From the very beginning of the new Trump administration, the issue of immigration became a point of public conflict with the Catholic Church. Pope Francis actually criticized the new U.S. administration the day before it even started, telling an Italian television program on Jan. 19, “If he wants to expel undocumented migrants, it will be a disgrace. This won’t do.”

Earlier on, in September 2024, the Holy Father, referencing Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, said: “Both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants, or be it the one who kills babies.” He said Catholics should vote for the “lesser evil,” without saying who that was. Polls show that most Catholics who voted in the presidential election favored President Trump.

If anything, the heat of the immigration debate has only risen since the Trump administration began less than two weeks ago. Sharp criticism from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has been answered in return by pointed rebukes by border czar Tom Homan and Vice President JD Vance, both Catholics. Both sides have Catholic allies and critics joining in, especially in the ever-contentious online space.

For ordinary Catholics who are not deeply partisan, the contours of the debate can be bewildering. There is, on both sides, a conflation or selective reading of many contending arguments and issues: immigration in general, illegal immigration, the right to asylum, human dignity, law enforcement, national sovereignty and worker’s rights. The Catechism and decades of Catholic teaching, from Pope St. John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris to subsequent popes to the USCCB’s 2003 pastoral letter “Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope” have been cherry-picked or quoted to buttress one argument or another.

What most definitely seems to be missing in the debate, by both sides in the United States, is a recognition that the issue of migration in all its aspects has now become an extremely contentious global issue, for Catholics and non-Catholics.

Within the past year, we have seen leading Western political leaders — some of them Catholics — turn sharply against immigration, at least rhetorically, in Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. In all of these countries, politicians had at some point been critical of the first Trump administration on this very issue. They changed because popular opinion in these democracies on immigration has shifted, becoming much more hostile. There seems to have been somewhat less fire from bishops’ conferences in those countries in response, compared to the United States.

The Catholic Church in Italy, of course, has launched some criticism against Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, an anti-immigration hardliner, on the issue since she entered office in 2022, but it all seems rather mild compared to the U.S. version.

In the Western Hemisphere, the issue of migration seems to become rather more muted or nuanced once the United States or Trump are not part of the argument. Mexico has repatriated thousands of foreigners, including Colombians and Cubans, for years, with little debate. Two states in the Americas — Nicaragua and Cuba — aggressively use forced expulsion or forced exile of their own citizens as a political weapon. Criticism from bishops’ conferences or the Vatican has been relatively muted because both regimes are dictatorships who either openly persecute the Church (Nicaragua) or seek to control it (Cuba).

And just as accepting migrants or refugees has become a hot political topic in the West, migration has also become a weapon in hybrid, indirect warfare waged by some nations against their neighbors, not only by exporting unwanted populations but by using migration flows to pressure other countries to extract financial or political benefits.

In addition to Cuba and Nicaragua, one can point to Algeria, Morocco, Turkey and Belarus as among the most blatant practitioners of this cynical tactic. Profiting from the migrant/refugee racket is not limited to criminal gangs; it includes nation states.

An interesting example of the complexity of the migrant question is Lebanon. Former President Michel Aoun and his foreign minister at the time, Gebran Bassil, both of them Maronite Catholics, were virulently opposed to Lebanon hosting more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees, the largest number of refugees per capita in the world. While there was some criticism of this stance by liberals and secularists, it was not an issue of contention between the Church and Catholic political leaders because the Church shares some of those concerns — that tiny Lebanon could be overwhelmed by foreigners and that the mostly Muslim Syrian refugee population would never leave and would further damage Lebanon’s already delicate demographic situation.

While the situation in Lebanon was driven by war, elsewhere, in South Africa and other relatively wealthier states in the Global South, the challenge is South-South migration. Africans are not only trying to get to Europe or the United States, they also head south or east, to try to enter the fabulously wealthy Arab Gulf states.

In 2023, Saudi Arabia is alleged to have machine-gunned hundreds if not thousands of Ethiopian refugees trying to enter the kingdom. In South Africa, migrants and refugees could enter but have been the victims of xenophobic outbreaks of vigilante violence by locals. Most asylum-seekers in South Africa (90%) are rejected but allowed to stay by paying bribes.

The United States is large and powerful and its news circles the globe, and so the seeming confrontation between the Trump administration and the USCCB or Pope Francis over migration dominates headlines and generates fierce controversy.

But laws and attitudes seem to be hardening worldwide. It is an issue everywhere, with every possible permutation, nuance and cruelty imaginable. We’re just not usually paying so much attention.