The Stranger who Sojourns with You: Toward a Moral Immigration Policy

The Scriptures teach us that people have always been fearful of immigrants. Pharaoh, confronting a fast-growing population of Israelites, enslaved them and instituted the first documented population-control policies.¹ Once settled in their own country, the Israelites themselves forgot the honor due to foreigners, even though each of the patriarchs had been a sojourner in a country not his own. Consequently, the Torah reminds the Israelites that they should treat sojourners as well as they treat their own people.

Immigration provokes the same fears and passions today that it provoked two thousand years ago. In recognition of these fears, many have advocated restrictions in varying degrees to the relatively generous immigration policy of the United States. Harvard economist George Borjas, for example, has consistently argued for a redirection of immigration policy toward a Canadian model that favors skilled immigrants who are less likely to burden social services.² Peter Brimelow and Pat Buchanan have taken a more extreme position, advocating a temporary halt to immigration in order to allow the United States to absorb both culturally and economically the immigrants who are already in the United States.³

What are we to make of these arguments? One response is to recall the previous large migration a century ago, -during which an equally fierce opposition led to the restrictive policies that governed immigration from 1924 to 1965. We know now that the fears about the effect of impoverished Southern and Eastern European Catholics and Jews on the fabric of American culture and economy were unfounded. Should we not conclude also that current fears about poor Latin Americans and Asians from Catholic and non-Christian cultures are similarly unfounded? Or are the new immigrants fundamentally different from the old immigrants? Is it the case that the old immigrants from Western, Judeo-Christian cultures were assimilable, while the new immigrants from non-Western, often non-Christian cultures, are not? Other important question are raised by the much larger role that the United States government plays in the provision of social services than it did a century ago: Do generous, publicly provided social services attract a different kind of immigrant? Do they help or impede assimilation?

Questions like these have shaped public deliberations about immigration policy in the United States and Western Europe, and have also directed the course of research agendas in economics, sociology, and political science. The examination of immigration issues has been a subject of particular interest in contemporary Catholic social thought, as well. John Paul II’s position on immigration emerges from his primary focus on the dignity of the human person. Although John Paul II addresses immigration policy only tangentially in his encyclicals, he has devoted a series of annual World Migration Day messages to the subject of immigration policy.⁴

Catholic social teaching brings a word to the policy conversation that is seldom heard.⁵ This word, which the popes speak quietly but insistently, is rights. The Catholic social tradition consistently asserts a very broad right to migrate; this perspective immediately transforms the debate. More precisely, rights-language reverses the perspective from which the issues are currently addressed. Immigration policy is evaluated from the point of view of the immigrant, not from the point of view of the host country. Once the matter of a right to migrate is introduced, policy arguments—which merely attempt to calculate the recent costs and benefits of immigration to native workers and to government budgets—are exposed as inadequate. Rights-language challenges policy makers to factor the interests of immigrants into their calculations.

The right to migrate is not inviolable in Catholic social teaching. It is analogous to the right to property but not to the right to life. Hence, research on the burdens of migration on host countries is inherently relevant to deliberations about the extent of that right. Recent research into the effects of immigration shows that it probably brings a small net benefit to the United States, although the benefits and costs are unevenly distributed across the native population. Immigration may depress the wages of unskilled workers slightly. In addition, the fiscal burdens of immigration, though small, are concentrated in a few states and cities. The decline in the wages of unskilled natives, though modest, is troubling, since their incomes are already low. One may thus be tempted to suggest immigration restrictions in order to mitigate this decline.

It is important to recognize, however, that this inclination puts a significantly greater weight on the losses of native, unskilled workers—however slight—than on the benefits for the poorer immigrants. Moreover, to effectively shield unskilled workers from competition with foreign workers, the United States would have to restrict not only the immigration of unskilled labor but also imports of goods made with foreign unskilled labor. A more practical and efficient protection of American unskilled workers would be to find alternative means of improving the economic prospects of low-wage natives, such as eliminating the common practice of granting high school diplomas to students who are functional illiterates. Clearly, securing a sound basic education for United States natives is preferable to restrictions on immigration and trade because it will bring about a net benefit to the poorest of Americans.

