Pope Francis penned a letter Feb. 10 to the bishops of the United States encouraging them to oppose “the initiation of a program of mass deportations” by the Trump administration. 

Unfortunately, some of the content in the Pope’s letter is disconnected from the realities of migration to the United States. For those wanting a more grounded conversation on the topic of migration, there are several things to keep in mind. 

In the first place, the United States owes no one an apology for restricting immigration to the country and removing those here who do not have lawful status. It is not impolite to say so, despite the frequent scolding of progressives who seem to view migration to the U.S. as a fundamental human right and anyone who objects as a nativist. 

It should be remembered that the U.S. has no peer in the world for the number of people it grants citizenship, which is the highest benefit the country can bestow on a foreign national, each year. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) statistics show that about 969,000 lawful residents in the country were naturalized in 2022. By comparison, Eurostat reports that the member states of the European Union — all 27 of them, collectively — granted citizenship to only slightly more in 2022, about 990,000. 

Another orienting metric comes from the Pew Research Center, which, in late 2024, reported that about 48 million immigrants reside in the U.S. That is about 14% of the American population and almost equivalent to the entire population of Spain. 

Second, it is important to recognize that most people attempting entry into the United States are economic migrants. The Vatican tends to presume that all migrants crossing the borders of the U.S. are escaping intolerable conditions at home and entitled to asylum or refugee status. 

This understanding is likely influenced by the fact that many inbound migrants are coached by smugglers and advocates to claim asylum so they can secure employment authorization documents and remain here for years while their applications are processed through the labyrinthine immigration court system. However, the reality is that most asylum claims are fabricated or lack merit, and better than 80% are routinely denied.

Third, the Vatican’s concern for the “infinite and transcendent dignity” of migrants is not threatened by recent enforcement actions taken by DHS. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has repeatedly explained that DHS must target criminals and gang members. Why? Because the migrant surge of the Biden era was accompanied by an exponential increase in criminal aliens entering the United States. 

DHS statistics show the number of aliens arrested for violent crimes, drugs, weapons trafficking and sex offenses increased by 600% from the final year of the Trump administration in 2020 to that of President Biden’s in 2024. On Feb. 17, Homan told Fox News that nearly 600,000 criminal aliens remain in the U.S. If “homeland security” is to have any meaning at all, it is incumbent on DHS and its partner agencies to identify and remove this population.

In his letter to the U.S. bishops, Pope Francis appealed to the concept of “dignity” for migrants 10 times. However, if the Church, foreign governments and professed human-rights organizations were properly focused on the dignity of vulnerable populations, they would do everything in their power to prevent migrant caravans from moving through the Darién Gap and Mexico to the U.S. border. The horrors of that passage were detailed by Doctors Without Borders in December 2024, when the medical charity reported that “[t]he violence migrants face ranges from torture to sexual violence, kidnappings, robbery, threats, deprivation of water and food, burns and extortion.” 

Fourth, it is a mistake to believe that the wave of mass migration to the United States we have seen in recent years is simply an organic phenomenon resulting from “extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment,” in the Pope’s words. Instead, in fact, it has largely been the result of a fusion of progressive policies and profiteering. 

When federal officials signaled to the world that the U.S. is relaxing border security and immigration enforcement — as the Biden administration did within days of taking office in January 2021 — they created the key “pull” factor that induced a surge in migration. Migrants make calculated choices: If they think the U.S. government has no intention of interdicting and removing them, they will undertake the rigors and costs of getting here. 

Fifth, moving people from one society to another is an industry that generates revenue for a wide variety of actors, from human-smuggling rings and cartels to advocacy groups, NGOs and government contractors. To get a sense of the monies in play, The Washington Post recently reported that the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels pull in $4 to $12 billion a year for smuggling migrants. Then there is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which reports that it has distributed $20 billion in grants over the past 13 years to a constellation of federal contractors, NGOs and religious organizations to care for migrant children. 

In another example that caught the attention of the DHS inspector general and Congress, a sole-source contract awarded by DHS to a nonprofit in early 2021, totaling $87 million, was granted without competition to an organization that had no experience providing the housing services covered by the contract. The Trump administration is making strenuous efforts to bring such outrageous profiteering to a stop.

In his letter to the bishops, Pope Francis approvingly cited Pope Pius XII’s 1952 apostolic constitution on the care of migrants as “the ‘Magna Carta’ of the Church’s thinking on migration.” Pius XII, who remembered the Italian poor seeking refuge in the Vatican during the Second World War, was principally concerned about the spiritual well-being of displaced Catholics. What Pius could not have imagined is millions of migrants from more than 160 countries traveling around the world to cross the southern border of the United States. 

One wonders what Pius XII would have thought about that.