Higher Education, Mission and Undocumented Students

With this column by guest author Dr. Elizabeth Collier we begin to examine one of our nation’s most contentious issues: how we respond to immigration into the United States. We begin with Professor Collier's introduction of Catholic Social Teaching on migration and its impact on the core constituents of our colleges and universities--the students we teach. In the future we will explore how Catholic Social Teaching’s view of immigration impacts Human Resources and the culture of a Catholic university or college. We are pleased to welcome Professor Collier as author of this column. She is Assistant Professor of Business Ethics in the Brennan School of Business at Dominican University. Her teaching and research interests include Business ethics, Catholic social ethics and U.S. immigration law and policy.

Craig B. Mousin

Higher Education, Mission and Undocumented Students

Catholic institutions of higher education have a treasure trove of resources to draw from when considering how to concretely and practically live out their mission in the world. Catholic social teaching (CST) is one of these resources. Most often, when CST is taught or called upon for guidance, the focus of the lecture, book or discussion is on the foundational concepts of the teaching: human dignity, common good, preferential option for the poor, the three types of justice, solidarity, and the principle of subsidiarity. Although these concepts form the core from which much more specific reflection and writing on particular issues is drawn, rarely are people aware of the more in-depth development and reflection on particular topics.

One relatively unknown, but robust area of teaching within CST is on issues related to migration. The Catholic Church has developed a body of teaching and a network of direct ministries for people who are away from their homes for almost any reason—foreign students, refugees, internally displaced peoples, nomadic peoples, those who work with the circus, airlines or trucking companies, victims of human trafficking—anyone who is voluntarily or forcibly “on the move.” Additionally, various institutions within the church work for law and policy changes at local, national or international levels, in accordance with the official body of teaching that has developed on migration over the last half century.

The teaching itself is grounded in the many stories of migration and hospitality in Scripture, the long-standing ministerial tradition of the church to give hospitality to those away from their home, and in the development of official, modern Catholic social thought. Specific Catholic teaching on migration can be briefly summarized in the five rights enumerated in Strangers No Longer, a pastoral letter written by the U.S. and Mexican Catholic bishops in 2003: 1. People have a right to find opportunities in their homeland. 2. People have the right to migrate to support themselves and their families. 3. Sovereign nations have the right to control their borders, except when this control is exerted merely for the purpose of acquiring additional wealth. More powerful economic nations…have a stronger obligation to accommodate migration flows. 4. Refugees and asylum seekers should be afforded protection. 5. The human dignity and human rights of undocumented migrants should be respected. (para. 34-38). An additional schema used by the bishops, coming from John Paul II, is the process of communion, conversion and solidarity. If I answer the call to show hospitality to the migrant and enter into relationship with the migrant, I will have a conversion experience. This experience will further my commitment to and relationship with the migrant and with God, resulting in a commitment to be in solidarity with those on the move. This is part of the journey toward salvation: communion, conversion and solidarity.

Four of the rights enumerated above relate to one of the most contentious areas of public discourse in the U.S.: undocumented migration. The public rhetoric on this issue usually follows one of two paths. Proponents of migration tend to focus on the push/pull economic and labor factors that result in people seeking work in the U.S. even though there are often no legal means of doing so, which results in migration without legal permission to enter or to work. Those on the other side who want to restrict migration usually focus on the fact that the person broke the law when they entered without permission—they are “illegal aliens” in this view. Restrictionists believe that this shows disrespect of the law, which is detrimental to the respect of our overall legal system.

As seen above, CST does believe that states have a right to regulate their borders. This right comes with a caveat though. The concept in CST of human dignity places the human person in a position that precedes the state. The rights and dignity of the human person, his/her flourishing, and the systems that support or deny that, are at the center of the moral deliberation. CST looks at the many facets of undocumented migration and reflects on these complex realities in light of the whole of CST. How is human dignity realized or diminished? Are the laws governing this just? What is the impact on the many sending and receiving communities involved?

At the federal level many complex immigration bills have been proposed during the last five years, but none have passed both houses of Congress. Because neither side in the debate sees much hope for reform at the federal level, local initiatives have proliferated. Much of the media coverage of these initiatives has focused on places where anti-immigrant groups or people with financial interests linked with the prison industrial complex have provided resources to state and local communities for passage of laws and ordinances restricting almost any contact with a person who is undocumented. There are, however, many unreported, or underreported, stories about the work of many on behalf of the undocumented, particularly young people whose parents brought them here when they were children.

Catholic colleges and universities have a long history of serving immigrant populations. For some, that was the impetus behind their founding. Having taught at three Catholic universities in the Chicago area, I can attest anecdotally to the number of students who discussed the priority their immigrant parents placed on them attending a Catholic university. In the last several years Catholic universities around Chicago have worked on several different initiatives that relate to college-age students who are undocumented, but who have the skills and aspirations for education and a better life for their families. Catholic university presidents joined other institutions in supporting an Illinois Dream Act, designed to provide private scholarships and resources that will support undocumented students who want to pursue a college degree. Financial, academic and institutional support were given to graduate students in law and social work, and undergraduate students, all from different Catholic universities, for the development and implementation of a conference designed to educate their peers on immigration law, in depth Catholic teaching on migration, and training in advocacy efforts. (It exceeded expectations, with several hundred faculty, staff and students attending.) Universities have provided scholarships for those who would, if they were able to legalize, obtain access to college, but who are not presently eligible for federal student loans. Trustees, presidents, administration, staff and faculty have provided moral and other types of support for these students, including those who are arrested for non-violent protest. These are only a few of the many ways in which these institutions embody CST on migration. These activities also engage the participants in the deeper process of communion, conversion and solidarity described above.

Such support is not without significant risk. In light of the challenging economic conditions and the competitive college market, publicly engaging in support of a vulnerable, relatively voiceless group of people who are vilified by groups with extensive resources, could potentially cost an institution in everything from applications for admission to development opportunities, depending on how the media portrays such activities and the position of applicants, donors and others on migration issues. The mission of these universities calls them to nothing less, however. These activities are only a few of the many ways in which Catholic colleges and universities embody the tenets of Catholic social thought in the wider community and fulfill their mission and tradition.

Dr. Elizabeth Collier

August 29, 2011

The presence of immigrants at our universities and colleges will lead to questions regarding employment of students and immigration law’s employment compliance requirements. In subsequent columns, we will return to some of the issues raised by the intersection of Catholic Social Teachings and immigration law. In the meantime, we invite you to respond to this column through our blog at http://hr-forum-ccu.blogspot.com/ . We look forward to your responses.

We invite you to post links of your mission statements as well as HR and compensation philosophy documents on our blog if you would like to share them with our readers. This will permit a fuller discussion of how mission and CST influence the employment process. Please let us know if you would like us to link to any of your institution’s documents.

The opinions expressed in this column are ours alone and do not represent DePaul University’s or Dominican University’s.

You may find the link to Strangers No Longer at:

http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/immigration/strangers-no-longer-together-on-the-journey-of-hope.cfm

If you would like additional information on the history of the DREAM Act and state responses, see, Michael A. Olivas, The Political Economy of the DREAM Act and the Legislative Process: A Case Study of Comprehensive Immigration Refortm, 55 Wayne L. Rev. 1757 (2009) at:

http://www.law.uh.edu/ihelg/ab540/Olivas-political-economy.PDF

Human Costs and Moral Challenges of a Broken Economy

In keeping with the spirit of Labor Day, you can read the U.S. Bishops’ Labor Day Statement at:

http://www.usccb.org/about/domestic-social-development/upload/Labor-Day-2011.pdf

Is It Just the Horns of a Dilemma?

Rev. Craig B. Mousin

When we started these columns on Mission and Human Resources, we assumed that although our particular institutions possess distinctive Missions based on particular histories and founding principles, all were grounded in Catholic Social Teaching (CST) that resulted in shared understandings of how our institutions approached labor and employment issues. Developed over hundreds of years, CST has responded to and helped shape the relationship between employers and employees throughout the world. With the birth of the Industrial Revolution, masses of peasants moved to the cities and faced backbreaking work under intolerable conditions that led to injury and early death. Fueled in part by the expansion of laissez-faire theories of economics and the transformation of work from farm to factory, Catholic scholars and writers addressed issues of a living wage and asserted worker rights to join associations to help balance power in the workplace. The European revolutions of the mid-19th Century frightened many with the fear of chaos and further bloodshed. Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum sought to balance the rights and hopes of workers with the need for economic development in offering guidance past the violence of the century.

