Sister Norma Pimentel and Father James Martin on the migrant question

The migrant question: It’s not really a question, is it? Migrants are our brothers and sisters, despite what you might have been led to believe in recent years. The vast majority of the migrants (and refugees) who come to the United States do so lawfully, applying for asylum (a human right, by the way), obeying the laws, working hard and following all the legal means to obtain U.S. citizenship.

What’s more, the consistent teaching of the church has been that we are called to care for migrants, refugees and “internally displaced persons,” people who are forced to flee within their own country. The Book of Exodus tells God’s people: “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (23:9). This line should resonate with Americans, many of whose ancestors (including my own) emigrated to this country. And Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 25 that the way we treat the “stranger” (in those days, understood not only as someone who was unknown to you but a “foreigner”) is how we treat him.

This “question” is a personal one to me, as I told Norma Pimentel, M.J., in our conversation on “The Spiritual Life,” since I worked with refugees in East Africa for two years during my Jesuit formation, helping them start small businesses to support themselves and their families. It often baffles me to hear Americans opposing migrants en masse. We need secure borders, and there needs to be a legal process for migrants to enter. But enter they should! Most of us wouldn’t be here if our forebears hadn’t in one way or another entered this country.

And I often ask people who oppose migrants and refugees, “What would you do if your family was under the threat of war, violence or starvation? Wouldn’t you try to find a safe place to live?” Mary and Joseph do that for Jesus in the Flight into Egypt.

The refugees with whom I worked in East Africa were, almost to a person, faith-filled. They had to be, in a way. Without a country and without money, what else, or whom else, could they rely on other than God?

Sister Norma, the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, has had that experience as well, seeing and being nourished by the faith of the migrants she has worked with for decades. One of the most moving parts of our conversation is her recounting how migrants often make their way to the center that she runs and fall on their knees before the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, “just knowing that God was with them.”

God is with them. How about you?