On The Immorality Of Illegal Immigration
by Father Patrick J. Bascio

Pub. Date: September 2009
232pp

Synopsis

Father Bascio presents a strikingly different perspective on illegal immigration from that of most Christian clergymen. He turns his spotlight on the harm of officially tolerated illegal immigration to America’s own struggling workers in the form of joblessness, shrinking wages and poorer working conditions. African-American workers, already plagued by job discrimination, bear the heaviest burden of the illegal invasion, which locks them out of many workplaces or drives wages below acceptable levels.

The chronic non-enforcement of immigration laws is no accident: Congress has little stomach for ending something so profitable for their most powerful donors and the voters they can muster. The author fears that many committed Christians are blinded to these abuses by their church leaders’ preoccupation with charity toward illegal aliens, while ignoring the plight of millions of low-wage Americans. He deftly rebuts the self-serving myth of employers’ and politicians’ that illegals “do jobs Americans won’t do.” Bascio also sees the profit motive behind legal immigration policies that lure the third world’s best and brightest to America, stripping poorer nations of their physicians, teachers and scientists.

As a Catholic priest, the author admits the unpleasantness of taking a position not shared by his Church’s hierarchy, which is driven by the prospect of rising membership. Bascio sees unchecked illegal immigration as having grave consequences for overall U.S. tranquility: disdain for the rule of law, street gangs, document fraud and identity theft, staggering welfare and education costs and creeping “Balkanization” that threatens the national principle of EPluribus Unum.

Father Bascio’s book is a resounding appeal to Christians to re-examine their churches’ conventional view of illegal immigration and consider the hardship it brings for fellow Americans and its dangers for the nation as a whole.
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Charity in Excess
by Anonymous
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November 10, 2009: This book reminded me of an admonition to Christians by Christian realist thologian Reinhold Neibuhr: “We are called to be fools for Christ — but not damn fools!”

Author and priest Patrick Bascio makes clear in a relatively short book that the acquiescence in illegal immigration now preached to Americans by Christian leaders is a counsel of immorality. The real victims of explosive, tolerated illegal immigration are America’s own low-wage workers, whose daily struggle for even menial jobs, survival wages and adequate low-cost housing, public education and other public services for their families is compounded by the competition of half a million additional illegal immigrants each year.

But even better-off but now sorely pressed Americans, are feeling the decline of education and public services while they face ever-higher local and state taxes. At he same time they feel the declining security in their communities brought on by rising immigration-related crime and fraud. Can the judgement by Christian leaders that such policy outcomes as “moral” or “just” be sustained?. The author tells us in this succinct, hardhitting book that it cannot. Committed Christians genuinely seeking peace, order and stability in their communities and the welfare of their less fortunate brethren should rightly work to end illegal immigration, not accept and encourage it.

A MUST READ FOR AMERICANS
by msMS
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November 09, 2009: Father Bascio puts in understandable terms the ethical, social and moral issues that underlie the question of illegal immigration. The book should be mandatory reading for all members of Congress and our nation’s religious leaders.

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