Love Thy Neighbor: A Christian Response to Mass Immigration
The Morality of Borders and Belonging
When you’ve lived abroad as long as I have you know how good immigration can be if done right and how bad it can be if done wrong. It was, in fact, being familiar with the immigration systems of other countries that opened my eyes to just how bad America’s system has become.
I’ve explored this topic from a secular perspective but today I want to focus on immigration through the lens of faith. I’ve heard it said that Christians should support mass immigration because Jesus commanded “love thy neighbor.”
So, is it right that loving our neighbor means supporting mass immigration?
The Truth about Mass Immigration
Christians are called to recognize that every person we encounter, whether a neighbor or a stranger, is made in the image of God and deserving of our love. Which is exactly why we must oppose mass immigration, which is a dehumanizing system of exploitation.
The scope and speed with which immigration is happening in many Western nations today is historically unprecedented. America has more than 11 million - possibly 22 million - illegal immigrants. When it comes to legal immigrants, America’s foreign-born population has reached a record 47.8 million people. Immigration on this scale leads to rapid demographic shifts that transform neighborhoods and towns in just a few years. High rates of immigration harm the working class by lowering wages, raising rents, overburdening social services, burdening the taxpayer, and eroding cultural cohesion.
This rate of immigration changes high-trust societies into low-trust societies. In many nations it has made daily life more dangerous. With mass immigration, immigrants form parallel societies in ethnic enclaves and do not assimilate to the host culture because while individuals can assimilate, entire peoples cannot. Nearly a million immigrants in Britain do not speak English.
By inflating the labor pool, mass immigration exacerbates wealth inequality by making the rich richer and the poor poorer. It creates a compliant, easily-exploited workforce that reshapes entire industries while lowering safety and quality standards. Rents go up, putting home ownership out of reach for many, while wages go down, making starting or supporting a family more difficult. In the US estimates show that roughly half the decline in wages for unskilled workers is because of unskilled immigration. Since the pandemic, 3/4 of employment growth went to immigrants. Mass immigration is so bad for the working person and so good for big business that traditionally the left was against it, saying one could not be anti-exploitation and pro-immigration.
High rates of immigrants leaving a country creates a brain drain, depriving countries of some of their most able citizens. This leads to the degradation of health and education services and deprives these countries of tax-payers. Further, by allowing high rates of illegal immigration, the US and the EU have effectively incentivized people to risk their lives to reach them. It is inhumane.
To support mass immigration because you think it is compassionate is to be the unwitting cheerleader of a system that benefits the rich, degrades societies, and exploits human beings.
What is Love?
Is supporting mass immigration loving? Clearly the answer is no.
Today “love” is often conflated with a vague “niceness,” which boils down to letting people do whatever they want. But love is not such a flimsy thing. Love implies a willing of the good of the other. Supporting mass immigration is not willing the good of the other and it is a distortion of the Gospel to equate “love thy neighbor” with allowing infinite immigration to endanger people while impoverishing and destabilizing society.
We are called to love everyone – but we are finite beings who show our love through action. It is not possible for us to equally express our love to every other person in the world in the same manner. The natural bonds of family and community are ordained by God and our obligations begin with those closest to us. It would not be loving for a mother to neglect her child’s hunger in order to give the last of her food to a stranger. As 1 Timothy 5:8 says: "If anyone does not provide for his own, especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever."
But, people will say, this isn’t about a poor mother with the last of her food, it is about rich countries!
And this is true - but the wealth of rich countries is not infinite and neither is their social cohesion, cultural inheritance, or institutional capacity. A nation is not a bank account, it is a living organism held together by shared values, history, and trust. To strain these bonds past their breaking point in the name of abstract ideology is not love, but destruction.
What Does Scripture Say?
In the Parable of the Good Samaritan we see that we should help the person God places in front of us. This can be seen in contrast to the Pharisees, who made a show out of their supposed piety and compassion while neglecting to help real people. The Good Samaritan helps the man right in front of him with his own time and resources. Christian charity is not about outsourcing your compassion in order to feel good about yourself, it is about rolling up your sleeves and doing the work yourself.
The Holy Family’s Flight into Egypt is sometimes invoked to justify mass immigration, but Mary, Joseph, and Jesus were not economic migrants but refugees fleeing a specific threat - and they returned home as soon as it was safe. Their journey was temporary and purposeful. To compare that to the massive, unregulated movement of tens of millions across borders without the democratic consent of the receiving nations is a distortion of scripture.
If foreigners come to your land, the Bible teaches we must treat them well - but it also says that incoming foreigners are to assimilate or else society will suffer. Scripture is clearly not championing today’s multicultural ethos that makes an idol out of diversity. Further, to do injustice to the poor is indeed condemned in the Bible - but what is also condemned is doing injustice for the sake of the poor. In our compassion we must not do ill for the sake of the oppressed or we are betraying those we mean to serve.
“Love thy neighbor” must include our neighbors who do not wish to see mass immigration drive down their wages, those who struggle with addiction who will be at risk with an even easier flow of drugs, those whose lives will be cut short due to violent crime, those who will see their communities fractured and their cultural roots torn up. These are our neighbors whom we must serve and love.
Common Sense and the Common Good
Historically, the Catholic Church has not promoted unfettered mass immigration or anything resembling open borders. These ideas are a modern development shaped by the conditions of industrialization and globalization.
Immigration the way we think of it today (the mass movement of millions around the globe) didn’t exist historically. When immigration did occur it was typically limited in scope and time – and even then was recognized as a potential threat to order and treated cautiously. The Church emphasized the duties of rulers to their own people and charity to strangers was personal and local, not a justification for supranational resettlement schemes.
The Church historically taught that a gradual and discerning approach to welcoming foreigners is best, emphasizing the need for hospitality to be balanced against the dangers of disorder and fragmentation. The Church teaches that the dignity of every person must be respected, that wealthy nations should welcome the foreigner to the extent they are able while regulating immigration to maintain the common good. This includes conserving cultural integrity and protecting public order.
Some may ask, what if a pope seems to support mass immigration? Well, Catholics must always respectfully receive the teachings of the pope but the Church is clear that Catholics are not obligated to agree with the pope’s political thoughts. The laity are encouraged to engage with political and social issues using prayer, reason, and the fullness of Catholic social teaching, which includes the importance of the common good, the dignity of every person, and the right of nations to regulate their borders.
Real Charity, True Compassion
In the West today, we are often given a distorted version of Christianity that has been infiltrated by the liberal worldview. This ideology sees all inherited bonds – family, faith, culture, even biological sex – as oppressive constructs to be dismantled in the name of individual freedom. Within this framework, people are reduced to atomized, interchangeable units of production and consumption, whose highest good is self-fulfillment without constraint.
Catholics should recognize that unfettered mass immigration is another expression of the modern liberal project that seeks to dismantle natural order and rightly ordered love, like the dissolution of the family, marriage, gender, and sexuality. These things - like mass immigration - are presented as moral imperatives when in fact they represent the breakdown of traditional moral architecture.
When it comes to mass immigration, we have been sold a perversion of “love thy neighbor” that has very little to do with loving our neighbor and much to do with exploiting our compassion to benefit the rich. This liberalized version of Christianity exalts a vague, abstract “humanity,” while scorning the flesh-and-blood neighbors we are actually called to love.
By supporting mass immigration people are not loving their neighbor, they are loving a utopian ideology that makes them feel good while it harms the very people they are called to love. Ultimately, Christians should recognize that mass immigration is exploitative, dehumanizing, and cruel – inflicting deep harm on the immigrants themselves as well as the societies they leave and the societies they enter.
Christians are not asked to affirm systems that grind people down in the name of abstract compassion. We are called to build something truer, something that is rooted and capable of love that doesn’t devour the very communities it claims to serve. Every person deserves to be treated with dignity and compassion, which is precisely why we must oppose mass immigration and support policy that is prudent, orderly, and discerning. The longer we delay hard decisions in the name of false compassion, the more suffering we guarantee. If we are serious about protecting human dignity, we must begin by restoring the conditions under which it can flourish.