Immigration and the American Church

SAN DIEGO, CALIF. - Last week the American bishops met here to pray, study and reflect upon the role of the bishop in the New Evangelization. But before they began, the Latino leadership of the American bishops devoted their attention to the emerging new America, on the pressing subject of immigration reform.

At Our Lady of Guadalupe parish in Barrio Logan, a heavily immigrant district south of San Diego on the way to the Mexican border, Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento and Bishop Richard Garcia of Monterey held a press conference to endorse the immigration reform bill in the U.S. Senate, a bipartisan effort to ensure border security and provide a path to citizenship — over a 13-year-period — for the 11 million estimated illegal immigrants in the U.S. the vast majority of whom are Latino.

“Our nation has a stark choice,” said Archbishop Gomez. “We can maintain a system that fosters illegal behaviour and undermines the law, or fashion one that provides incentives for legal behaviour and is based upon fairness and opportunity.”