Immigration has driven ideological discord and social fragmentation perhaps more than any other issue. Since assuming office in January, President Donald J. Trump has signed a series of executive orders empowering the Department of Homeland Security and its primary investigative arm, ICE, to expand border security and hasten the removal of illegal immigrants by way of individual and mass deportations.
Criticism of the administration’s zero-tolerance policy, including from the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops (USCCB), has focused on the moral implications of these actions and the challenges they present to genuine multilateral cooperation and the development of sustainable economic models. Pope Francis has also weighed in with a recent letter addressed to U.S. bishops, buttressing their concerns.
The debate over immigration has also fractured Europe, fueling skepticism of the European Union’s efficacy amid its failure to implement integration policies, precipitating broader discussions on the interplay between state’s rights and the influence of supranational bodies in addressing the economic, social, and cultural repercussions of mass migration.
The Catholic Church does not provide technical solutions, nor does it engage directly in electoral politics or public policy debates. By way of the vast corpus of its social doctrine, it does, however, offer pastoral considerations and apply objective moral principles to inform the social and political order, providing guidance on how such questions may be evaluated to uphold the rule of law and state sovereignty while safeguarding the inherent dignity of the human person and promoting the common good.
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Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, a foundational text of the Church’s social doctrine, was a response to the new paradigm of political economy that emerged in Europe following the collapse of the ancien régime in 1789, the Napoleonic Wars, and the revolutions of 1848. These events solidified the Westphalian system—the nation-state notion of sovereignty—as the preeminent model of governance. This revolutionary spirit was catalyzed by widespread industrialization and the rise of market economies across the continent, fostering new patterns of social organization (urbanization and migration), national identity, class consciousness, and imperialist impulses to sustain economic growth.
In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII articulated a vision of a new social order, one that eschewed the class struggle and the atheistic materialism of Marxism while advocating for economic justice and expanded workers’ rights. Successive popes developed the Church’s teaching on political economy, broadening it to encompass governance and the social order, in addition to the state’s function with respect to economic activity. In Quadragesimo Anno, Pius XI introduced subsidiarity as a “fundamental principle of social philosophy,” which called for the preferential option that action, whenever possible, is best exercised by individuals and at the local level. Subsidiarity, then, assumes a vertical, and downward, orientation.
The postwar international order facilitated the development of new intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations as a mechanism for conflict resolution and to iron out, at least in theory, asymmetries between states. This nascent intergovernmentalism developed in tandem with supranationalism, as seen in the formation of a common European political identity and political integration, starting with the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC).
In light of the refugee crisis following the end of the Second World War—which displaced over 10 million people in Europe alone—migration was reconceptualized as more than a response to economic shocks and regional conflicts but as a complex transnational reality, requiring multilateral intervention and the codification of a legal and normative framework. This was seen in the adoption of the 1951 U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.
Pius XII’s 1952 Apostolic Constitution on migration, Exsul Familia Nazarethana, a seminal Church document on migration, responded to this new reality, and John XXIII, in Pacem in Terris, broadened subsidiarity to cover the relationship between national governments and emerging supranational organizations, emphasizing the need for a new “international public authority” to adequately address global “economic, social, political and cultural problems which affect the universal common good.” The caveat, however, was that “it is no part of the duty of universal authority to limit the sphere of action of the public authority of individual States, or to arrogate any of their functions to itself.”
In affirming labor as “a key, probably the essential key, to the whole social question” (Laborem Exercens), Pope John Paul II stressed that “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,” reaffirming the Pastoral Constitution of the Second Vatican Council Gaudium et Spes. Yet he also highlighted the loss that migration “constitutes” for the home country as well as the challenges presented by integration into a foreign country, which may have a different history, language, traditions, and culture, and which can have a deleterious effect on the “creation” of identity and necessary social association.
While an individual has a right to migrate under certain conditions, a state also has the right to protect its sovereign autonomy and cultural identity. Naturally, then, states are encouraged to maintain external security and internal stability, which in turn promote the common good of its domestic constituency.
This point is developed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which notes that
political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.
