US Bishops call for comprehensive immigration reform
(Vatican Radio) In the United States, a senior member of the House of Representatives
has said there is no guarantee the chamber will pass comprehensive immigration legislation
this year or that a pathway to citizenship for 11 million illegal residents would
be part of the effort.
A bipartisan plan for immigration reform – which enjoys
widespread support – was proposed last week in the nation’s Senate.
Reform
of U.S. policy on immigration has been a priority for the nation’s Bishops. In a press
conference on Monday, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference
of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), said “now is the time” to fix the nation’s broken immigration
system.
Bishop John C. Wester of Salt Lake City, chair of the USCCB Communications
Committee, also took part in the press conference. He spoke with Vatican Radio about
the principles that should inform immigration reform. “What the bishops are looking
for, and the principles that we are seeking to see bolstered and protected and used
are really the sanctity of human life – that these are human beings that we are talking
about, and that we have to provide a system for them to be safe and a just system,
a workable system to protect them in the very dangerous process of immigration.”
Bishop
Wester said the Bishops hoped immigration reform would: provide a path to citizenship
for the undocumented; help families stay together; ensure that immigrants would not
be exploited and that their rights would be protected; and that provision would be
made that “lives will not be lost in the desert” as immigrants make their way to the
United States. “So these are some of the things that we are looking for in this new
bill,” he said.
Bishop Wester also said the Bishops hoped that immigration
reform would “address the root causes . . . the push factors of immigration,” and
ask “how can the United States work with other countries to eliminate the need for
people to immigrate in the first place if they would rather stay home.”
One
of the Bishops’ concerns, said Bishop Wester, was to find a balance between securing
the border and caring for immigrants. “We know that enforcement only doesn’t work,”
he said, “so we’re calling for our country not to link enforcement and humane provisions.”
Although the government has a right, and even a duty to secure the border, he said
it was important that strategies to achieve border security should not be “linked
to a path to status and citizenship.” The different elements of immigration reform,
he said, should each be moved forward “on their own merits.”
Bishop Wester
emphasised the Bishops’ primary concerns: “We’re hoping that the focus can always
be on the family, on the sanctity of human life, on the dignity of the immigrant and
treating people with respect.”
Listen to the interview of Bishop John
Wester of Salt Lake City with Christopher Wells: