Collaborative on Global Children's Issues

False narratives about immigration abound that directly harm young people on the move, with recent family separations in Texas recalling the Donald Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance policy.” The Christian tradition’s commitments shape a different story, a counternarrative of our common humanity, with implications for a just immigration ethic.

Whereas a Catholic immigration ethic is rooted in biblical injunctions to welcome the stranger, it is also borne of the tradition’s teachings on universal human rights, understanding of the political community as oriented to serve the common good, and its global rather than nationalistic perspective. Its notion of social sin significantly extends responsibility for irregular migration beyond individuals who cross borders or overstay visas alone. A consideration of the social sins at play in the dynamics of irregular migration illuminates our complex complicities in injustice and the need for robust solidarity with refugees and migrants. 

The Catholic social tradition is rooted in a scriptural vision of the person as inherently sacred and made for community. Its principles of economic and migration ethics protect not only civil and political rights, such as freedom of conscience, but also more robust social and economic rights and responsibilities. These establish persons’ rights not to migrate, or fulfill human rights in their homeland, and to migrate if they cannot support themselves or their families in their country of origin. Hence in situations where individuals face desperate poverty or pervasive gang violence, the tradition supports the right to freedom of movement so they can live free from credible fears of violence or severe want.

Whereas a focus on willful lawbreakers or burdensome outsiders frames the rationale behind the responses to the recent entry of unaccompanied minors, the Catholic tradition’s emphasis on serving the global common good contextualizes the individual acts of migrants or refugees and underscores social dimensions of justice and complicity alike. Transnational actors responsible for violent conflict, economic instability, or climate change are eclipsed from view, much less blame.

Distinct elements of social sin—dehumanizing trends, unjust structures, and harmful ideologies—shape complex dynamics that perpetuate inequalities and influence receptivity to outsiders. Whether in forms of cultural superiority or profiteering, social inducements to personal sin in the immigration context abound. Social sin indicates how powerful narratives casting immigrants as security threats or “takers” influence our roles in collective actions or inaction that impact migration (such as votes in a presidential election or congressional failures to pass comprehensive reform). Hence, socioeconomic and political structures that lead to minors’ undocumented immigration are frequently connected to the ideological blinders that obstruct hospitality to immigrants.

Internalized ideologies make persons susceptible to myths. When bias hides or skews values, it becomes more difficult to choose authentic values over those that prevail in society. Given such nonvoluntary dimensions of social sin, a Catholic ethic not only calls for defending human rights or providing hospitality to strangers but also unmasking the complex structures and ideologies that abet personal complicity, preventing justice for migrants like unaccompanied minors and the members of mixed-status or transnational families. Viewing immigration through the lens of individual culpability alone obscures these multileveled, subtle dynamics at play.

These intertwined patterns of social sin require repentance from idolatries that marginalize and disempower those beyond our immediate spheres of concern and borders. From repentance and conscientization, we are called to conversion toward interdependence in solidarity. Such metanoia can occur through personal encounters and relationships that provoke new perspectives and receptivity. At the broader systemic level, nations must understand themselves as collectively responsible for the shared challenges posed by child refugees compelled to cross borders.

Finally, transnational migration is often framed as an economic or a geopolitical matter, whereas the experiences of minors highlight how it is families who primarily channel the impact of immigration. Despite immigrants’ resilience, the rhetoric and enforcement practices highlighted herein obscure their full humanity as spouses, parents, and children. Push factors propelling unaccompanied minors across borders and traumatic enforcement mechanisms endanger families’ well-being with social consequences. The detrimental impact of family separation has been poignantly evident in U.S. federal, state, and local enforcement mechanisms that have escalated in recent years. In the aftermath of detention or deportation, families face major economic instability, and affected children suffer poor health and behavioral outcomes. Such foreseeable consequences violate fundamental norms regarding human dignity and care for the vulnerable. Christian family ethics offers significant resources for contesting the overreach of enforcement tactics impacting transnational families, such as the nature of familial relationships and the connections between family life and the common good.

The sanctity and social mission of the family developed in Christian ethics reorient immigration stakes away from deportation quotas or political calculations. Families comprise our most intimate relationships such that protracted separation threatens our very human subjectivity. Policies that undermine family unity frustrate this core relationally. Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz characterizes the family as the central institution in Latina/o culture, for example, noting it functions as a duty, a support system, and a primary identity marker. Hence for migrant women whose agency is caught up in motherhood, the inability to reunite with children can fracture integrity in profound ways.

Hebrew and Christian scriptures are replete with examples of displaced families, revealing a pattern not unlike what we encounter today: “Families are forced to uproot themselves, leaving behind their homes, their relatives and friends, the security of their lands and their provisions, the familiarity of their language and support of their communities.” [1] A Christian family ethic can reorient a response to unaccompanied minor migration in several constructive ways: its profoundly relational anthropology; the family as “domestic church” and mediator of covenantal love; and the family’s social mission. Rooted in Trinitarian anthropology, Catholic social thought integrates a family’s intimate communion with its charge to mutually engage the broader social good. If families serve as basic cells of civil society— “schools of deeper humanity”—social conditions must protect their participation in the demands and benefits of the common good. Particularly in light of this social mission, conditions that perpetuate family separation undermine human subjectivity and harm the common good.

In closing, the harms wreaked by dominant rhetoric framing unaccompanied minors as security threats or political pawns violate fundamental standards of justice and indicate the urgency of prophetic truth-telling. An approach rooted in repentance from complicity in generating displacement can help reframe the debate about Central American minors’ arrivals. Christian commitments to universal human rights, unmasking social sin, and restorative justice can help focus our moral responsibilities to those fleeing violence and other insecurities embedded in relational histories of unequal interdependence.

Moving forward, moral and policy considerations of our responsibilities to unaccompanied minors should also combat diversionary and false rhetoric, provide counsel for minors making asylum claims, enable careful deliberation of said claims rather than fast-tracking or outsourcing enforcement, and work to enact meaningful comprehensive immigration reform that does not trade family reunification for merit-based points or sacrifice safeguards for those fleeing violence. The first refugee family fleeing Herod invites Christians to solidarity with unaccompanied minors in need that avoids the lure of exculpating rhetoric and facile solutions alike.

1. Robert Fortune Sanchez, "Migration and the Family,” Catholic Mind 79 (February 1981)

Kristin Heyer is professor of theological ethics at Boston College. She serves as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and co-chair of Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church. Her related book publications include Kinship Across Borders: An Ethic of Immigration and Christianity and the Law of Migration. She received her AB from Brown University and PhD from Boston College.

Editor’s Note: This essay is excerpted from “Unmasking Harmful Rhetoric and Structural Complicity: Toward a Moral Response to Unaccompanied Minors in the U.S. Context,” in Flavio Bravo and Erin Brigham, eds., Resilience and Resistance: Immigrant Youth and Families (San Francisco: University of San Francisco Press, May 2019).