Pope Francis on Immigration

I hate it when Catholics sort of treat the Pope as just another kind of political talking head whom you can call a moron at your pleasure. He's not. I think he's deeper, thinker than that. I think he's a better person than that. And I basically I kind of view the question of, you know, criticism of the Pope along the lines that I would if my own father were doing something that I didn't like or I didn't

disagree with, How would I talk about it? If my father were a prominent figure in public life and we're doing something I disagreed with, I would probably ninety nine percent of the time maintain a respectful silence. And if I were pressed into talking about it, I would, you know, do so with love and affection and respect, because I love my father and I have that kind of an attitude towards the Pope, as I think the early Christian community would have had towards the apostles towards Peter. I'm

also not really anyone in a position of authority. Paul, an apostle, was able to engage in fraternal correction to Peter when Peter was sort of being kind of hypocritical in his treatment between some of the more some aspects of the early Christian community that wanted to maintain Jewish customs and other aspects of the Christian community as represented by Paul and Peter. Really that we're saying, no, Christianity

is open to the gentiles. We don't need to insist on following the We do not need to insist on following old law customs, kosher rules for food, et cetera. So Paul was able to critique Peter. But I'm not Paul. I'm not an apostle, I'm not bishop, I'm not a priest.

I'm a guy yapping on the radio, and I'm not even necessarily someone with you know, I am a lawyer, so I think I have some basis for discussing the immigration question a little bit, and I want to sort of talk about the tensions within Catholic teaching on this. So Pope Francis issued just yesterday this letter to the Bishops of the United States talking about the immigration question, where it seemed as if he was directly responding to

Jade Vance. Jady Vance had mentioned this idea called the Ordo amorris, the notion that there is a certain ordering of love, of care and concern that everyone is supposed to have. That this is just sort of obvious, natural common sense, but also as a principle within Christianity that you have certain kinds of obligations of care and duty to the people closest to you. To care for someone in need in your immediate sphere is a more urgent, pressing obligation to you than caring for someone who is

half a world away. You know, I'm going to put food on the table and clothing on the backs of my own children before I do that for someone else's children. If I neglect and my own children for the sake of someone else's children, that would not be good and JD.

Vance is just basically making the point that we've I think the broader point that Vance has been making that I think has been missed by some of his more liberal Catholic interlocutors, and that frankly, you know, the Pope did not mention Vance by name, but he certainly didn't mention this topic, and it's obviously a reaction to Vance.

I think the point Vance is making is that American immigration policy has been so solicitous to welcome people from other countries that it has resulted in detrimental outcomes for our own citizenry. We have been so eager to let in immigrants from other countries, whom, by the way major capitalist big business can mistreat in the labor market. Okay, why do we want Why do all these big companies want a bunch of H one B visa holders to come to America from India to work, you know, to

work engineering jobs. It's not out of an altruistic desire to lift up the world's benighted masses, you know, and bring in you know, wonderful people from India to do this work. Part of it in many, many companies is you can get away with paying an h one B VISA holder less money, treating them worse because an H one bvs A holder, it's almost like this indentured servitude. If they lose their job, their rear end is going

back to India. So rather than hire an American engineer who's an American citizen, who if you treat him badly, if you don't pay him well enough, he can say, well, screw this, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go get another job. If you mistreat them, you know, I'm an American worker could maybe say, hey, you're violating labor law, you're not paying me what you owe, or you're violating overtime rules, or you're you know, discriminating against me on the basis

of you know, exra y category. No worry about that with H one bvs A holders. Why have Americans picking your crops when you can have someone from Mexico, someone from Mexico who is more leary about unionizing because maybe they're only here on a green card maybe or well green card is implies permanent status, but you know, maybe they're only here on a work visa temporarily as long as they have a job and they don't want to lose a job. Maybe they've overstayed their visa, so they're

in a dicey situation. They don't want to lift their nose above the water and give someone an occasion to call ice or call it immigration authorities to ship them back.

I think there's this fundamental problem with American immigration policy, that this fundamental injustice that's being perpetrated, that that people on the bleeding heart left don't seem to want to acknowledge that the reason why people like tons and tons of illegal immigration and even in some cases a wildly over expansive legal imageation market, is not out of an altruistic desire to keep and care for the world's oppressed masses, or even like you know, I think there is some

obligation that wealthy countries have to take in immigrants, to allow people to migrate relative with relative freedom as long as people follow legal processes, and the United States is incredibly generous as far as it's immigration policies. There are other countries that just say a total pause, we're allowing in no new legal immigrants. In the United States never does that. We are constantly allowing in hundreds of thousands

of legal immigrants every year. It's just that there's a process, and I think a lot of illegal immigration is motivated not it's not just a sense of how could you be so harsh and draconian in, you know, enforcing American immigration law to stop illegal immigration. This is so harmful, This is so mean to the people who came here. Why do you think they're here in the first place.

