leaning Cato Institute). He accuses the current “campaign of mass detention and deportation” of being built on hatred and intentional cruelty. In García-Siller’s words, “This system’s brokenness is not merely policy failure . . . A system in which racial disparity is so deeply embedded cannot deliver justice without honest reform.”
A spirituality of the cross runs through his letter, notes Corbett. “Human tragedy met with love becomes where God lives.” The crucified Savior comes bringing life and comfort to those agonizing under the weight of oppression, injustice and pain. As in the parable of Jesus in Matthew 25, as we care for “the least of these,” we care for Jesus himself. The map García-Siller is offering in his letter is one that grew out of his own experience: “encounter with the reality of human suffering, then accompaniment, then organized advocacy, then lived solidarity. It is a model for what religious leadership looks like when silence becomes impossible.”
A glimpse into other faith actors on this scene
There is so much material on this that I will only give you a glimpse into it.
· * Read about the letter sent to President Trump less than a week after his second inauguration signed by “prominent national and local Jewish organizations . . . voicing their stern opposition to his immigration policies and urging him to abandon plans for what they describe as ‘widespread persecution of immigrants.” In particular, the letter reads, “The history of our Jewish values make immigration policy—including ensuring a functioning and welcoming refugee program and protection of the right to seek asylum—deeply personal to the Jewish community.”
· * The Rev. Noel Andersen, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, is also national field director of Church World Service, and international humanitarian nonprofit bringing together “37 Christian denominations and communions.” He spoke in August 2025 to journalist Aleja Hertzler-McCain for an RNS article: “Faith leaders bear witness and speak out against the ways masked ICE agents are abducting our community members.” They are accompanying immigrants “in every major city and in some rural areas, just about everywhere there is an immigration court,” he added.
· * In the same article, we follow the Rev. Cloe Breyer, episcopal priest and director of the Interfaith Center of New York. She tells RNS that watching immigration court proceedings is “harrowing,” like “witnessing a kind of public display of lawlessness.” There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why some are arrested and others not. Hertzler-McCain writes, “Breyer said she has gone to immigration court about half a dozen times in the last six months, along with rabbis and other Christian leaders. She has worked with the New Sanctuary Coalition, through which she shows up to accompany immigrants who happen to be there that day, and also with specific clients at the request of their lawyers.”
· * Kilmar Abrego García, the Salvadoran immigrant living legally with his wife and kids in Maryland (no criminal background) was arrested and deported with other compatriots in March, 2025. In this famous case, the Supreme Court ordered the government to return him, which they did in June. Read the August 25 article in RNS about the crowd that came to support him as he was about to go up the steps for his immigration court mandated appearance in Baltimore that day. See in particular the picture of clergy praying for him on that occasion.
· * Read about seven clergy arrested at a protest at the Broadview, Illinois, ICE facility. An American Baptist pastor, Rev. Michael Woolf, was dragged to the ground by four ICE officers and kept in custody for seven hours. “I have bruises all over,” Woolf said in his first interview. The violence and the insulting language are “part of the dehumanizing nature of it, and it gives me a lot of clarity around what’s happening here. It’s really a spiritual emergency.”
As I conclude, let me say that a lot of secular organizations have also stepped in to defend, counsel, guide and support immigrants in these difficult days (just one example). As Americans, we have often been guilty of mistreating immigrants in the past (the internment of the Japanese community in the 1940s might be the worst case), and we have had to work hard at dealing with our various prejudices along the way. But most of us—people of faith and no faith—realize that our outsized welcome for the immigrant by and large is part of what made the United States the great nation it has become. More on this in the last installment on this topic.