In Ciudad Juarez earlier this week, Pope Francis spoke of the “humanitarian crisis” of mass migration and human trafficking. Celebrating mass close to a border crossing he called the ordeal of the many Mexicans who have risked their lives in search of a better life: “a journey laden with grave injustices.” Later, responding to a direct question about GOP frontrunner Donald Trump’s proposed wall between the US and Mexico, the pontiff dismissed the idea and said that “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges is not Christian.”
Pope Francis is viewed favourably by 70 per cent of the US public – a striking number when one considers the US Supreme Court and Congress enjoy only 45 and 16 per cent approval ratings respectively. His remarks may affect the South Carolina primary, but they also offer a welcome rebuke to the politics of xenophobia which is enjoying a resurgence around the world. In recent months, several European nationalist parties have successfully called for curbs on immigration even as their governments prepare for mass deportations. In Europe, and elsewhere, the words used to describe outsiders frequently take on a dehumanizing quality. The British Prime Minister David Cameron notoriously referred to “a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean”. Others, including mainstream news outlets, invoke images of tidal waves, floods, hordes and marauders. With remarkable candour Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently announced a plan to surround the entire country with a fence because “In our neighbourhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts.”
The Pope’s corrective to these insular tendencies has been met with a predictable over-reaction in the US. Even so, several commentators have pointed out that his opinions are not that remote from previously mainstream attitudes to immigration and cultural assimilation. Looking back on the Republican Party’s earlier positions on immigration, the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks notes that up to the presidency of George W Bush, many mainstream GOP candidates held fairly open views on the issue. Brooks then looks at a few of Trump’s rabble-rousing statements and exposes their disingenuousness. After peaking ten years ago, for instance, immigration to the US has been falling, particularly immigration from Latin America. Since 2008 there have been more immigrants from Asia than the Americas, and between 2009-2014 the US produced a net outflow of 140,000 Mexicans.
After the “grave injustices” of their harrowing journey to the US, migrants often face belittling and dismissive attitudes when they get there. This is particularly galling since, as Brooks points out, new immigrants are half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans, or, in the case of people without a high school diploma, a quarter as likely. Furthermore, a study of 103 cities between 1994 and 2004 found that rates of violent crime fell as immigration increased. In fact: “Numerous studies have shown that a big share of the drop in crime rates in the 1990s is a result of the surge in immigration.”
President Reagan endeared himself to a generation of European dissidents – many of whom profoundly disagreed with the rest of his politics – when he called on Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!” Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with national borders disappearing into the dustbin of history as ‘market states’ become the political norm, arguments for new walls to hold off marauding foreigners ought to be seen for the desperate anachronisms that they are. Pope Francis is absolutely correct. What the developed world needs is not walls, fortresses or deportations, but bridges: coherent immigration policies that acknowledge the inequalities of our world and take a few reasonable, practical steps to reduce them.