Previous popes have emphasized the right to emigrate. This emphasis on emigration as opposed to immigration reflects the context in which the issue has arisen in the past, when the most visible barriers to migration were those that prevented people from leaving their home country. Of course, as John Paul II poignantly expressed in his address for World Migration Day 1995, the right to emigrate is worth little if no country will guarantee the right to immigrate.⁷ Emigration and immigration are flip sides of the same coin; the right to migrate entails both and is founded on three principles.

For the same reason that man has a right to private property—so that families can provide for their needs and development—man has a right to migrate in order to provide materially for the family that migrates. John XXIII in Mater et Magistra clearly ties the right to migrate to the right to private property:

Both private property and migration are important means to the development of the migrant’s family. Paul VI in Populorum Progressio notes that the welfare of families is at stake even when they do not accompany the migrant; immigrants remit large sums of money to families back home.¹⁰

In the pursuit of its own development, the family has priority over the state. The principle of the priority of the family over the state goes back at least to Leo XIII, in his discussion of the right to property in Rerum Novarum:

John Paul II in Laborem Exercens makes the prerogative of the family to build a better life very clear: “Man has the right to leave his native land for various motives—and also the right to return—in order to seek better conditions of life in another country.”¹² Because the rights of families are prior to those of states, migration is not a moral evil, even if it is regrettable from the point of view of the home country.¹³

The concept of priority as it is used here is easily misunderstood. It does not mean that persons and families have no responsibilities toward the state, or toward the other communities in which they live. Neither does it imply that the state should leave the family unconstrained. Instead, families and persons cede to the state the authority over their lives, so that the state may procure for them certain common goods. The principle of priority asserts that while the state exists for the good of persons and their families, families and persons do not exist for the good of states. Indeed, there are no true goods of states that are not goods of persons and families.

Closely tied to the right of the family to migrate is the right to economic initiative. John Paul II in Solicitudo Rei Socialis observes that many persons migrate because their right to economic initiative is unduly restricted in their home country.

Faced with this direct threat to “the creative subjectivity of the citizen” and the common good of the home country, persons may justly seek out other places where they may exercise this right.

A decision to migrate across international borders affects three groups directly: the immigrant and his family, the migrant’s home country, and the host country that receives him. Policy discussions in the United States focus primarily on the impact of immigration on the host country, and the resulting evaluations of immigration policy rely almost entirely on the assumed impact. Conversely, the impact of immigration on the immigrant is considered only insofar as it has implications for the immigrant’s contribution to the welfare of the United States.

John Paul II describes the migrant as a subject, that is, one who exercises a creative agency in society. This description implies that the host country should welcome the immigrant, who can enrich the culture and economy of the nation in which he settles. Immigrants are not burdens; they are creative persons.

Notwithstanding its solicitude for the plight of the migrant, Catholic social teaching does not go so far as to claim that the right to migrate is absolute. John Paul II states clearly that “illegal immigration should be prevented,” thereby implying that states have a right to enforce restrictions on migration.¹⁵ Just as clearly, John Paul II states elsewhere that the right to migrate must be regulated in light of the burdens it imposes on the host country.¹⁶

If the right to migrate is not absolute, by what principle is it to be regulated? In his address for World Migration Day 2001, John Paul II ties the mediation of rights closely to the universal common good:

Note that John Paul II invokes the universal common good, not just the common good of a particular country. Countries that rely on a narrow concept of their own common good, one that ignores the rights of those outside of their borders, are likely to ignore the right to migrate.

The proper balance between the rights of the migrant and the common good of the various nations affected by migration can only be found in the concept of the universal common good. This poses a challenge for policy, since the concept of common good has been neglected until relatively recently, and researchers are only beginning to attempt a theory of the universal common good.¹⁸

The significant benefit of employing economic analysis for our purposes is that it will illuminate some fundamental issues not fully addressed in Catholic social teaching. Economists have two sorts of expertise that are relevant to this analysis. First, economics offers a useful framework within which to discuss the causes and effects of immigration in an interdependent world economy. Not only people move across borders. Billions of dollars worth of goods and trillions of dollars worth of investments move across national borders annually. Economists offer insights about how all of these movements are related, as well as insights into how influxes of labor into a local labor market affect national markets for labor and capital.