In the United States, leaders such as Msgr. John Ryan helped reinterpret CST into the political life of this nation raising up the idea of distributive justice and minimum wage protections early in the 20th Century. Ryan’s work helped introduce the justice principles of Rerum Novarum into the many progressive policies of the New Deal. In the latter part of the 20th Century papal encyclicals addressed the Catholic response to the major ideological battle between communism and capitalism, fostering the common good through alternative strategies not raised by the competing forces of the Cold War. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops weighed in with Economic Justice For All again reinterpreting the encyclicals through the lens of democratic capitalism of the United States. In that pastoral letter, the bishops supported the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining recalling Pope John Paul II’s conclusion that unions were an “indispensable element of social life” while adding, “no one may deny the right to organize without attacking human dignity itself.” At the end of the 20th Century, St. John’s law professor David Gregory could confidently report, “For more than a century, the Catholic Church has been the world’s most eloquent and consistent voice for the rights of workers. In the contemporary era of the transmogrifying workplace, and in cyberspace’s global village, the social teaching of the Catholic Church remains the timeless, and most timely, beacon for fundamental human dignity.” (footnote omitted)

But when a world-wide recession dominating the first decade of the 21st Century combined with increasing unemployment as jobs migrated across national boundaries undermining long standing industries, the national debate became polarized as governors and legislatures attacked public unions challenging the very right to bargain collectively. Yet the relative absence of voices raising CST in this national debate raises a question whether Gregory’s sanguine 20th Century conclusion merits credence in this new day. Is CST robust enough to guide Catholics and their institutions in responding to these new challenges? Silence or neutrality seems to have taken its place. In reporting on the arguments raised by New Jersey Governor Christie’s challenge to his state’s public unions, one national news story only mentions “Catholic” in noting that Christie’s children attend Catholic schools, with nary a mention of whether CST informs his decision making. Within Wisconsin, Milwaukee’s Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki released a letter noting that the Church has long favored the right to organize, followed by a letter confirming the position by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Both letters acknowledged that unions also have a responsibility to make sacrifices if so required by the common good. Madison’s Bishop Robert C. Morlino responded that each side had important equities to support its claim to the common good, but the debate comes down to choosing the proportionality of the sacrifice required by those in the union who have expectations of the contracts they have lived by versus the sacrifice of the entire population given the economic crisis the states find themselves enduring. He added, “As Catholics, we see both of these horns of the dilemma as good, and yet the current situation calls many of us to choose between these two goods. Thus the WCC [Wisconsin Catholic Conference] has taken a neutral stance….”

Certainly, CST does not preordain a simple answer to the horns of this dilemma, but more important, CST does not limit the debate to be boiled down to a simple choice between these two options. Instead of permitting the complexity of CST to necessitate simplifying the choice to proportionate sacrifice, why not call upon that very complexity to explore why the Church has historically stood on the side of workers to organize? Instead of abdicating the field, why isn’t the debate more fully exploring why the Church has come to favor workers’ associations and whether those circumstances remain valid? Where are the voices in the academy explaining how the Church came to this position, why it continues to do so, and what principles help one’s conscience determine an appropriate response to such a complex problem?

Pope Leo XIII saw the negative consequences when the state outlawed trade unions and prevented collective bargaining as one reason for attempting to balance power and permit engaged negotiations. Under CST, work is seen as essential to human flourishing, recognizing the dignity of each person. In employment situations of unequal power, organizing as a group helps further each individual’s ability to participate, thus encouraging his or her own development while contributing to the greater good. CST calls for collaborative pluralism and an array of “intermediary institutions” that collectively seek the common good. Unions are an indispensable part of that collaboration. Current debate suggests that public unions have too much power against weak politicians who give away the store, and thus, the argument goes, we need to reduce that power. Yet the solution posed by those Governors and legislatures seeking to take away the power, is to give the power back to those politicians to unilaterally set wages and conditions of work, even though it was the weakness of those very politicians to bargain responsibly that allegedly caused the problems the states now face. Moreover, that solution reduces engagement and dialogue, eliminating the potential for new ideas through additional voices at the table. CST encourages more voices to bargain responsibly in seeking solutions to the problem.

CST’s dedication to workers’ rights to organize recognizes that collective bargaining also reveals more benefits than just the bottom line of the contract payout. Encouraging participation of all workers through their unions leads to greater creativity, not only in the workplace, but in the work product enjoyed by the public. CST envisions the advancement of art and public goods that better all society.

CST critiques the alienation of workers where employees become commodities. When the public debate constricts to just the dollars saved by reneging on contracts, the workers become widgets, commodities to be traded, equal to the goods they produce, and rated simply by the dollars they are paid. Through collective bargaining, unions can negotiate for more than just benefits and seek conditions that dovetail with CST’s principles of the work environment as a place for human flourishing and service to the greater common good. This would seem especially important in the public realm where the negotiations involve more than simply the employer-worker relationship.

