One of the hot issues our Nation has to deal with at present is a comprehensive immigration reform. No doubt this is badly needed as our present system is truly broken and lends to all sorts of abuse to take place in the meantime.

I recall Mathew 25: 31-46, where we are told that when the Lord returns in glory, we will be separated as sheep and goats. The “sheep” will be welcomed into the Kingdom because of their compassion towards others in reaching out to their basic needs. Among other things we hear: “For I a stranger and you welcomed me” (Mat 25: 38) One of the reasons the non caring “goats” will be condemned is because “For I was a stranger and you gave me no welcome” (Mat.25:43)

Each of us will be held accountable one day before the Lord for the way we treated others and that includes our immigrants, legal or not.

The Holy Family themselves from the start, began their life together as immigrants in Egypt. I wonder how the Egyptians treated them? I doubt whether they were rounded up roughly and put in a prison with common criminals, nor was Jesus kept in Egypt while Mary and /or Joseph deported back to Israel separated from their son. Of course they were probably legally in that country, but illegal presence does not justify abusive behavior.

I wonder at times, what right we have to tell other countries to respect human rights when we can’t respect them ourselves.  We are like those trying to take a splinter out of someone’s eye while we have a beam in our own.

The Holy Family fled to Egypt as a way to survive. A good percentage of immigrants to the US have come for the same reason: to survive from hunger and poverty; the alternative would have been to populate the slums of their large cities. As the Bishops of the US said recently, the first principle of immigrants is to have the right to not to have to immigrate in the first place. No doubt then, the key problem to address is the causes of desperate immigration in the first place. Survival leads to desperate measures even illegal when the legal way does not solve the problem.