Pope Leo On The USCCB Special Message

On Tuesday, Pope Leo made a statement that endorsed the "Special Message" the USCCB issued the week prior. According to the USCCB,

Pope Leo told reporters in Castel Gandolfo that the pastoral message is "a very important statement. I would invite especially all Catholics, but people of goodwill, to listen carefully to what they said."

"No one has said that the United States should have open borders," the pope said. "I think every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter."

However, he said, in enforcing immigration policy "we have to look for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with the dignity that they have."

"If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that," he said. "There are courts. There's a system of justice," but the system has "a lot of problems" that should be addressed.

The video I saw strongly suggested Leo was repeating what had been prepared for him, and I've got to think he isn't familiar with the actual conditions imposed on the migrants by the processes through which they're brought into the country, as well as the conditions under which they live and work once they've been brought in. The efforts of the Trump administration have in fact been to alleviate the inhumane and undignified conditions imposed on them. For instance, via Reuters,

U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics show apprehensions at the southwest border, an indicator of the number of migrants trying to cross, are down nearly 90% to their lowest level since 1970.

As a result, the corridor between San Diego and Tijuana, one of the busiest international crossings in the world, has dramatically transformed in less than a year. Major concentrations of migrants in squalid conditions have largely disappeared. A San Diego transit center that once served as a makeshift migrant depot has returned to normal. A dusty gathering spot hemmed in by 30-foot (9.1-meter) border walls, where asylum-seeking migrants amassed to turn themselves in to U.S. officials, is once again nothing more than a vacant outpost. Across the border in Tijuana, migrant shelters suddenly have empty space.

Once they're settled in the interior, a common business model takes over that relies on a form of permanent indenture. For instance, just this week:

A Michigan couple has been arrested and charged with allegedly hiring hundreds of undocumented workers while bringing in tens of millions of dollars for their plumbing business.

. . . The feds say that between January 2022 and December 2024, the couple employed around 253 people, of which only six were legally present and allowed to work in the U.S.

. . . According to the complaint, the defendants collected the passports of the workers and housed them in overcrowded houses and hotel rooms.

Between Jan. 1, 2022 and Aug. 7, 2025, feds say the plumbing company generated around $74 million in customer revenue.

This pattern appears nationwide:

Charlotte, N.C., is making headlines this week because dozens of construction sites have gone silent. ICE swept through the region, and the labor force evaporated almost instantly. A major American city discovered, in real time, that its building boom was being held together by workers who couldn’t legally be there. Watching that footage hit me hard, because I’ve seen it before — not on the evening news, but in the slow collapse of my own childhood community.

. . . Farmers who had paid teenagers and local laborers fair wages realized they could hire adults from Mexico and Central America for far less and house them in the kinds of conditions Americans would never tolerate: eight men to a sagging, leaking trailer with no electricity, no running water, no insulation. They were paid in cash, they didn’t complain, they worked year-round, and they had no leverage because they knew their employers could always get them deported.

The writer concludes,

And through all of this, politicians, pundits, and corporate lobbyists kept repeating the same line: “Americans just won’t do these jobs.” . . . Americans didn’t suddenly lose their work ethic. The jobs were taken from them — not by immigrants directly, but by American employers who built a business model on illegal labor and by a federal government that looked the other way for forty years.

What Americans “won’t do” are jobs that have been made illegal in everything but name — jobs where wages have collapsed to exploit desperation, where safety standards are ignored, where workers are paid off the books, where insurance and taxes are bypassed, and where living conditions violate every regulation on the books. When the floor is lowered that far, legal workers cannot enter the market at all. That isn’t laziness. That’s math.

This business model first surfaced last year, when the problem of Haitian migrants working in sweatships in Springfield, OH hit the media. At that time, it became clear that the issue wasn't just individual greedy employers, it extended to landlords who evicted middle-class tenants so they could rent the units to occupants who would overcrowd them more profitably. As it happened, NGOs, often Catholic, facilitated the process by recruiting candidates in their home countries and flying them in.

If the migrants needed housing, the NGOs paid the slumlords directly. If they needed jobs, they became employment agencies for the sweatshops. If they needed cars, they paid used car dealers who'd sell junk cars to the migrants without drivers licenses, registration, or insurance. All the time, the NGOs were getting humanitarian awards and collecting an administrative skim.

The local migrant ecosystems that relied on Haitian and Venezuelan migrants in particular were created by he Biden administration's extension of "temporary protected status" to migrants from countries including Haiti, Venezuela, and El Salvador. The status of these migrants was often erroneously portrayed as "legal", when it was only a temporary provision. By terminating it, the Trump administration simply eliminated this large-scale exploitation and forced businesses to revert to a fair-wage business model:

Springfield businesses, big and small, are struggling in the aftermath of thousands of Haitians fleeing the town after the Trump administration’s termination of the humanitarian parole program for citizens of several countries, including Haiti, in June. On top of that, the government has ended temporary protected status, affecting the immigration status of more than half a million Haitians, which comes into effect on or before 5 February 2026.

This in fact appears to be the issue behind this sentence in the USCCB "Special Message" linked yesterday, "We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status." This missates the situation that the "temporary protected status" was never permanent, and it also neglects to note that the Catholic NGOs that were enabling the exploitation of migrants and disruption of communities also lost the federal funding they were using to do this.

The economic reality of immigration waves is that they lower wages. The repeated instances of systematic resettlement of third-world low-wage workers in US communities show that they benefit certain employers and other local businesses at the expense of social cohesion and overall prosperity. When the low-wage workers disappear, either permanently, as in Springfield, OH, or temporarily, as in Charlotte, NC, it displays the distortion these policies place on local economies. I asked Chrome AI mode to explain what the current pontiff's namesake, Leo XIII, advocated in his encyclical Rerum Novarum. It answered in part,

• Right to a Just Wage: Wages should not be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved worker and their family in reasonable comfort. This concept laid the foundation for the idea of a "living wage" in Catholic social teaching.
• Right to Rest and Reasonable Working Hours: Workers have the right to reasonable hours, adequate rest periods, time off for religious obligations, and shouldn't be forced to work on Sundays or holy days.
• Right to Safe Working Conditions: Employers are obligated to provide work suited to each person's strength, gender, and age, ensuring health safeguards and safety from bodily harm. He specifically condemned child labor in factories as it interferes with education and proper development.

Pope Leo seems to be unaware that the US bishops, in some measure due to the influence of Catholic NGOs that are enabling low-wage policies that are hurting both native and migrant workers, are pushing him into a position that contrdicts Catholic social justice principles.