Another contribution of economic analysis to the immigration debate is a careful accounting of the costs and benefits of immigrants, native workers, native business owners, and state and federal governments. Estimates of the effect of immigration on labor income, capital income, and government revenues and expenditures paint a clear picture of the economic costs and benefits of immigration. If the economic benefits of immigration to natives outweigh the costs, or if the costs to natives are small compared to the benefits to immigrants themselves, then the case for abridging the right to migrate in light of the common good of the United States will be weak.

The current United States immigration policy is geared toward the needs of refugees and those immigrants who are separated from their families. The large numbers of immigrants who are admitted legally, and the reasons for their admittance, accord with the right to migrate in Catholic social teaching. Nonetheless, the large number of immigrants who are currently denied permanent residence the United States, and the large number who come here illegally, raises questions about whether current immigration policy consistently recognizes the right to migrate. The fundamental question is this: Even though the United States welcomes millions of the world’s poor, is it morally obligated to welcome even more?

The answer to this question depends in part on the costs and benefits of immigration to United States citizens. Nevertheless, the entire issue cannot be resolved by reference to the impact of immigration on natives. It involves an additional comparison of the benefits to immigrants and the net benefits to natives.

In the economic theory of trade, people who are similar in every respect—in talents, preferences, and assets—have no reason to trade and will not benefit from exchange. It is differences between people and nations that open up the possibilities for mutually beneficial exchange and specialization. Theoretical approaches to the effects of immigration emphasize the gains to specialization that result when immigrants who have a different set of skills from natives enter the workforce. If the immigrant population had the same distribution of education and other skills as the native population, there would be no gains to natives for welcoming immigrants, since the immigrants as a group would have no advantages over United States natives. The theoretical literature on this subject reveals a tension that is not sufficiently emphasized, a tension that seems counterintuitive to non-economists: The greater the disruption in an economy induced by trade or immigration (measured by changes in prices, wages, and profits), the greater the net gains to natives.¹⁹ Thus, if no native workers are negatively affected by immigration, then there are no net gains to the United States from immigration.²⁰

United States immigrants are different from United States natives—the former are relatively less-skilled, for example. Their arrival allows United States natives to focus more heavily on the production of more skill-intensive goods without sacrificing their consumption of goods made with unskilled labor. The net benefits for natives of the recent immigration wave are, however, almost certainly small because the recent immigrant wave is not particularly large relative to the United States labor market. Economist George Borjas estimates the benefits at seven billion dollars per year; James Smith and Barry Edmonston estimate the gain somewhere between one and ten billion dollars per year.²¹ These estimates may seem large, but they are very small relative to the size of the United States economy: The estimates amount to, roughly, one-tenth of one percent of the total GDP. As new immigrants, and particularly their children, assimilate to the United States market, they will become more like United States natives in their education and preferences and thus over time the benefits will decrease.

The specialization brought about by immigration is a net economic benefit to natives, but the benefits are not distributed evenly, and some natives, instead of benefiting, will experience a decline in their standards of living. The hardest hit will be those who compete most directly with immigrants: the unskilled whose wages will fall. In contrast, those who own businesses will benefit from lower wages, as will skilled workers who manage the unskilled.

The most that can be said is that immigration can account for perhaps one-quarter of the increase in wage inequality over fifteen years (a three-percent fall in the wages of unskilled workers), although some argue that it has had a greater effect.²² It is important to recognize that even a small decrease in the wages of unskilled native workers represents a hardship for those at the bottom of the wage distribution; hence, even a small impact should not be taken lightly. Nonetheless, restrictions on immigration alone would not prevent a loss to unskilled natives. Restrictions on imports of goods made with low-wage labor would be necessary in order to shield low-wage natives from indirect competition with low-wage workers. There are more desirable alternatives for improving the lot of unskilled native workers, such as providing native children with a better education and reducing the high school dropout rate.

