Catholic Social Teaching and Migration in a Time of Uncertainty Opening Remarks

At the opening of the JRS/CMS conference Catholic Social Teaching and Work with Migrants and Refugees at a Time of Uncertainty, Mario Russell, Executive Director of the Center for Migration Studies, reflects on today’s challenges in migration policy. His introduction situates the conversation in the Church’s call to read “the signs of the times” with faith, wisdom, and hope.

March 24, 2025

Good morning and welcome to all here in attendance here and virtually. Welcome on behalf of Jesuit Refugee Services and the Center for Migration Studies.  Welcome to today’s convening entitled Catholic Social Teaching and Work with Migrants and Refugees at a Time of Uncertainty. Thank you for attending, for participating, for bearing witness. Thank you to the staff supporting this effort and a special thank you to Kevin Appleby at CMS and Don Kerwin and Kelly Ryan at JRS for your indefatigable and excellent organizing.

To speak of a “Time of Uncertainty”—today’s moment, today’s time—to meet as we are meeting today, is in fact to engage in a long-held Catholic practice of “reading the signs of the times”. We know this idea well, so necessary in the moment. Reading the signs of the times calls us to listen to, learn from, engage with the world, to assess “the joys and hopes, griefs, and anxieties of the age”, so that we can discern God’s presence and guidance, engage with contemporary challenges and opportunities, and respond with faith and wisdom, rooted in the Gospel and Church tradition, whose mission is to bring “her perennial riches and wisdom to the times.”

So these times are indeed a Time of Uncertainty, especially for migrants and refugees? We feel it with a particular force and violence and consequent suffering. We feel dismay and shock, even as our own sense of surprise begins to dull and diminish. A heavy challenge is how to remain calm and hopeful.

Are these times for migrants—globally and domestically—a first? No. For this generation, perhaps yes, but in fact, no. Literally 100 years ago: the United States passed the Immigration Act, reactive legislation that created nationality quotas (screening out Asians, undesirable eastern European Jews, and southern European Catholics), was inspired by eugenics, and amounted to a rewinding of the country’s racial and ethnic mix.  Just as profoundly, it was a new framing of migration policy under a “legal v. illegal” paradigm—that is, migrants’ identity and movement would be regulated through visas and their presence defined by deportability or non-deportability.  The anxieties about identity, culture, and race seemed to be very much like those in the political and social psyche today and, just as interestingly, with the same percentage of immigrants as part of the total population as today – about 14%. So, not much is different.

But 100 years of legislative neglect and failures consistently to think and rethink policy have led us to where we are today, again trapped in the paradigms of “illegal v. legal” of “border security v. order”, of “criminality/predation/fear v safety”, of “economic and social exploitation v protecting national interests”. In those paradigms we miss the deeper, more essential values and priorities of human dignity, family, civic society and community, labor, and opportunity, which together are essential to produce the common good.

So, we see exclusion ratcheting up (refugee resettlement, loss of CHNV, Title 42, Remain in Mexico and more) as well as expulsion, mass deportation, the driving of many out or into the shadows – today, by the Center for Migration Studies’ latest count, about 12.2 million.

It is in this very difficult space—in these times—that we find ourselves. And it is for this very reason that we are here in this moment as a community of faith, leaders, voices, thinkers, service providers, to enter into it with calm and constancy, with vision and valor, and with hope and help.

Today we will hear from

1. His Eminence Fabio Cardinal Baggio, with the Vatican Dicastery, and His Eminence Robert Cardinal McElroy, on the global and domestic realities and challenges for migration from a Catholic Social Teaching perspective.
2. We will then present 3 excellent panels (with Q+A and discussion) on rights, duties, and freedoms – moral and social — on migration and movement, on protection, and on religious expression. We will also have an excellent lunchtime keynote presentation by Juan Sebastian Chamorro, from the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

These are beginning but important conversations, touching on where we are at present, touching on what’s a stake, and touching on what are the deepest source points and truths from which flow the works of mercy, justice, and compassion that we have done for a long time: work that brings together the divine and human imaginations.