CONSERVATIVE POLICIES DO NOT DENIGRATE MIGRANTS …
On May 21, former Atlanta archbishop Wilton Gregory, 71, became the first African American archbishop of the Washington D.C. Catholic church.
Gregory, who grew up in Chicago and converted to Catholicism as a teenager, is a progressive with ultra liberal views on immigration.
On June 30, in his first network TV interview since his installation, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace handed Gregory an opportunity to slam President Trump’s tough anti-illegal immigration rhetoric … and Gregory didn’t disappoint.
June 30, 2019
Wallace: When you hear the president talking about an invasion, does it bother you?
Gregory: Anyone who denigrates the people who seek a better future, a more positive way of living for their family, to denigrate them is wrong.
What’s wrong is that Gregory totally misrepresented Trump’s immigration rhetoric and policies.
Trump uses tough rhetoric when he speaks out against illegal immigration. The United States accepts roughly one million new immigrants every year, including the past 2.5 years of the Trump administration, as we are one of the most generous countries on the planet. And Trump wants to increase legal immigration that protects U.S. citizens and promotes their interests, based on merit, work visas and asylum, not illegally via unauthorized border crossings or unwisely through lotteries and chain migration. Trump also believes illegal immigration harms the most vulnerable U.S. citizens, as flooding labor markets with uneducated, unskilled immigrant workers eliminates jobs for and reduces wages of American minorities and young people. And, finally, he believes it simply isn’t fair that migrants entering our country illegally should be able to jump ahead of the hundreds of thousands of people who are obeying all our immigrations laws, following all the process rules, and waiting patiently in line for years.
We respectfully offer Archbishop Gregory the following facts and advice that we hope will cause him to reconsider his own denigrating and divisive rhetoric on immigration …
CRITICIZE CENTRAL AMERICA, NOT THE U.S.
As reported on June 5 in US News & World Report, “nearly 680,000 migrants have been encountered so far this year on the southern border – more than the population of Miami and on pace to break records for the number of migrants encountered in a year. Thus, Trump’s term: “invasion.”
“Officials say most of the migrants arrested at the border are from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador – a group of Central American countries commonly known as the Northern Triangle.” Those mostly poor migrants are leaving their countries to seek work, find better social services, and flee widespread corruption and violence.
Bloomberg and Zero Hedge reported on June 19 that the three Northern Triangle nations have done little to provide for their poor. They write, “Perhaps inadvertently, the region has developed a system that encourages the poorest members of the population to emigrate by offering inadequate social services.”
According to Bloomberg, “The World Bank tracks social spending on a per-capita basis. In El Salvador, the number came to $562. It was even lower in Honduras, $278, and Guatemala, $258. That’s a fraction of the $2,193 spent in Costa Rica or the $2,269 in Brazil. Guatemala only spends about one-fifth of what it should annually on health care. The World Bank hasn’t updated the data set since 2012, but analysts say there have been few signs of improvement in recent years.”
Despite bond investors rating all three Northern Triangle countries as stable, safe, investments, who can borrow money at interest rates on par with the preferential terms enjoyed by regional economic powerhouses like Brazil, they do not borrow sufficient money to provide the most basic government services for their poor citizens.
Central American countries “denigrating” their poor people are who deserve Archbishop Gregory’s moral criticism.
Bloomberg continues, “The Northern Triangle strategy of exporting their poor is reinforced by growing remittance payments that illegal migrant workers in the U.S. send back to their families. The payments represent a reliable flow of dollars that serve to underpin the financial systems of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. That sum is more than 30 times greater than U.S. annual aid payments.”
Now we turn our sights on Mexico, which is the first country that Central American migrants encounter on their dangerous trek to the U.S. border. While Mexico is considered a relatively wealthy country, they only have the same percentage of immigrants in their population as oppressive communist regimes in Cuba and China.
It seems to us that Mexico’s immigration policy is much more worthy of criticism than ours. The U.S. has a higher percentage of immigrants in its population than even immigrant friendly European countries.
PRIORITIZE AMERICANS OVER ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS
As reported in the Huffington Post, “Gregory was embarrassed five years ago by criticism for living in a $2.2 million Tudor-style mansion in an exclusive neighborhood of Atlanta. He left the house and acknowledged he had taken his “eye off the ball” after the archdiocese received a $15 million donation from the estate of Joseph Mitchell, a nephew of Gone With The Wind author, Margaret Mitchell.”
in Buckhead, Atlanta
It’s callous for people living an opulent lifestyle, insulated from the economic downsides of their proposals, to promote open borders and unlimited illegal immigration. The Archbishop should be more considerate of Americans less fortunate than he before espousing policies that will only worsen their economic condition.
REMEMBER YOUR PASTOR’S WORDS OF WISDOM
At the end of his Fox News interview, Gregory recalled that he wanted to become a priest when he was a teenager. But his pastor at the time said that first he would have to convert to Catholicism. “You have to take this step-by-step, you can’t steal first base,” the pastor wisely counseled him. Although Archbishop Gregory was oblivious to the irony in his Fox interview, his pastor’s counsel is also excellent advice for immigrants seeking citizenship in the U.S.
We congratulate Archbishop Gregory on being the first African American to head the Washington D.C. church. We wish him well. But, as leader of the most politically influential parish in America, we sincerely hope that he will:
a) redirect his criticism at the real causes of unwavering migration from Central America
b) prioritize Americans over illegal immigrants, and
c) unite all Catholics — including those supporting Trump policies that advocate for more legal, fair and meritorious immigration.