It is important to recognize that immigration will not benefit United States natives very much if it does not appreciably affect wages and profits. On the one hand, if the rise in immigration cannot account for much of the relative fall in unskilled wages, then there will be little benefit to natives as a group. On the other hand, if immigration has had little effect on the wages of native unskilled labor, then there is no defensible economic ground for opposing immigration. Although one might argue that even a modest fall in the wages of unskilled natives provides sufficient ground for restricting immigration, such a calculation must weigh the wage decrease for native unskilled workers more heavily than the significant increase in wages that is enjoyed by immigrants from much poorer countries.

Before examining the literature on immigrant assimilation, it should be noted that for some immigrants assimilation is irrelevant. One-third or more of immigrants eventually return home. We do not know what proportion of this group intended only a temporary migration when they arrived and what proportion was disappointed by their experience in the United States. The size of the remigration flows should remind us not to assume that all immigrants arrive in the United States to stay. A temporary migrant will invest in skills—for example, language and labor—in his host country, and may have a very different assimilation profile from that of the immigrant who will remain in the host country for life.

Concerns that we are being overwhelmed by waves of unskilled immigrants have led some Americans to advocate restrictions on immigration and changes to the criteria for awarding visas that favor more-skilled applicants. If we are to consistently apply Catholic social teaching, the news that certain immigrant groups are adjusting to the American labor market more slowly than others is not a sufficient warrant for supporting restrictions against unskilled immigrants. The reason for this is that the right to migrate within the Catholic framework applies equally to skilled and unskilled persons. If the immigrants’ struggle will not place large burdens on the host country, then measures to make assimilation easier or to remove impediments to assimilation are in order. For example, a 1996 study presents evidence that the wages of immigrants who are educated in the United States converge more quickly to those of natives than the wages of immigrants educated abroad.²³

The study also shows that, within immigrant groups, more highly educated immigrants (whether abroad or in the United States) assimilate more successfully than poorly educated immigrants. If this is true, then proposals to restrict the access of immigrant children to public education will only make the assimilation of those children significantly more difficult. If the correlation between English language adoption and assimilation reflects an underlying causal relationship, then we should teach English to immigrant children in order to facilitate their assimilation.

An important research question is this: How do the children and grandchildren of unskilled immigrants fare? If the progeny of unskilled immigrants, regardless of their country of origin, become as successful as other native workers, then concerns about the entry of unskilled immigrants applies only to the short run. The literature on the relative success of the children and grandchildren of immigrants is not extensive. George Borjas reports that the earnings of immigrant descendants converge slowly to native levels across generations, not equaling native earnings until the fourth generation.²⁴ A study by David Card, John DiNardo, and Eugena Estes confirms Borjas’ findings, but they also indicate that second-generation immigrants achieve higher education and earnings than the children of similarly poor natives.²⁵ Depending on the size of the earnings differences that persist across generations, a shift in immigration policy toward skilled immigrants may not affect matters in the long run. In the short run, it is worth noting that a shift toward selecting immigrants whose education is comparable to their American correlates will decrease the (already small) gains from immigration on the overall economy, unless there are significantly large economic advantages in industries that could be gained by employing highly skilled people.²⁶

The consensus in all economic research into the effects of immigration on native workers is that immigration has had only a modestly negative effect on the wages of native, unskilled workers. This evidence should diminish any concerns that current levels of immigration pose a threat to the material well-being of American citizens. Hence, this evidence disposes of one of the two economic concerns that militate against the argument for the right to migrate. The remaining task is to examine the other economic argument that can be raised against the right to migrate: the effects of immigration on government finances.

A common concern is that immigrants benefit disproportionately from government assistance programs while bearing a disproportionately lower tax burden than native workers. This raises the fear that immigrants will impose large burdens on public finances and that natives will as a result lose their access to basic public goods, such as well-maintained roads, public health care, and public education or, alternatively, that governments at every level (local, state, and federal) will tax natives a higher proportion of their incomes.