Pope Benedict XVI reiterated that “states have the right to regulate migration flows and to defend their own frontiers, always guaranteeing the respect due to the dignity of each and every human person.” This sentiment was reaffirmed by Pope Francis in both his encyclical Fratelli Tutti and his Message for the 2023 World Day of Migrants and Refugees, during which he said that “joint efforts are needed by individual countries and the international community to ensure that all enjoy the right not to be forced to emigrate, in other words, the chance to live in peace and with dignity in one’s own country.”
Both Benedict XVI and Francis have built upon John XXIII’s insistence that a competent yet limited public authority be developed by emphasizing “multilateral interventions” and “joint efforts” as the only way to develop cooperation among nations and international bodies in creating a just economic order aimed at providing greater political stability and, thereby, ameliorating the underlying conditions in countries of departure that contribute to economic migration.
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In Europe, the principle of subsidiarity was enshrined in Article 5 of the Treaty on the European Union (TEU), or the Treaty of Maastricht, in 1992 and reaffirmed in the Treaty of Lisbon when it was signed in 2007, to “safeguard the ability of the Member States to take decisions and action” when the EU does not have “exclusive competence.”
Yet the challenges of migration in Europe have showcased some of the inherent difficulties in the practical application of subsidiarity and in arriving at a shared, and coherent, policy on migration, as there are often conflicting interests between Brussels and the member states that form the outer border of the bloc, which are more sensitive to the external impulses and shocks by migratory flows.
This shortcoming was seen in the Dublin Accord with the first-country-of-entry criterion, which, in practice, meant that a small number of states, primarily Italy and Greece, were responsible for processing the overwhelming majority of asylum claims, straining the courts, public finances, and welfare systems, as well as fueling popular resentment and Euroskeptic political movements.
In June 2024, the EU adopted the new Migration and Asylum Pact, which will go into effect in 2026. The new rules could be a positive development in alleviating the burden on some states via the Crisis Regulation, which allows states to diverge from obligations set out in the pact in cases of “crisis, instrumentalization and force majeure.”
Recentering an authentic application of subsidiarity in the European context is needed not only to correct excessive centralization and bureaucratic bloat but also to rebuild credibility for the European Union, enhance cooperation between member states, and preserve the shared history and common identity of the EU against, at times, forced multiculturalism.
In American federalism, subsidiarity exists not as an expressed principle but as an implied feature of its constitutional design, buttressed by juridical review. The Supreme Court has upheld that regulating immigration is the right of the federal government both as an aspect of national sovereignty and as it relates to control over foreign affairs and protection of the national public interest. Individual states, then, cannot impinge on the federal government with respect to immigration, as this would undermine the Doctrine of Preemption.
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Immigration in the United States is historically an economic phenomenon and a critical underpinning of its demographic growth and continued innovation. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2023 “the foreign born accounted for 18.6 percent of the U.S. civilian labor force.” While legal migration is an integral part of the United States, lax immigration enforcement and porous borders undermine legitimate economic development and pose serious risks, especially as concerns pressure on local communities, the arms and drug trade, and human trafficking.
In fact, the surge of migration between 2021 and 2024 was the largest in U.S. history, with The New York Timesobserving that around 5 million, or 62%, had entered the country without legal authorization. This dovetails with a report submitted to the House Budget Committee, noting that, since January 2021, there were “1.5 million ‘got-aways’—individuals observed entering illegally but not stopped.” The Trump administration has focused on known criminals and gang members, such as the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which the U.S. Treasury Department designated as a transnational criminal organization.
When Pope Francis said that “migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity,” he was as much commenting on the imperative of building solidarity and human dignity as he was calling for a depoliticization of migration. When the Church defends the rights of asylum seekers and calls for greater international cooperation among states and international bodies, it is urging prudence and presenting a nuanced position that balances both the rights of the human person and a normative view of a state as sovereign. This in effect complies with a rules-based international order.
Of course, just as this international order requires greater cooperation, it also requires a proper application of a downward-oriented subsidiarity, to empower states to safeguard their own interests while forming commonsense policies and, on the part of the migrant, a necessary reciprocity in respecting legal norms and cultural customs. Migrants, of course, are not a homogenous group in terms of their motivation for migrating (students, economic migrants, asylum seekers, victims of forced migration), and immigration policies ought to reflect these multifaceted motives. This is the challenge for liberal democracies amid the rise of illiberal, and even authoritarian, trends.
