Msgr. Paul V. Garrity
Compassion, feeling sympathy for people who are suffering, is a natural dimension of what it means to be human. Commercials that invite us to help end cancer in children and save elephants in Africa appeal to our instinctual proclivity to help alleviate suffering and make the world a better place.
As dire conditions throughout the world continue to worsen, it is equally natural for people to leave their homes in search of security and a better life for themselves and their families.
Ellis Island in New York Harbor is the living reminder that immigration is not something new to our nation but the foundation upon which much of our prosperity has been built. We all know that with the exception of Native Americans, the population of the United States is composed of people who have immigrant forebears in their ancestry.
While we celebrate our immigrant roots as a nation, the present crisis over people who want to come to our country is having a corrosive impact on our national psyche. When a child drowns in the Rio Grande and a pregnant woman is cut by razor wire, we are torn between empathy for these migrants and righteous indignation at the lack of border security.
Natural compassion clashes with our respect for law and our sympathy for the people who are utilizing legal means for entering our country.
In order to avoid the discomfort of this clash, immigrants as a group get depersonalized and labeled illegal aliens and criminals. They are Mexicans, Venezuelans, Guatemalans, Haitians, and Cubans. They are swarms of people, caravans and columns that make the nightly news.
Their faces and their stories get lost in the cumulative identity of illegal migrants.
The United States is not alone in facing an immigration crisis. The Mediterranean Ocean has become a graveyard for hundreds of children, women, and men who have sought a better life in Western Europe. Wars, poverty, and violence continue to force people all over the world to leave their homelands to seek refuge somewhere else.
In an age where we can put people on the moon, cure many forms of cancer, and deliver a package within hours of ordering it on the internet, it is astounding that more cannot be done to address the international immigration crisis that shows no sign of easing up.
It has often been said that where there is a will, there is a way. The obstacle to addressing immigration and refugee challenges throughout the world is the absence of a collective will to make meaningful reforms.
When natural compassion is short-circuited by branding migrants as enemies, immigration reform becomes a political football. The “we versus them” mentality not only makes compassion into a casualty, it creates insensitivity, callousness, and cold disregard for suffering. This is the corrosive impact of the modern immigration crisis.
When thousands upon thousands of people are on the move every day around the globe, there is no simple solution or magic formula that will make everything right. One size never fits all. But one path to solutions may lie in recognizing that real solutions are possible when there is a consensus that solving these intractable problems has a net benefit for all.
As long as true compassion is framed as unrealistic idealism or aiding and abetting criminals, an evolving consensus that things can be better is thwarted.
In the Book of Genesis, Cain asks God “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain had already murdered his brother Abel and the answer that was never given is a resounding yes. Genesis teaches us that we are responsible for one another.
When today’s migrants remind us of our grandparents and great-grandparents who fled the potato famine and the Holocaust, they begin to look a lot different. When we begin to look at strangers as friends we have yet to meet, our appreciation for our common humanity enables us to see migrants in a very different light.
The global immigration conundrum cannot be solved overnight nor is there anything near consensus as to what solutions may look like. What is clear is our universal need to rise above the politicization of this issue so that our natural compassion for suffering people can forge a consensus that solving this issue is the right thing to do for the sake of the migrants and the wider population.
Compassion says there is no “us and them,” there is only us, and we all need to begin thinking in this way.
Msgr. Garrity is a retired priest of the Archdiocese of Boston and former pastor of St. Mary’s Parish in Lynn.
