Poll: Catholics Reject Church’s Pro-Migration Policies

Migrants of different nationalities, mainly from Central and South America, who make up th
Patricia Castellanos / AFP via Getty
Neil Munro

A plurality of Catholics want less immigration, contradicting the bishops’ activist support for President Joe Biden’s mass migration, according to a June 2024 report by a church-affiliated survey team.

Forty-three percent of 1,342 self-identified Catholics said they want the inflow reduced, according to a summary by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University.

Just 23 percent favor more migration, even though 37 percent of the respondents said they are Latinos and 41 percent said they are Democrats. Just 30 percent said they were Republican.

Twenty-three percent said they want migration to be raised, and 34 percent said they want it to be kept at its current level.

Just one in five told the pollsters that they thought migration was an unalloyed good:

One of the pollsters at CARA wrote:

Respondents generally said immigration was making things worse, with some exceptions. The areas where immigration was seen as making matters worse are: crime (56 percent worse and 7 percent better), taxes (50 percent worse and 15 percent better), the economy in general (48 percent worse and 24 percent better), and social and moral values (38 percent worse and 21 percent better). A plurality, 40 percent, saw immigration as having little effect on job opportunities for themselves or their families. But 39 percent saw immigration as making food, music and the arts better in the United States, compared with 16 percent who said these have been made worse.

“Among those most likely to believe immigration is a good thing for the country were Democrats (28 percent) and those aged 18 to 34 (27 percent). Republicans were the most likely to believe immigration is a bad thing for the country (34 percent),” said the pollster, Mark Gray.

His report was headlined “Survey: U.S. Catholics are divided on immigration—even though they know church teaching on it.”

The Pope and his U.S. deputy,  Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, have repeatedly complained about Catholics’ growing pushback of migrants — including orthodox Muslims — into their homes.

“The people in that [New York] parish … rebelled and said, “Absolutely not, we will not have them here,” Dolan complained in December 2023, as the poll was being conducted.

Dolan understands the issue because his Catholic-affiliated groups help to fly, feed, and shelter migrants in Americans’ neighborhoods, despite the economic, pocketbook, housing, and criminal damage done to Americans.

But he rejected the criticism as bigotry, as he asserted he and other bishops get “hate mail … saying, ‘We’re tired of you bishops being hung up about the immigrants, and we’re not going to support you anymore.’”

“I am honored to receive criticism and to be maligned for the defense of the immigrant,” he said.

In recent months, many reports show that the church-supported, progressive-directed inflow of migrants is killing many Americans and thousands of migrants. , and also inflicting massive economic damage on ordinary Americans, including on the parishioners who fund the church.

The church poll was skewed to maximize support for the bishop’s pro-migration policies. It was conducted during 2023 Christmas and provided little or no information about the mass inflow of Biden migrants.

A Harvard/Harris poll in December 2022 showed that 67 percent of Republicans and 87 percent of Democrats thought the southern inflow in 2022 was less than a million people. A third of Republicans and a quarter of Democrats thought the inflow was less than 250,000, even though the number was more than 10 times larger, or roughly 3 million.

Also, the survey includes a wide range of Catholics, many of whom are not religious. Twenty-eight percent said they “rarely or never” attend mass, and another 28 percent said they attend mass “a few times a year.” Forty-seven percent said they are not at all involved in parish activities.

The poll spotlights the nation’s turn against the federal government’s economic policy of Extraction Migration.

In New York, 62 percent of Catholics described legal migration as a burden, and just 27 percent describe it as a benefit, according to an October poll by Siena College for the New York Times.

A 52 percent majority of New York’s Jews told Siena College that migration is a burden, shortly after Arab migrants took to New York streets to celebrate the killing of more than 1,000 Israeli Jews in October 2023.

Since the October 2023 attack and the subsequent cheerleading, the normal support for migration from pro-migration Jewish leaders has been muted. 

“I’m just constantly surprised that there does not seem to be enough leadership in the Jewish community that says immigration is our issue,” Ruth Messinger, a leading Jewish politician in New York admitted to the Israeli Haaretz newspaper. She added:

[I’m] surprised there aren’t more such people and leadership positions in the Jewish community, saying any version of ‘My family came here in need of a new place to live, the United States offered a haven for many, many Jews in various decades, for the last several hundred years – and by the way, times when they didn’t – and we want to be a more welcoming nation.

A majority of Americans say migration is an invasion as the public rejects the Cold War-era narrative that declared the United States a “Nation of Immigrants.”

 

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