Why do you think you have so many of these entities wanting them to come here, to overstay their visas, to be here on a you know, a tenuous either legal but only if you have a job or illegal basis. It benefits big time businesses, that's whom it's benefiting, and it is to the detriment of American workers. I see no reason why other than proximity to Mexico, the California agriculture industry came to be dominated by just immigrant, by

mostly ununionized immigrant labor. Other you know, the UfW tries and the UfW is really a shadow of is really not a very significant force anymore. It's not like most I don't think most farm workers are members of UfW. Why it developed like that rather than the automobile industry. It's not like guys who were working the line at Ford were not working hard. It's not like that isn't

a physically taxing job. But why did the American automotive industry develop that way and not I don't know California agg industry. Now that there's a seasonal nature to agricultural jobs. I get it that maybe it makes it hard to sort of build a house and settle down in one spot, but and should certainly there are a lot of other

contingent factors. But this sort of vaguely racially, this vaguely racist idea that only Mexicans are able to pick to do the backbreaking labor of picking vegetables is I think ridiculous. There are plenty of examples of Americans who did backbreaking physical labor. Who do backbreaking physical labor. You know, why are coal miners all Americans? Why are you know these

are hard jobs that Americans do. It developed that way in California because California is close to Mexico, and it is clearly financially advantageous in certain respects to have non citizens people here quasi legally, people here illegally. So I think none of that is being discussed, and I guess it's a little bit. It's a little unrealistic to expect Pope Francis, of all people, to be able to even

get in the weeds of that. He is an Argentinian priest bishop who in Rome now, who is getting his information about the American immigration situation from the most liberal bishops in the United States. Pretty much. Of course, he's not going to give a very two sided presentation to the debate. Now. He reiterates Catholic teaching on the subject, which, if you look at Catholic teaching on the subject, I think can result in a variety of different approaches Legitimately

between disagreeing people to the immigration debate. I think there's a lot of room for reasonable people of goodwill within the Catholic Church to disagree on the parameters of immigration enforcement. I think the bishops have been in America, and by the way, both bishops, not just bishops who are very liberal. I had I had Bishop Joseph Brennan, the Bishop of Fresno, on this show. I can assure you all there is nobody more socially conservative you're ever going to meet in

your life than Bishop Brennan. All Right, he is a die hard pro lifer. He is you know he's for one thing, He's also just been a very dear friend to me, a very faithful Catholic, and not like a total He isn't like this caricature of the modern day left pro immigration, you know, racial fraudster who thinks that any immigration enforcement whatsoever is just tantamount to racism and responds to any argument about immigration by saying, well, America

is a country of immigrants. No, He's like, yes, I really think we should deport anyone who's in this I think deportations are okay. I think anyone who's committed a

crime needs to be deported. I think Bishop Brennan has legitimate concerns about the fairness of people who were allowed to stay in the United States for long periods of time, who were allowed to stay for such a long time that they set down roots, now all of a sudden, all being deported because guess what, probably a lot of his parishioners in the Sanawaquin Valley are like that, And now a lot of those people are scared. They are worried,

they're concerned. They've made a life here, they're not sure what they would go back to in Mexico or wherever. He has concern for those people, and unfrankly, I do too. I think that there is this fundamental unfairness that's resulted in American immigration law as a result of non enforcement of immigration law that happened for the past four years.

And I think that's what frustrates me, is that the people from whom Pope Francis is getting all of his information about the American immigration scene are some of these most liberal bishops I think, who didn't raise a peep about the problems that President Biden had been creating at the border, exacerbation of the problems with people making phony asylum claims, which has been I think the chief I think that, more than anything has been the chief problem

at the border during the Biden years, the fact that we have an asylum system in America. The asylum system, it's not supposed to be a shortcut to immigration. It's supposed to be you're in a bad, exigent circumstance in you're you're putting a raft together made out of old tires to float from Cuba to Miami because Castro is gonna murder your family. You don't have time to or the ability maybe to, you know, apply for a work visa in the United States. You lash a raft together,

you float from Cuba to Miami Beach. You've come ashore, you get picked up by immigration authorities and you say, hey, I know I didn't come here the normal legal way. I am seeking asylum. Castro is gonna kill me. Can I come to the United States and we have a

