That is understandable, because you don’t want to cooperate with that. However, if one does with to help one of them with a job or direct aid, that is not an immoral act. The thing that they are cooperating with is not an intrisically grave sin. It would* not* equate, for example, to helping pay for an abortion.
I didn’t compare the gravity of the act (of enabling illegal immigration – via direct help, via indirect help, and via resistance to enforcement) to the gravity of abortion. I’m comparing the dynamics of cooperation. For the bishops to rationalize blanket opposition to E-verify (which they did in the
Catholic Voice statement), they would need to establish that E-verify is in itself immoral. They have not done so to the standards of Catholic apologetics. Again, we do not stop enforcing criminal laws in this country because laws are not standardized in all 50 states, or even within all counties within a State, and because penalties for those laws are not standardized among the several States. Nor do we assert (I doubt the bishops would assert) that disparate outcomes in prosecution of lawbreakers is an aspect of criminal law that invalidates the law itself. (Lots of suspects and later-convincted criminals manage to escape prosecution by trickery,by chance, or by incompetence of prosecutors; yet there has been no episcopal statement that suggests that it is a holy act, an act of justice, to “therefore” fail to prosecute, because of differences in outcomes.) And I repeat, many such unluckily prosecuted criminals are among the most desperately poor of those legally here.
It stretches credibility to imply (by argument) that a different moral code should be applied to the desperately poor of other countries, who have violated sovereign boundaries, than to the equally desperately poor of our country, who have violated criminal laws with the same incentive and personal plight (poverty).
In courts of criminal law, there is the occasional convicted criminal whose act(s) of desperation --often accompanied by a history of victimization-- will reach the ear of a sensitive judge, who is legally empowered with dispensing ultimate justice (the sentence). The judge gets the last word. But those judgments are particular to the cases at hand, carefully studied, in all detail, and by experts in criminal law. The bishops are not experts in the individual cases of strangers who have broken federal jurisdiction by invading boundaries. The motivations of those strangers are mixed. In making broad, sweeping judgments of the supposed innocence of these strangers, the bishops are romanticizing illegal immigration most inappropriately and inaccurately, declaring it by argument (though not my label) as good, and therefore opposition to its prosecution as morally justfiable. They have not presented evidence that illegal immigration is generally or always or even mostly good (not only in its motivation but also in its outcomes – to immigrants and to the host country).
By contrast, the Civil Rights movement of the mid-to-late '60’s in this country was one which opposed racism and the soft and hard laws that reflected and supported that racism. Thus, in that case, nothing good could be asserted about the upholding of such laws; all opposition to such universally unjust laws was legitimately moral.
Such is not the parallel with illegal immigration. It is unfortunate the the bishops do not appear to have done their homework regarding these key differences.