Researchers measure both the long- and short-term fiscal impacts of immigration. Short-term studies account for the net contributions of immigrants to government expenditures to annual, government budgets. The short-term impact of immigration in state and local governments is negative but concentrated to the areas of most immigrant density. Long-term studies account for the new contributions of immigrants to government programs over several decades. It turns out that over time, immigrants are net contributors to federal budgets, because immigrants do not request social assistance in the form of Medicare or Social Security services. In addition, immigrant children fare well in school and often better than native children. By obtaining greater education than their own parents, immigrant children can also be expected to be net contributors to government finances, rather than drains. Evidently, then, these two time frames yield very different pictures of a typical immigrant’s use of government services, and his contributions to public revenues. For example, the positive contributions of immigrants (and their children) to the Social Security and Medicare systems will only be realized over several decades, and will be invisible in short-term analysis.

Studies of the impact of immigrants on the state and local budgets of New Jersey and California have been commissioned by the National Research Council study in order to document the net fiscal burden of immigrants in those states.²⁷ In New Jersey, in 1990, the net fiscal burden per native household as a result of immigration was estimated at $232. In California, in 1995, the net, fiscal burden per household was more significant, $1,178. California natives bear such a large burden both because of the size of its immigrant population and because of its relatively generous government services.²⁸

The fiscal burdens found in California and New Jersey do not, however, represent the fiscal burdens of the average native in every other state; immigrants cluster in a few states and, consequently, the fiscal burdens of immigration are concentrated in those states. Thus, the real problem is not the fiscal burden of immigrants but the concentration of the fiscal burden in a few localities. This unevenly spread burden of immigrant, social service expenses was one impetus for the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995 that required the federal government to calculate the burden of its mandates on state and local governments. The 1996 Welfare Reform also eliminated immigrant access to welfare.

We have examined the impact of immigration policy on two areas of the national interest: the economy and labor markets. Immigration may, arguably, affect the national interest, but it does not necessarily threaten national security. Terrorist attacks, however, present a threat to national security, since they are an attempt to destroy the integrity of a nation by inflicting fear, death, loss of property, and civil disorder upon its population. Whenever immigration policy facilitates the occasion for terrorism in a nation, then, the policy considerations must expand beyond those of national interest into the matter of national security. For the average American, however, national security had not been a serious consideration or worry until the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, awakened them to the gravity of the national security concerns posed by international terrorists.

It is important in the present environment to avoid the conflation of national security and national interest in policy debates. It is clear, for example, that Haitian boat people and Mexican illegals are not threats to American national security, although the disposition of these cases may affect American national interest in many ways. Similarly, the costs of immigration do not present a threat to national security.

The above clarification is not tantamount to arguing that immigration policy and procedures have no impact upon national security. The legitimate concerns of terrorism in the United States warrant an extensive reform of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). It is significant to point out that the reform considerations have focused on restructuring of the INS with the purpose of instituting systems for closer scrutiny of the foreign visitors admitted into the country.

Most of the anti-terrorism legislation after the attacks of September 11, 2001, has aimed to improve the ability of the INS to screen out possible terrorists, to track immigrants temporarily admitted into the United States, and to expel those who violate the terms of their entry. These legislative measures are quite appropriate because the past inefficiency of the INS compounded by the problem of inadequate information sharing from other federal bureaus, such as the State Department and the Justice Department in screening and tracking visitors has de facto facilitated the entry of terrorists into the United States and thereby jeopardized the national security. New applications for visas, green cards, and other official permits to enter the United States have increased by fifty percent in the past six years.²⁹ Visa application fraud may be as high as twenty to thirty percent.³⁰ The INS as it is currently organized, funded, and operated is not capable of taking on the new tasks of carefully screening visitor’s-visa applicants and keeping track of them after entry. A systematic implementation of these tasks will most likely require the appropriation of resources from the many wasteful (and unjustifiably funded) federal allocations toward a thorough INS overhaul.