system for that. Instead, what we've got are people marching all the way up through Central America, through Mexico, through safe parts of Central America, safe parts of Mexico, to say, ah, I need asylum, when really what they're moving for is an economic opportunity. Which that's fine, but you shouldn't be using the asylum system to effectively cut the line. So

what do we do with these people? The Biden administration said, ah, let them come in, and so we have wave and wave and wave and wave of people where the Biden Administration's like, ah, we're just not going to catch people sneaking across the border illegally. We're not. We're gonna let people in while we sit around and say we're going to adjudicate their asylum claim, give them a court date three years from now, that they're never going to show up for and so now we just have all these

people in the country. But basically, this on again, off again situation of American immigration enforcement I do think is unjust for a lot of people who wound up staying here on the basis of American presidents saying yeah, you can stay. So when we return, I want to just talk about maybe some dynamics about Pope Francis and things like that, just to try to give some context for the whole thing that is next on the John Girardi Show.

I'm discussing the recent letter that Pope Francis sent to the bishops of the United States with regards to immigration, and I want to talk about this just to give some context for people. I think the perception of probably most power talk listeners is Pope Francis is a left wing lunatic and he hates Donald Trump. It may be that he doesn't like Donald Trump. I wouldn't call him

a left wing lunatic. I think he has been very concerned about immigration questions in many contexts worldwide, that that is clearly something that really animates him. I wouldn't say that he is unconcerned about social conservative questions. He's been very few people in the world have been more anti trans than Pope Francis, who, in spite of various whining

wringing their hands Catholic lefties said absolutely not. Nope, the catholicarick absolutely posed it and actually helped develop Catholic teaching over the course of his pontificate with regards to these emerging trends and emerging issues with regards to transgenderism, all in ways that are completely excellent and good. So I

want to give him credit where it is due. He's unfailingly pro life, has reiterated, honestly with far harsher language than I've ever used his opposition to abortion in context after context. I will also, though, note this, with regards to this most recent interaction, I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that Pope Francis didn't write a word of it. That maybe he signed it, but he didn't write it. Pope Francis is eighty eight

years old. I don't need to tell any American about you know, when someone's getting into their late eighties, you know, it's kind of a difficult thing to expect them to be operating at a super high level. We just saw this with a guy who was our president who was clearly senile the whole time. And I'm not saying Pope Francis is senile. I don't think he is. I think he's actually still fairly I think he's still probably pretty darn mentally sharp. But you don't have the same fastball

at eighty eight. I don't care how mentally sharp you are, you don't have the same fastball at eighty eight. I think that's why Pope Benedict the sixteenth resigned the papacy. Some of you may remember this, that Pope Benedict in twenty thirteen resigned. Was the first pope in like five hundred whatever, how many years, I forget how many centuries was the first pope to voluntarily resign his office. And I think he did so because he saw what had

happened under John Paul the Second. John Paul the Second, I think had a very strong sense of his duty and obligation to serve the church. And in spite of the fact that he had Parkinson's disease and was suffering very badly and was exhausted by the efforts of the papacy, he said, no, I'm going to carry this cross like Jesus did, and that's it. I'm not going to resign.

And I think Pope Benedict was saw that and saw obviously he very so deeply admired John Paul the Second, but I think he also realized maybe that's not the best thing for the church to have a pontiff who's well into his eighties, who cannot be as on top of things as a younger man. And you know, popes are living longer than they used to. Okay, in the fifteen hundreds, if a pope dropped dead at age sixty eight, no one was surprised. Popes are living to be they

have really good health care. They can live to be ninety. And paup Francis only has one lung. He had some kind of lung disease when he was young and had one of his lungs removed. The fact that he's got bronchitis right now. So again, I'm not saying Pop Francis doesn't know what he signing, but I will say he is reliant on other people. And I think I don't know if there's some kind of a anti American bias that's just present among Europeans and South Americans of which

he's kind of both. And I think he just sort of has this. You know, he actually said this in a press conference he had on an airplane recently when he was asked about Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and he said, one of them wants to kill all the babies, and one of them wants to get rid of all the migrants. And that's it's sort of just his viewpoint on things that he thinks abortion is bad and he thinks he has a vague sense that American conservative's position

on immigration is bad. But he doesn't have the level of sort of nitty gritty detail understanding of it, I would guess. And you know, maybe I'm being as umptuous.

