Pope Leo XIV is trying to impose a moderate migration compromise on his zealously pro-migration Catholic hierarchy.
On September 28, Leo pushed that compromise as he championed Europe’s Christian culture in Metz, France:
As I said … “Human dignity demands legal and safe pathways, rescue and assistance, real cooperation against traffickers, effective protection for victims, serious processes of reception and integration, and policies that allow every person to live with dignity in their own land [emphasis added].
Migration “gives rise to a twofold demand for social justice: to offer safe and legal pathways, a respectful welcome and real opportunities for integration; and, at the same time, to promote the right to remain [emphasis added] in one’s own land, ” Leo told the Spanish parliament on June 8.
But his push for moderation — and the “right to remain” in the home country — are being ignored by many older U.S. clerics, including Robert McElroy, the Cardinal of the Washington, D.C. region.
McElroy is now asking American clerics to oppose President Donald Trump’s 2024 mandate for enforcement of the nation’s popular immigration laws.
Americans are waging a “war on every undocumented immigrant in our land,” McElroy told a mass for migration advocates on September 27, adding:
We are losing our soul as a nation. We must stop, recognize the evil that is being carried out in our name, and fight every dimension of it. We must seek to convert our political representatives from tolerating this evil or replace them. We must shed our identities as priests and Levites and become like the Good Samaritan who recognized no boundaries in rescuing the victim by the side of the road. We must recognize that in abandoning the words of Deuteronomy and the Statue of Liberty we are losing our soul as a nation. And we must constantly see before us the families that are being broken apart, the fear that consumes the undocumented communities, the children who are in pain.
McElroy’s pre-election speech did not mention the “right to remain” theme that is central to Leo’s compromise on migration.
The Pope’s right to remain is not recognized by pro-migration groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In 2021, for example, Breitbart News reported how pro-migration lobbies prefer to extract more migrants and to minimize investment in developing countries:
Throughout the 1990s, economists expected investors in wealthy countries to move job-creating investments to the developing world and, thereby, raise billions of people out of poverty, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the GOP-linked American Action Forum, said.
However, “for any number of reasons — inability to enforce contracts, political problems — the capital [in wealthy countries] really didn’t flow that way. It stayed in these [wealthy] countries,” he said during an October 26 online talk organized by far-left public publication DemocracyJournal.org.
“But economics does abhor a vacuum, and so now the [poor] labor is coming for the capital,” via international migration, according to Holtz-Eakin, a pro-migration economist who formerly worked for Sen. John McCain and for President George W. Bush when he was pushing the open-borders “any willing worker” claim.
He added: “If the U.S. is going to be a place where people want to migrate for economic reasons, let’s have an immigration system that recognizes and takes advantage of that.”
McElroy also sidelined the border-security section in the November 2025 statement by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: “We recognize that nations have a responsibility to regulate their borders and establish a just and orderly immigration system for the sake of the common good.”
Nor did McElroy mention the thousands of migrants killed as they tried to reach the dangled offer of jobs and welcome from President Joe Biden’s deputies and allies. In 2025, Rolling Stone revisited the jungle paths and reported:
In October [2024], it took Edinson almost four days to cross the Darién Gap by foot, passing four corpses during the last stretch of the jungle: the emaciated remains of a mother and daughter who died hugging; a woman who looked like she’d just been shot in the head; the decomposed body of what appeared to be an elderly man; and many, many human bones and skulls lined the edges of the swampy, overgrown paths.
Nor did McElroy mention that thousands of people are not dying amid the post-2024 enforcement of President Donald Trump’s border security and deportation mandate.
McElroy was also silent about the renewed economic opportunities for Americans in an economy where fewer companies can hire desperate and cheap migrants.
The cardinal also ignored the role of business advocates who are using migration to cut wages, inflate housing costs, and boost consumer sales — regardless of the harmful impact on Americans and their families.
Instead, McElroy tried to resuscitate pro-migration rhetoric from the late 1800s when Americans were building an economy powered by muscle and steam:
We as Americans enjoy is a reverence for immigration, which has built us up into the great nation that we love so deeply. It was not people of great wealth who came to our shores, but the poor and the dispossessed, those seeking freedom from oppression and opportunities to build new lives in this new land. In the words emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus wrote that Lady Liberty cries out “with silent lips, Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free… Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.” There was a time when these words brought tears to every American. Now they are shunned, riddled with conditions, or ignored altogether …
McElroy’s condescending view of migrants as helpless “huddled masses” ignores the rational and sincere differences in priorities between Americans and migrants. It also disregards Leo’s direction to his clerics to accelerate the cultural integration of migrants via frank debate over cultural and economic differences. Leo said:
To welcome a person means to integrate them as if they were part of one’s own family, offering them the opportunity to develop their gifts, abilities and sensibilities, but also to enter into the life of the household. We must grasp the historical significance of what is taking place, namely an unprecedented encounter between peoples and cultures, which calls us to rediscover our roots in new and creative ways, while at the same time listening carefully to others.
But McElroy ignored migration’s dilemmas as he declared that Catholic illegal migrants “exemplify all of the best qualities that our nation is so desperately searching for.”
He did not mention crimes committed by other migrants, or the many fundamental differences with Islamic migrants.
McElroy has been critical of Trump’s low-migration economy for years. In 2025, for example, he described Trump’s mandate as “a crusade which comes from the darkest parts of our American psyche and soul and history.”
The backbone of McElroy’s one-sided, pro-migration sermon was the biblical story of the traveller who was ambushed by thieves, and then ignored by passers-by until a wealthy stranger — “the Good Samaritan” — paid for his recovery at an inn.
In McElroy’s view, Catholics and the Catholic Church should serve as the wealthy stranger and the inn for all travelling migrants.
That story is usually described with minimal reference to the cause of the traveller’s migration into a foreign land.
In reality, many migrants are encouraged to split from their families and communities to travel in search of better economic opportunities. Their wives and children are left behind, although most are sustained by remittances from hard-working migrants.
Many of the migrants are waylaid on the route by criminals, others are killed by nature and accidents, and many are exploited by pimps or businesses once they reach their destination, such as New York.
Many non-profits encourage and participate in this economic process. For example, under President Joe Biden, many employees at Catholic Charities aided many illegal migrants as they travelled among criminals towards the often-abusive employers.
McElroy’s Catholic Church has not provided any details about the migrants that its charities helped move to the United States.