Permanent immigration is not a threat to national security. Instead, what jeopardizes national security are the regulatory disarray and the inefficient information sharing on the part of the INS and other federal entities, such as the State Department and the Justice Department, that have a role in the temporary admission of foreigners into the United States. The crucial concern for national security in immigration matters is, then, the scrutiny of temporary visitors and their timely exit when their temporary visiting permits expire. Each year, thirty-four million tourists, businessmen, and relatives of United States citizens or permanent residents enter the United States from many parts of the world.³¹ Since the United States will not reduce the number of temporary entry permits because the costs of such a restriction would be too great, it is likely that terrorists will attempt to enter as temporary visitors so long as the federal mechanism for screening them prior the approval of their temporary visas and for tracking their whereabouts until their visa expires remains inefficient.

The United States can probably increase its rate of immigration without incurring significant costs. The question is, what level of costs is too high? What is the threshold? Let us suppose that one million additional immigrants over five years will increase government expenditures by seven hundred million dollars. Is this expenditure too high? Would one billion dollars be too high? Furthermore, should a cost-benefit analysis of immigration account for the benefits enjoyed by the immigrants themselves? If it is true that there is a right to migrate, in what practical ways can this right be promoted so that nations will consider it in their deliberations about immigration policy?

According to John Paul II, a country cannot balance justly the benefits of migration, on the one hand, with concerns over migration’s burdens, on the other, unless it employs the criterion of the universal common good. At this point we must distinguish the concept of the common good from that of the universal common good. The common good entails the sum total of conditions that people need for their individual fulfillment as persons. Traditionally, the sphere of the common good has been understood to coincide with a political community, such as a nation-state. The sphere of the common good is thus generally demarcated by a nation’s borders, and the beneficiaries are all those living within those borders.

By contrast, the beneficiaries of the universal common good include every person in the world. In other words, the universal common good is that which affects mankind as a whole. In context of a nation’s immigration policy considerations, what must be recognized is that the decision to migrate directly affects the people of two communities: the host (or new) community, and the home (or original) community. Consequently, the host community is too narrow a sphere for judging the desirability of migration. The effects of migration upon the home community must be also included. From the perspective of the universal common good, then, the dignity and rights of natives are not the only concern; the dignity and rights of immigrants, as well as those of the members of the home communities left behind, also carry moral weight.

Because immigration has effects across national boundaries, any institution attempting to evaluate the just limits to migration (i.e., taking into consideration the rights of all parties) must be an international institution. The universal common good has, then, a moral character that applies to nation-states, subsidiary groups, and individuals. In fact, the universal common good is the most adequate guide for relations between nations in the absence of any pre-existing treaties established for the purpose of directing their negotiations or transactions toward mutually beneficial ends. The application of the criterion of universal common good to matters of international relations requires the exercise of two principles in Catholic social thought: solidarity and subsidiarity.

The principle of solidarity is an implication of the Christian commandment of love, since solidarity calls forth an awareness of the interdependence of all persons. This awareness stems from the attitude of responsibility for and commitment to the good of one’s neighbor. According to John Paul II in Solicitudo Rei Socialis, when an individual recognizes his own personal interdependence with the rest of mankind, the natural and appropriate response is solidarity. Solidarity is not an intellectual construct. It is a virtue, John Paul II writes, “not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress.… On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good.”³²

The universal common good is a call to international solidarity in migration policy. The exercise of solidarity across nation-states shifts the focus from internal concerns exclusively to broader considerations that account for the global implications of immigration policy decisions. John Paul II asserts that solidarity makes demands on both the strong and the weak. The strong (in this case, developed host countries) should “feel responsible for the weaker and be ready to share with them all they possess.”³³ The weak (in this case, most immigrants) must not be passive in their acceptance of the help and hospitality offered by the strong. Instead, the weak should “do what they can for the good of all.”³⁴ For immigrants, this means obeying host country laws and contributing otherwise to the common good of the host country.

