A friend was joining me for Christmas Mass. We planned to attend my parish, a more reverent than average middle-class Dallas church. (It still has the altar rail, and when folk take communion in the hand, they do so kneeling, pal!) It’s not a very mixed neighborhood, so there’s no call for masses in Spanish, Filipino, Italian, Ukrainian or any of the languages routinely offered back in my old New York City liturgical haunts.

But I screwed things up. When we got to the last service offered, it was three-quarters over. The holy day schedule there was different than Sundays’. Frantic not to miss Christ’s Mass on Christmas, we scoured our smartphones. We found the last Mass in Dallas — over in one of the dodgiest, most crime-haunted neighborhoods, and only in Spanish. “Well, this will be an adventure!” I said as we got on the highway. Neither of us knew the language.

Christmas at a Spanish-Speaking Church

When I entered the crowded, 1950s-era church I was pleasantly surprised. The inside was lovely and reverent. Then I remembered: This was the parish where a past leftist, laxist bishop (now a Grand Panjandrum at the Vatican!) used to exile orthodox priests. Those good men who’d built strong parishes were turned out and shipped away. But they hunkered down in their new church and worked till their health was almost ruined. They’d restored a beautiful sanctuary, they taught solid doctrine in English and Spanish, and offered Mass in Latin.

Once they’d put that bankrupt parish on a solid financial footing, the bishop yanked them out and sent them to even more distant exile. That’s how our Church works these days. No good deed goes unpunished.

Since my friend is half-Asian, I was literally the only person of pallor. My rusty Italian and years of attending Latin Masses helped only just a little. I couldn’t keep up with the prayers. The sermon, while short, I found incomprehensible. So I took the time to meditate a bit on the start of the Gospel of John. What did it really mean to say of Christians that we are “born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God”?

I enjoyed the service thoroughly. I was grateful the parish offered something so late in the day. Charmed by the smiling, perky, boisterous little brown babies. Impressed by the broad shoulders and strong backs of hard-working laborers, the patience of the mothers who kept their children happy and quiet. It was great to see the place packed to the rafters with people praying and singing. I felt far more at home than I would have at some lily-white Episcopalian ritual, with sonorous hymns and tasteful organ preludes instead of mariachi music.

What Would They Think?

I did find myself wondering what these friendly, welcoming people would think if they knew I’d co-authored The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration. Would it matter that I’ve hung a tapestry of Our Lady of Guadalupe on my bedroom wall? That neither that book, nor anything I’ve ever written, contains any animus against immigrants as people? 

I wondered how I’d explain my thoughts to them. And decided that I would write it up here today. If anyone would like to translate this into Spanish and post it somewhere that Latino immigrants might read it, I would be grateful.

Dear Fellow Christian at Christmas:

First, thank you for your genial welcome at this beautiful service. You made me feel at home. What we share as fellow believers far transcends any cultural or political differences. However, it does not erase them. While I hope you and I meet in the next life in the peaceful Kingdom of Jesus, there are some things we ought to talk about here in this life, in a fallen world of scarcity and conflict.

I’m not interested in policing which of you entered the U.S. legally or not. I wouldn’t hire illegal workers under any circumstances, but I’m not an agent of ICE. It’s not my job to report people. I don’t fantasize about mass deportations. My concerns are about the future. I want to stop anyone, of any race or culture, from entering the U.S. illegally. And I hope to reduce to near-zero the number of low-skill immigrants entering this country legally.

I have good reasons for these positions, which have nothing to do with racism or xenophobia. Let me list them briefly, with the most important ones first. Please consider them as if you were still in your native country, debating its immigration policies. Because America is no different. We have as much of a right to pursue patriotic policies as anyone in any land.

Most of You Vote Wrong

My first political issue, all through my life, has been legal protection for unborn children. They’re protected back in your birth country, aren’t they? I’m glad of that. But a majority of people from your country who move to mine and vote, support politicians who want abortion legal, right up through infanticide.

I know people have other reasons for casting votes. Different priorities. The Democrats promise more government programs for poor people, and most of you are poor. They also claim to represent racial minorities against the “white establishment,” whatever that is. And that trumps defending innocent life for most immigrant voters.

I don’t respect that, and I don’t want people with priorities like those entering my country and voting that way. I remember white Catholics in Louisiana giving excuses like those for supporting pro-abortion racist David Duke. Everything else about you might be perfect, but I don’t want one more pro-abortion voter entering the U.S. ever again if I can help it. Not if he had the cure for cancer stuffed in his knapsack.

Religious liberty, traditional marriage, and countless other cultural issues ought to make more of your people vote Republican. The fact that they don’t suggests that economic self-interest and tribalism prevail over basic Christian principles in your political choices. And we frankly don’t need to import more of that. We’ve got plenty of Kennedy voters in Massachusetts already.

Our Bishops Are Using You

I know that the Catholic bishops don’t agree with me. They get some 40 percent of their income from federal non-profit contracts, mostly for serving immigrants. And they lose 40 percent of native born Catholics to apostasy, on average. So they depend on people like you abandoning your churches at home, and filling their churches here. And their coffers.

I don’t respect that, and I don’t want to enable it. It lets our slack, secretive, self-serving bishops continue to coast, instead of reforming things. They can steal sheep from Latin America, and pretend they’re dutiful shepherds.

The Welfare Glue Trap

When my ancestors got here (not that long ago), there wasn’t a welfare state that bribed people not to work. That rewarded teenage girls for getting pregnant, generation after generation. Or offered to kill their babies, no questions asked. (Unborn Latino kids are safer back at home.) There weren’t multicultural activists teaching them to resent America, and refuse to assimilate. If those things had been here, we might never have risen from the very bottom rung of the working class. In fact, we’d have fallen below it, and stayed there, as too many immigrants now do.

Speaking of the working class … . We have already outsourced many of the low-skill jobs that blue-collar people like my dad once took. Jobs that high school dropouts could take to get a start in life. That young men returning from the military might take. That ex-cons might get once they’d paid their debt to society. Millions of jobs like that we shipped to China or Haiti. Those that still remain, that simply must be done in America?

By letting in a million or more mostly unskilled laborers every year, we’re making sure that the wages stay low. That blue collar workers, even in a booming Trump economy, can’t really better themselves. That you, as someone already here, will never see much of a pay raise. Why do you think Cesar Chavez fought against illegal immigration?

Please give these issues a little thought the next time you vote. Or even the next time someone lazily labels as “racist” Americans who want policies that in Mexico or Honduras people would consider simply … patriotic and sane.

Merry Christmas to you and your family, and a happy, prosperous New Year.

 

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration.