After winning the prestigious Orwell Prize for Political Writing for his 2023 novel “The Picnic” (W. W. Norton & Company, $28.95), author Matthew Longo wrote a reflection that included one of the most thought-provoking quotes about immigration I’ve ever heard.
“If the money doesn’t go where the people are, the people will go where the money is,” said Miklos Nemeth, the last Communist prime minister of Hungary, in an interview with Longo for the book. Longo never included it in “The Picnic,” which is about the hundreds of East Germans who fled communism just before its collapse in Eastern Europe, and the quote is actually from late French historian Alfred Sauvy, but Nemeth cited it as a prophecy.
And I’ve been thinking about that line — “the people will go where the money is” — a lot lately, considering all the dramatic developments with immigration under our new president.
Sauvy’s quote is not just about material things, but also opportunity. My ancestors came to this country for the same reason. When a Salvadoran comes to the U.S. and his children go to college and become professionals, I see an echo of my family: My grandmother was an illiterate ethnically German girl when she arrived here; now, her grandchildren are now solidly either middle- or upper middle-class Americans.
People want a better life for their children. The Mexicans I worked with in a small town in Ohio came over the border without registration to work in nurseries. The money they earned helped them build houses back in Mexico out of cement block, instead of adobe. Eventually, some decided to outstay the season of work and put down roots. Gradually, a group of them were able to get residency and they brought up their children, who themselves were in various stages of the legal immigration process.
So many people cannot understand the complexity of immigration because they have no idea of the difficulties involved for the immigrants.
Once I was at an immigration seminar at a local college and a suburbanite woman angrily asked me why so many Mexicans working in our county didn’t just get visas to come here.
“There is a legal way in,” she insisted. I tried explaining it was not like getting a visa to take a vacation to Cancun, but much more difficult.
People complain about immigration in many parts of the developed world, not just in the U.S. but in places like Ireland, Colombia, and most of continental Europe. But I have been disappointed lately when I hear Catholics declare they are “against” immigration itself.
I wonder how many of them can have ancestors who were here to greet the Mayflower. The Draconian idea of expelling all who came into the country in an irregular way would cause a great deal of havoc, not just economically, but for families that are sometimes mixed with members who have all their residency resolved and those who do not. There is an unconscious xenophobia that regards all strangers as threatening: hospes, hostis, as the Latin has it, “the guest is an enemy.”
At least I hope the xenophobia is unconscious, but sometimes I am not sure. The hysteria about Haitians having “Garfield” for a barbecue here in Ohio last year — despite a glaring lack of evidence — suggested an attitude close to paranoia. “Open border” policies are a mistake, I am convinced, but not everyone who suddenly passed through the gates without a wall was a criminal or intent on destroying the American way of life. To have to say something so obvious reveals the ignorance or at least the naiveté of some of the more vociferous nativist voices.
As an Ohioan who supported our former senator on several issues, I agreed with Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York’s criticism in late January of Vice President J.D. Vance’s hypothesis that the U.S. bishops defended a federal program that resettled migrants because they wanted to recoup the billions paid out in claims about clerical abuse.
It’s a shame that some so-called Catholic “conservatives” online have defended that scabrous accusation. Their joy at the election results make them blind to the complexity of some issues, and unwilling to recognize when politicians overstep their bounds, e.g., Trump’s full-throated support for expanding access to in vitro fertilization.
In visits to Hispanic families that I call friends last year, I was surprised at how many immigrants voiced approval of candidate Trump. One of them is in a difficult migratory situation: although raised in the United States, he was too old to be bundled with his parents when their papers came through. I often think of him now, in fear of the future.
But I am especially afraid of a future that will be one of disastrous and acrimonious division.
St. Thomas Aquinas said of doctrinal debates that it was best to “Numquam negare, raro affirmare, semper distinguere (“Never deny, seldom affirm, and always distinguish”). It’s a principle that has been neglected in the immigration debates. One size does not fit all. Some undocumented aliens are integrated in families with citizenship, they are educated and useful members of society. Even Trump was quoted talking about the so-called “Dreamers,” who are contributing members of society. But some people seem averse to drawing those kinds of distinctions.
The stream of immigration under the last White House administration almost resembled the chaos of the Children’s Crusade in the Middle Ages (in which droves of European children ran away from home under the delusion they could help knights retake the Holy Land, and ended in disaster), a mass movement of people without realistic structures of evaluation or assimilation.
Now, a calmer approach must be taken, starting with a case-by-case study of cases and some kind of gradual framework set in place. Politically, it is anathema to propose some kind of amnesty (which the sainted President Reagan accepted), but how can it be ruled out, at least in certain cases? We Catholics do believe in forgiveness.
This is a problem that might take a generation to work out. Meanwhile, Catholic opinion should be considerate, contextual, and careful about the question.
Source: Angelus News