A significant consequence of international solidarity is the recognition of the rights of immigrants not as a trade-off of the host country’s common good for the benefits of migrants but, rather, as a requirement for the full development of the host nation’s society. Indeed, the full development of any social group, including a nation, requires that it be properly oriented toward the common good of the larger society of which it is a part. The human person needs community in virtue of his social nature, and this need will orient him toward the common good in order to contribute to the preservation of his community.

The call to solidarity implicit in the universal common good includes not only a solicitude for immigrants but also a concern for the conditions in countries from which they emigrate. The analysis of immigration cannot be separated from the analysis of emigration if we consider that the very decision to migrate is often made in the context of a search for human flourishing that has been either impeded or altogether denied in the home country. The universal common good demands that all countries seriously examine the source of the plight afflicting developing countries from which most migrants come.

The orientation toward the universal common good requires more than merely practicing solidarity, since “socialization also presents dangers.”³⁵ The principle of subsidiarity “aims at harmonizing the relationship between individuals and societies.”³⁶ John Paul II defines subsidiarity as follows:

A community of a higher order should not interfere in the life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.³⁷

Lower-order communities give rise to what John Paul II calls “networks of solidarity”: concrete opportunities for individuals to devote themselves to the common good of the community.³⁸ Without these communities and each community’s corresponding understanding of its own common good, individuals would not be able to grasp the sense of the common good that is grounded in their experience. The common good would be apprehended as a mere abstract concept employed for interest group politics or other self-serving gains in political activity. The state can never replace the initiative of individuals acting through subsidiary communities toward the common good, for a nation-state that assumes the functions of the communities under it will become so burdened that it will be unable to carry out those functions proper to it.³⁹ This is not to say, however, that the state is dispensable. The chief point here is that it would be pretentious for the state to attempt to be a comprehensive community whose role is to solve every social problem through its own institutions. Individuals acting through their local communities (families, parishes, clubs) and larger communities (worldwide churches, non-governmental organizations, nation-states) contribute their share toward the attainment of the common good for each community.

If we apply the principle of subsidiarity to the relation between the common good of a nation and the universal common good, then we will find that the attainment of the universal common good is only possible when every individual nation enjoys appropriate autonomy in its pursuit of its national common good. Similarly, the common good of the nation is only possible when individual communities in the nation also enjoy appropriate autonomy in their pursuit of their common goods. According to the principle of subsidiarity, higher-order communities may assist lower-order communities to achieve the common good only if these seek such assistance, or are genuinely unable to function autonomously in pursuit of the common good. Above all, lower-order communities are not simply agents that must submit to the dictates of higher-order communities.

One of the challenges of pursuing the universal common good is that immigration policies of different nations are often irreconcilable or conflicting. Some nations, for example, do not accept that persons have a right to migrate and, as a result, will not agree to the protection of such a right in any international treaties and conventions of which they are a part. Most nations do recognize the right to migrate for refugees and asylees (those whose lives are in danger or who are persecuted), and these nations have established an international system of treaties and conventions that protect refugees and asylees. Two organizations, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees and the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, promote the right to migrate of those persons who are under the threat of persecution. The right of refugees to seek asylum in other countries is also included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.⁴⁰ It is clear that migration not caused by life-threatening circumstances is not an absolute right according to the notions of solidarity and subsidiarity in Catholic social teaching. In addition, international treaties do not recognize the right to migrate (as understood here) of those who simply want to increase their earnings. Nonetheless, this kind of migration may also help to bring about greater universal common good.

From the framework of economics, human capital is not employed productively if people are not allowed to move freely to places where they perceive their labor services to be best directed toward the achievement of their individual plans of human fulfillment. This view is clearly reconcilable with Catholic social thought.

In the final analysis, some may interpret the right to migrate as a severe restriction of a nation’s ability to control its own borders, or to promote the interests of its own people. It is important to consider, however, that the opposite may be true: A recognition of the right to migrate, when it is applicable, will open up horizons of cooperation and growth that are overlooked when immigrants are viewed simply as burdens.