CST also emphasizes the integrity of a contract. Just because politicians were not the ones who negotiated the initial promises does not mean they can avoid the public obligation of past promises made. CST calls for more honesty than a shrug that times have changed.

CST’s discussion of a living wage reminds us that workers need to provide not just for their families, but also have savings to cover their needs when their age prevents them from working or sickness takes its toll. The current restricted debate of economic sacrifice of the few versus the many ignores the commitments made under contract to organized labor to help ensure their livelihoods upon retirement. CST can again enliven the debate.

Some scholars have pointed out that when unions were strongest in the 1940s and 1950s, our nations experienced the “Great Compression,” fostering the most equal society in terms of wages in our nation’s history. CST favors an orientation toward equality as vast income disparity denigrates dignity and disrupts the common good. If work helps humans flourish, the common good demands that all workers flourish. Equality in society furthers this important goal of CST. Today, however, in contrast to the peak of the Great Compression, at the very time unions are under their greatest attack, we live in one of the most unequal societies in our nation’s history. The bargaining power of unions helped provide more equality and social mobility that truly benefited the common good. Ironically, it is the generation of children that prospered during this time of the Great Compression that have since become the leaders who seek to dismantle the very institutions that helped make us a more equal society and gave them their ability to participate in public life.

The metaphor for neutrality is wrong. The traditional understanding of sitting upon the horns of a dilemma means that we face two questions, both with untenable answers. Choose either answer and one ends up impaled on a bull’s horn. CST breaks through the binary choice of conservative-liberal, pro-public union or anti-public union, economic efficiency or deficit. The answer is not simply dollars and cents. Surely CST encourages us to seek responsible bargaining by all sides, reexamination of work in the 21st century, how we provide for the aged and sick when work becomes impossible, and how to hold elected and administrative officials to the integrity of the contract. CST provides more intellectual resources for resolving these issues than to remain neutral regarding whose sacrifice is greatest. If we are to conclude with David Gregory that the Catholic Church remains vigilant in the defense of workers in the balance of the 21st Century, those of us in the academy should become collaborators and set forth the great strengths of Catholic Social Teaching to address these fundamental problems rather than remain as neutrals on the sidelines.

We invite you to respond to this column through our blog at http://hr-forum-ccu.blogspot.com/ . We look forward to your responses. We invite you to post links of your mission statements as well as HR and compensation philosophy documents on our blog if you would like to share them with our readers. This will permit a fuller discussion of how mission and CST influence the employment process. Please let us know if you would like us to link to any of your institution’s documents.

The opinions expressed in this column are mine alone and do not represent DePaul University’s.

March 9, 2011

Resources relied upon in preparing this column include:
David L. Gregory’s article, “Catholic Social Teaching on Work,” can be found at 49 Labor L.J. 912 (1998). His footnote 1 at page 912 lists many of the sources of CST on employment and labor unions.

Rerum Novarm can be found at: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html
Economic Justice for All can be found at: http://www.osjspm.org/economic_justice_for_all.aspx. See paragraph 104.

The comment on Governor Christie was written by Matt Bai in “How Chris Christie Did His Homework,” The New York Times Magazine, February 27, 2011 at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/magazine/27christie-t.html?pagewanted=1&ref=mattbai

Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki’s letter on trade unions in Wisconsin can be found at: http://www.wisconsincatholic.org/Right%20of%20Workers%20Statement%20Feb%2016,%202011.pdf

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops letter in support of Archbishop Listecki, written by Most Reverend Stephen E. Blaire, Diocese of Stockton, Chairman, Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development can be found at: http://www.usccb.org/comm/archives/2011/11-038.shtml

Bishop Robert C. Morlino’s statement can be found at: http://www.madisoncatholicherald.org/bishopscolumns/2083-20110224-column.html

John Ryan’s work includes Distributive Justice, The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth, (The Macmillan Co., NY, 1916). For a discussion of Rerum Novarum’s impact on United States policy, see Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 98.
For a discussion of the Great Compression, see Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal, (W.W. Norton and Co., (2007), 38-39, 49.

Regarding the issue of income equality, see, Craig B. Mousin, Frédéric Ozanam—Beneficent Deserter: Mediating the Chasm of Income Inequality Through Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” Vincentian Heritage, Vol. 30, No. 1, 59 (2010), http://via.library.depaul.edu/vhj/vol30/iss1/4/