The language and imagery used by the leadership within the Catholic Church concerning immigration is highly distorted.
By Jack Rigert
Crisis Magazine
January 6, 2026
Happy New Year ! As we enter 2026, we find ourselves once again confronting questions that refuse to remain theoretical-questions about borders and belonging, compassion and responsibility, charity and political order. Immigration will continue to press itself upon public life, Church teaching, and the Christian conscience, often framed in stark moral absolutes that leave little room for prudence or historical memory. It is therefore worth beginning the year by examining one of the most frequently invoked-and most frequently misunderstood-Christian images in this debate: the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt.
This image of the Holy Family is frequently invoked in modern immigration debates. It is often presented as the definitive Christian archetype of the refugee family-one that allegedly demands unconditional welcome and the suspension of prudential judgment. Yet this sentimental reading collapses under historical scrutiny and, in doing so, distorts the moral tradition it claims to defend.
At the time of Christ's birth, Egypt was not a foreign nation-state but a province of the Roman Empire, annexed in 30 B.C. Joseph did not cross into an alien political order governed by unfamiliar laws and customs; he traveled within the same imperial jurisdiction that encompassed Judea. 1 The Holy Family fled a local tyrant-Herod-not a civilization. They did not breach borders, demand accommodations, or seek to refashion Egyptian society. They were displaced persons seeking safety, not symbols for ideological abstraction.
The persistent misuse of this episode reveals a deeper confusion in contemporary Christian discourse on immigration-a confusion Pope John Paul II identified decades ago and one that remains unresolved.
In his 1995 Message for World Migration Day addressing "Undocumented Migrants," John Paul II observed a subtle but consequential shift in public language. Increasingly, societies spoke of immigrants as problems within host nations rather than of emigrants driven from their homelands by war, corruption, economic collapse, or political disorder. This inversion, he warned, conceals root causes while relocating blame.
What is lost in this linguistic shift is moral clarity. An emigrant is a person compelled to leave his home because the conditions necessary for a stable and dignified life no longer exist; the primary moral failure, in such cases, lies with the regimes, elites, or systems that render life untenable. An immigrant, by contrast, is that same person viewed only from the perspective of the receiving nation, abstracted from the forces that expelled him. When public debate collapses the emigrant into the immigrant, attention is diverted from the injustices that drove displacement in the first place, and responsibility is subtly transferred to host societies-or to the immigrants themselves-instead of addressing the crisis that neither of them created.
This confusion is further compounded when moral outrage is directed almost exclusively at receiving nations-often by Church leaders and political movements shaped by socialist assumptions-while the failures of the sending nations go largely unexamined. Often, Western countries are castigated for not absorbing ever-greater numbers of immigrants, yet scant attention is paid to the corruption, violence, economic mismanagement, or ideological decay that force families to abandon their homes. In such narratives, borders become the moral scandal, while the conditions that necessitate flight escape sustained scrutiny. John Paul II's warning cuts directly against this imbalance: authentic solidarity does not consist merely in redistributing populations but in confronting and correcting the injustices that produce mass emigration in the first place. To demand limitless reception, for example from wealthier nations built upon Christian principles, without demanding reform of the sending nations is not charity; it is a refusal to name responsibility.
Importantly, John Paul II never endorsed a vision of open borders or moral indifference to political order. He consistently affirmed the inherent dignity of the human person while also upholding the right-and duty-of nations to regulate immigration, safeguard the common good, and require respect for law and culture from those who enter (CCC 2241). Immigrants, he insisted, possess rights, but they also bear responsibilities toward the societies that receive them. The tragedy of the modern debate lies in its insistence on choosing between compassion and prudence, as though fidelity to one required the abandonment of the other.
Recovering this balance requires returning to the Church's tradition of moral realism, beginning with St. Augustine.
For Augustine, peace is not merely the absence of violence but tranquillitas ordinis-the tranquility of order (The City of God, XIX.13). Political authority exists to sustain a just framework within which truth may be sought, families may flourish, and communities may endure. When order dissolves, charity itself becomes incoherent, untethered from the social conditions that allow it to be exercised meaningfully.
In The City of God, Augustine defends rulers who protect their people, arguing that legitimate authority restrains chaos and shields the innocent (XIX.17). A society that abandons self-defense does not become more charitable; it becomes more fragile, inviting disorder that ultimately harms the weak most of all. Hospitality that corrodes order does not elevate mercy-it undermines it.
St. Thomas Aquinas sharpens this insight with characteristic precision.
Prudence, Aquinas teaches, is right reason applied to action-the virtue that governs how universal principles such as charity and justice are embodied in concrete circumstances (Summa Theologiae, II-II, q.47, a.2). Prudence is not fearfulness, nor is it moral retreat. It is wisdom in governance. Law, he argues, must serve the common good rather than sentiment, impulse, or abstraction (ST I-II, q.90, a.2; I-II, q.96, a.1). Even charity itself follows an ordered logic: we owe particular responsibilities to those nearest us (ST II-II, q.26). For political leaders, this entails preserving social cohesion, public safety, and the conditions necessary for a virtuous life.
From this perspective, a nation may justly regulate its borders, limit inflow, require assimilation, and exclude genuine threats without betraying charity-provided such actions are undertaken without malice and with respect for human dignity. To abandon prudence is not to embrace mercy; it is to abdicate responsibility.
This framework becomes unavoidable when addressing Muslim immigration into historically Christian societies. Christian caution in this regard does not arise from prejudice but from memory.
Beginning in the seventh century, Islamic conquests overwhelmed vast Christian heartlands across North Africa, the Levant, and Asia Minor. Under dhimmi systems, Christians were often relegated to second-class status through special taxation, restricted worship, and diminished civil rights. 2 Regions once decisively Christian-Egypt, Syria, Anatolia-did not drift into secular pluralism; they were subdued.
These realities are not confined to history. Today, Christians remain the most persecuted religious group in the world, with a disproportionate share of that persecution occurring in Muslim-majority countries through blasphemy laws, forced conversions, church attacks, and mob violence. 3 Recent reports estimate that more than 380 million Christians face high or extreme persecution globally.
Christian moral reasoning demands careful distinction. Systems and ideologies may conflict with Christian truth or with liberal political order-particularly where religion and law are inseparable-without imputing guilt to every individual adherent. Collective suspicion of Muslim persons would be unjust. But informed caution shaped by historical experience is not bigotry; it is prudence.
Returning once more to the Holy Family clarifies the matter.
They fled danger but posed none.
They sought refuge without demanding cultural capitulation.
They lived quietly, without imposing divine law on their hosts.
To deploy their story as a rhetorical weapon against legitimate concerns about integration, extremism, or social cohesion is to misuse Scripture itself. The Gospel commands love of neighbor and love of stranger, but it never dissolves the responsibility of political stewardship.
Scripture, John Paul II, Augustine, and Aquinas converge on a demanding but coherent vision. The immigrant is a person bearing inviolable dignity, never a disposable burden. The nation is a moral community, not an open inn. Borders exist to serve justice, not to negate it. Charity detached from truth erodes order; prudence severed from charity hardens into cruelty.
The Christian vocation refuses the false choice between compassion and security.
To forget history is to invite naïveté.
To forget the person is to commit injustice.
To forget prudence is to lose both.
The way forward lies neither in utopian universalism nor in defensive alarmism but in societies capable of welcoming the stranger while preserving their own moral and cultural foundations that made genuine hospitality and a chance for a better life possible in the first place.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.