Maybe he does. Maybe I'm just wrong. I just don't think he has the level of nitty gritty detailed understanding of like, hey, do you realize how President Biden, like royally screwed everything up, completely screwed up the asylum system and people cutting the line via the asylum system, letting them come into the country unchecked, everyone's miensing their court dates,

people overstaying whatever kind of parole Biden gave it. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah, bah blah blah, the long term economic harms to American the American working class that's resulted from immigration, the benefits to capitalist enterprise to from illegal immigration that people just pay their workers less, on and on and on, the sort of in depth America specific details about the immigration question that I just I think it would be unreasonable to expect him to fully understand.

And I think he's got a lot of advisers around him who want him to talk about want him to push him to talk about this, who seemingly didn't push him to talk about things like abortion or whatever. So at the end of the day, that's my thoughts. I respect the Pope, I love the Pope. I'm never gonna blast him on this show. I want to treat him the way I would my own father. I hope that's what I've done. When we return. Is jd Vance initiating a constitutional crisis of ignoring the court? Next? On the

John Gerardi Show. Jd Vance the other day had a fairly simple statement that's been blown way out of proportion into literally people calling it a constitutional crisis. I mean, I guess it's not much of a surprise to anyone given the level of lunacy and historyonics that people were into during the first Trump administration, where everything Trump did was the end of the world, that we you know, get more of the same in the second Trump administration.

But and it's especially comical to see the American Bar Association. So for those who don't know, the American Bar Association is a joke. It is completely dominated by its actual you know, leadership is dominated by left wingers, and they are are now at this point where they're totally fine with accepting even the most wildly left wing, outlandish liberal legal ideas and theories humanly possible that that would just get laughed out of an actual, real life, real world courtroom.

Stuff that's like too liberal for the actual Biden doj The American Bar Association was cheering the notion just a few weeks ago that Joe Biden could create a constitutional amendment to the United States could declare something to be a constitutional amendment to the US Constitution, an amendment to the US Constitution via tweet. When Biden declared an think they equal rights amendment is part of the Constitution, It's like, yeah, well, there,

it is part of the Constitution now. Spite of the fact that it you know, didn't get another states to ratify it within the specified time frame, and a bunch of states de ratified after initially ratifying it, and blah blah blah blah blah. So the American Bar Association's ridiculous. But they issued this big statement just earlier that the Trump administration this unprecedented attacks on the law because he's firing a bunch of government employees and because of this

statement by JD. Vance. So what advanced say? Vance said, quote, judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power. Now people took that to mean the president is going to ignore the courts, and frankly, this is a you know, I think a lot of people like to think of our constitution as this sort of perfect, sort of fail safe, perfect mechanism with no holes, no lacune, no sort of gaps. As far as well, what would happen if this happened?

And this has actually been kind of a long standing thing. The checks and balances that exist within our constitutional order as we have it today is Congress rights the laws. The president executes the laws. The president can only execute those laws that Congress writes. The president has some ability to use some level of executive discretion about how exactly he's going to enforce the law within the parameters of what Congress has written. So Congress has some ability to

check the ability. Congress has the ability to check the power of the executive by delineating the area of its activity. You will enforce the law. This is the law you will enforce. You must stay within these parameters. You go outside these parameters, you're outside the law. And the judiciary has this sort of power to check everyone by in an individual case or controversy, declaring that a certain law violates the Constitution. The problem is, how does the judiciary

enforce its decisions. Well, it really only does so through the good graces of the executive branch of government. And this has led at different times in American history to these kind of little mini constitutional crises. Andrew Jackson famously ignored a Supreme Court ruling. He said, the Court can

issue its decisions, let them enforce it. And the thought is that basically we have followed this pattern that the Supreme Court has the last say about what is and is not consistent with federal law or consistent with the Constitution, and the executive follows it. That has been the most

majorum the way of our ancestors. That has been the custom that has been kept, an important custom, long standing custom, but effectively it's only in place with the goodwill of the executive And there have been times when the executive has or would tell the Supreme Court to go shove it. If the Supreme Court were to intervene and say, in wartime, the president cannot move the first Infantry battalion from this area to that area through an emergency court ruling prompted

by a soldier filing a lawsuit or something. Clearly that would be a wrongful infringement on the authority of the president. The president is the commander in chief of the military. He is solely given that responsibility by the Constitution, and if the Supreme Court were to purport to venture into that territory, the President would be I think completely within his rights to tell the Supreme Court to go shove it. And I don't know if we are quite there, but boy,

