In a recent interview with a French magazine, Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, said it is wrong to use the gospel to defend illegal immigration. The reason many priests, bishops, and cardinals will not say so is because they are “afraid of being frowned upon, of being seen as reactionaries.”
Sarah is not afraid of that. “It is better to help people flourish in their culture than to encourage them to come to a Europe in full decadence,” he said. “It is a false exegesis to use the word of God to promote migration. God never wanted these heartbreaks.”
This is a radical thing to say, and no doubt Sarah will be criticized by people with acceptably liberal views on immigration. But his remarks get to the heart of an uncomfortable truth about illegal immigration, which is this: for many migrants, and especially for families and children now caught up in mass illegal entrance into the United States from Central America, it produces misery.
For some, it means death. Last week, an infant drowned in the Rio Grande when the overcrowded raft he was in capsized. Three others, two of them children, are feared dead. Days earlier, a 16-year-old boy from Guatemala fell ill and died shortly after arriving at a shelter for unaccompanied children. In December, two Guatemalan children, ages 7 and 8, died in Border Patrol custody.
For others, especially women, the journey north means being sexually assaulted by smugglers they paid to keep them safe. Others are extorted by criminal gangs. Still others are kidnapped and held for ransom, trafficked as sex slaves, or pressed into the service of drug cartels, transporting illegal narcotics over the border to pay off a debt or “tax” incurred simply by passing through cartel territory. In some cases, children are rented or sold to adult migrants seeking to present themselves as a “family unit” and thereby claim asylum.
On top of the perils of the journey itself, mass illegal border-crossing tears families apart. Most of the families showing up on the southwest border consist of a man traveling with one child. Many have wives and other children back in Central America, and have no idea how long it will be before they are reunited. Some, having arrived in the United States, regret the decision to leave home and wish they could go back but can’t because they are in too much debt to smugglers and loan sharks.
So when Sarah refers to “heartbreaks,” and says mass migration is a “new form of slavery,” he’s talking about a grim reality that many people, out of a misguided desire to been seen as compassionate, are unwilling to confront.
Our Leaders Neglect Border-Breaking For Personal Profit
http://thefederalist.com/2019/05/08/illegal-immigration-creates-mass-misery-u-s-leaders-dont-want-fix/
Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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