Shortly after these supplemental funding bills were passed and signed into law by the President, Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration, transmitted the bishops’ migration-related funding requests for Fiscal Year 2025, which begins October 1. These requests cover four of the twelve appropriations bills passed by Congress on an annual basis: Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies; Homeland Security; Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies; and State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs. Funding provided by these bills impacts agencies and programs that are crucial for the wellbeing of immigrants, refugees, asylees, asylum seekers, unaccompanied migrant children, survivors of torture, victims of human trafficking, and others.

Migration-Related Stories, Op-Eds and Interviews by Catholic Bishops, and Catholic Agency Executives

Iowa Catholic Conference: Statement on Immigration

Notable New Publications, Reports, Resources, Articles, Etc.

Center for Migration Studies: How Europe is Slowly Closing Its Doors to Asylum-Seekers 

Forced displacement around the world is at an all-time high, having reached 114 million persons by the end of 2023. Migrants are being driven from their homes by conflict, economic deprivation, climate change, and persecution. In response, the industrialized nations, including many in Europe, are emphasizing deterrence strategies to stem the flow of migrants to their countries. 

The European Union (EU), as well as individual European countries, have in the last several years launched several initiatives to prevent asylum-seekers from reaching their shores. A recent EU migration pact, approved by the European Parliament on April 10, would establish a common asylum system and emphasize burden sharing among Member States, but also would introduce strict procedures to screen asylum applicants. 

The adoption of restrictive policies by Europe has come in response to an unprecedented jump in irregular migration to the continent, mainly from Africa and the Middle East. Conflicts in Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and other hot spots have helped fuel the migration, along with, of course, extreme poverty and hunger. Relatively new wars in Sudan and Gaza threaten to increase the flow of persons attempting to find safety in European countries. 

CLINIC’s State and Local Immigration Project: March and April 2024 - Texas and Beyond

During the month of March, there was a lot of movement in the courts around one of the anti-immigrant bills passed last year known as SB 4. The bill was signed into law on Nov. 21, 2023. It creates state crimes for illegal entry and reentry to Texas, authorizes state and local law enforcement to arrest people in Texas, and gives state magistrates and judges the authority to issue deportation orders. Since the law brings up various constitutional concerns, parties filed lawsuits in order to prevent it from going into effect on Feb. 6, 2024.

Franciscan Action Network (FAN) U.S. Border Trip 2024: Photo Report 

FAN Director of Advocacy, Sr. Maria Orlandini, joined a delegation to the U.S.-Mexico Border organized by the Sisters of Mercy Justice Team. For the week of April 21-26, 2024, participants were immersed in the current situation at the border and educated on obstacles to asylum processing, humanitarian response, root causes of migration and the conditions in Mexico. The delegates strategized together on ways to raise consciousness to these realities in order to shift the public discourse to unity and compassion. 

National Bureau of Economic Research: Immigration's Effect on US Wages and Employment Redux 

In this article we revive, extend and improve the approach used in a series of influential papers written in the 2000s to estimate how changes in the supply of immigrant workers affected natives' wages in the US. We begin by extending the analysis to include the more recent years 2000-2022. Additionally, we introduce three important improvements. First, we introduce an IV that uses a new skill-based shift-share for immigrants and the demographic evolution for natives, which we show passes validity tests and has reasonably strong power. Second, we provide estimates of the impact of immigration on the employment-population ratio of natives to test for crowding out at the national level. Third, we analyze occupational upgrading of natives in response to immigrants. Using these estimates, we calculate that immigration, thanks to native-immigrant complementarity and college skill content of immigrants, had a positive and significant effect between +1.7 to +2.6\% on wages of less educated native workers, over the period 2000-2019 and no significant wage effect on college educated natives. We also calculate a positive employment rate effect for most native workers. Even simulations for the most recent 2019-2022 period suggest small positive effects on wages of non-college natives and no significant crowding out effects on employment. 

Healing the Divided Body of Christ: USCCB Resources

With many divisions in the Church and the United States today, the USCCB created resources on how Catholics can be part of the important work to heal those divisions. In an upcoming virtual event on May 14th, join Cardinal Robert McElroy, Bishop Robert Barron, and Bishop Daniel Flores as they dialogue on the challenges of polarization and where Catholics can find hope in a path forward. You can also watch the most recent virtual event about what our faith teaches us about overcoming polarization here