Table Talk

A theology professor looks back on conversations about immigrants with Midwest Catholics.

Several years back I found myself in a small city in the Midwest doing ethnographic field research at a Catholic parish. I went there to learn how an influx of immigrants had changed the life of the parish. Ethnographic research involves embedding oneself in a community, building relationships, and listening to people in a disciplined way. I spent many months listening to both Euro-American Midwesterners who had lived there for generations and Mexican immigrants there for about a decade.

At dinner one evening, I sat down at the table of a Mexican couple in their 30s and their two teenage children. The teenagers dutifully shook my hand before they fled to their bedrooms to play video games or phone their friends. The couple asked me what I thought about the upcoming presidential election. They liked the Democratic candidate, they said, but the husband, ever the jokester, reminded me, “But without papers we only vote at this dinner table.” A few weeks before that, I was in the passenger seat of a minivan driven by the parish’s volunteer youth minister, who was a Mexican immigrant and an opinionated mother of young children. She gave me a ride home while my car was in the shop, noting to me the inequalities between the youth ministry program in Spanish, which had no budget, and the English program, which did. Later I went to dinner at her house, where her husband firmly directed me to repark my car in a different spot to be more respectful of his Anglo neighbors.

At yet another dinner, a gregarious white Midwesterner in his 30s distanced himself from family members who constantly complained about “the Mexicans.” Most of these immigrants, he knew, were his Catholic brothers and sisters. Still, he appreciated widespread worries about people who entered the United States without legal status. To him, that was obviously immoral. “That’s why they call it illegal,” he added, assuming that that told the whole story. In a quieter conversation at the home of another Euro-American parishioner, I listened to an older man convey his suspicions that too many Mexicans in town openly flouted the laws and were taking advantage of social services. He called them scofflaws. Coming home from conversations like these, I would reluctantly peer at the online comment section of the local newspaper’s website. It contained many protests against the “illegals,” some using overtly racist language

That entire year felt like an exercise in communal cognitive dissonance. Many Euro-American parishioners assumed that the Mexican parishioners whom they personally knew and liked were “legal” (they were mostly wrong). To them, the “illegals” were a different breed: lawbreakers, unresponsive to local expectations of behavior, “scofflaws” contemptuous of law and order. When I found myself in the company of actual undocumented persons, however, they looked to me like devout Eucharistic ministers and catechists, mothers of young children driving minivans, jokester fathers making sure children were politely hospitable to a guest, and thoughtful neighbors instructing the Anglo dude to go and repark his car.

This confounding sense of the distance between rhetoric and reality has never left me, and now it assaults our country to an extent never previously seen. As a scholar, for example, I know there is no positive correlation between immigration and crime in the United States; one study of 200 cities over four decades showed that the more immigration a place had, even illegal immigration, the lower the crime rate. Other studies show that citizens are much more likely to commit crimes. Yet now I hear not only politicians falsely asserting a connection between immigration and crime in the United States, but also some immigrants assuming it must be true.

Political disinformation has generated a kind of moral blindness, justifying outlandish conclusions. I hear fellow Catholics saying that empathy for immigrants is a sin, or that Christians need not have compassion beyond their own nation or neighborhood. I think once more about those dinners and conversations from years ago, and I want to weep.

Brett Hoover teaches practical and pastoral theology in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts. He is the author of numerous articles and three books, including “Immigration and Faith” and “The Shared Parish: Latinos, Anglos, and the Future of U.S. Catholicism.”