I think we're getting close. With some of these lower court rulings that have been coming out with regards to actions by the Trump administration. You had one federal judge who said basically that Treasury Department positive information he was trying to block. The effort was to block Elon Musk and the DOGE guys from accessing certain kinds of Treasury

Department information. And the ruling from this one Federal District court judge was to limit all political appointees in the Treasury Department from seeing this information, from accessing this information, all of them. That includes like the Secretary of the Treasury not being able to see Treasury Department stuff. How is that not a wild infringement by the courts on

the clear prerogatives of the executive branch. And by the way, liberals have cheered the fact that the judiciary shouldn't infringe on executive prerogatives. In twenty twenty two, a case Biden b. Texas. This was a case where President Biden had gotten rid of the Trump Remain in Mexico policy. Basically, American lawses win an asylum seeker comes to the United States, they are to be detained. Well, we don't have enough cells

to detain people. So the policy enacted by President Trump was, look, you got to remain in Mexico while we adjudicate your asylum claim. And this led to fewer flimsy, fraudulent asylum claims. President Biden changed it. He said, Oh, we're going to let you into the country while you wait for your asylum claim. And so people just go into the country their asylum There are way too many asylum seekers, not

nearly enough immigration judges and lawyers. Their court date for judicating their asylum claim wasn't for several years, and then we just let these people into the country. They're in the country, and they're never shown up for that court. That has been one of the massive reasons, one of the massive flaws in the Biden immigration policy was that. And it got to the point where Biden was using

like the Border Patrol CBP one app or something. I think that was the app to sort of like make that process even more quick automatically just giving these people parole is purporting to give these people some kind of parole from their necessary legally mandated detainment and just letting him into the country. So a bunch of states sued the executive branch to say, hey, you're violating the law. You're letting all these people in in violation of American

law that says you have to detain these people. Well, The Supreme Court ruled against the States in twenty twenty two in a case called Biden v. Texas, and Chief Justice Roberts wrote Article two of the Constitution author the executive to engage in direct diplomacy with foreign heads of state and their ministers. It part of remain in Mexico.

It relies a little bit on Mexico's good graces. Accordingly, the Court is taken care to avoid the danger of unwarranted judicial interference in the conduct of foreign policy and decline to run interference in the delicate field of international relations without the affirmative intention of the Congress clearly clearly expressed. That is no less true in the context of immigration law,

where the dynamic nature of relations with other countries. Who requires the executive branch to ensure that enforcement policies are consistent with this nation's foreign policy. Now, in that case, Roberts was saying, well, the judiciary is not going to tell the president what to do in something that's within his province foreign relations. So while the Court is from a peace in National Review by Andy McCarthy, that's kind of a good summary of this. While the Court can

and should say what it thinks, the law is. We must always remember that the justices are right because they are final. They are not final because they are always right. As is well known, the High Court has in its history reversed itself on a number of significant matters, often because prior rulings were egregiously wrong Roe v. Wade, And the Court has a doctrine storry decisis a major aspect of which assumes that some decisions are wrong and wrestles

with whether they should be retained. Nonetheless, so I don't I think that this notion that Vance is saying something revolutionary, I think is ridiculous. He's not. He's saying there is a proper role for the executive and the judiciary shouldn't be overstepping it, and if it, and frankly, I'd love to see some old Supreme Court cases overturned to establish the authority of the executive one to fire members of the executive branch and actually oversee them, which I think

Trump might be setting up here. That's really what is just that, that's what I hope is accomplished by these clashes Trump is having with some of these lefty federal judges. When we return my seasonal effective Disorder aka being sad

that there's no football next on the John Jrwardy Show. Folks, my problem when we get to the Super Bowl is that any feeling of excitement I have about the game gets immediately overshadowed by the looming dread, the dread that basically there's no football for the next what is it, five months? No? Seven months? Oh gosh, there's no football until like late August at best. It's devastating. I'm so wildly bummed. The Super Bowl was a pretty much a

huge snoozer. I kind of like Kendrick Lamar, but I recognize that like this is not you know, anyone over the age of fifty has no idea what's going on. No aspect of it was particularly entertaining. Of the whole Super Bowl was particularly entertaining. And now I'm left with this reality of basically, I'm seven months away from Notre Dame playing its first game, and I'm sure many of you are in a similar situation where this stinks. But what you do have? You have Fresno State basketball, which

is having the worst season in fifty years. You got Friends of State baseball, though, which is great, and you've got all president State sports here on iHeartMedia, So catch that anytime. And hey, even the basketball team, the men's basketball team, you know, still a fun time going to the Save Art Center. That will do it for John already shows see next time on Power Talk