"Immigration tends to happen when people do not judge they have a chance to survive and raise a family in their native place," Bishop Flores said. Immigration is often the most realistic human response to "a moment of crisis" involving hardship and fear.
"Today, immigrants are often pawns in a harsh power-game that involves governments on one side and criminality and corruption on the other," he said. "In some parts of the world the distinction between the two is not so easy to see."
Sovereign control of borders is a good thing, but it is not absolute, and "gives way in view of the right of persons to survive," he stated.
Bishop Flores rejected an immigration policy based on "purely economic criteria."
"The fact of global economic displacements, of war or lawless violence in numerous parts of the world must be addressed in a way that reflects a realistic response to a proximate threat to human life and its proximate goods," he said.
The bishop stressed the foundational role of the family and the U.S. bishops' longtime effort to oppose deportations that result in the separation of parents and children.
"If families are separated, the whole fabric of the culture unravels," he warned. "The breakdown of the family structure vitiates the social good because it directly affects the formation of the young."
Framing the discussion around crimes and misdeeds of some immigrants is often a rhetorical "short-cut" to genuine discussion. Rather, Bishop Flores advocated a generous response to immigrants that can also accommodate legitimate concerns for stopping criminal elements.
"A great many immigrants that I know are seeking permission to stay in the United States because they are fleeing the very same kinds of criminal elements and activities that we rightly do not want causing harm here," he said.
"One of the tragedies of the mutually exclusive narratives, and of our anemic discourse is that we do not currently have a legal way to distinguish between immigrants who are fleeing criminals, and immigrants who are criminals."
Bishop Flores recounted the story of a 16-year-old Honduran teen whose parents were either dead or gone. The teen had been deported from Mexico and had sought entry to the U.S. five times, for fear of deadly gangs.
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"He wanted to have a life, he said, a job, maybe a little house and get married," the bishop recounted. "And if he didn't make it to the U.S., he would try to live in Mexico. At least there, he said, you can have a life. I think of this young man often."
The bishop said he wanted to tell the teen's story not to stir sentiments, but to let people know that there are hundreds of thousands like him who live "at the edge of human society."
"They are the ones told there is no room for you here, and there is no room for you anywhere else," Bishop Flores said. "He is just one young man. But our political activity as Catholics must keep faith with him if we are to keep faith with Christ."