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Wosbald
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The Right to Migrate

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Proposed UK migration law ‘will punish’ asylum seekers, Catholic group says

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Security guards stand at the migrant processing centre in Dover, Kent, England, Tuesday, March 7, 2023. (Credit: Kin Cheung/AP)

LEICESTER, United Kingdom — Another leading Catholic organization has condemned the British government’s proposed Illegal Migration Bill, which would ban migrants crossing the English Channel from seeking asylum in the United Kingdom.

The Caritas Social Action Network (CSAN) said it was “profoundly concerned” about the bill, which has drawn criticism from migration advocates and human rights organizations.

“This Bill, if passed, will not only deny those people fleeing war and persecution their right to seek safety in the UK and apply for asylum, but will punish them, based on how they came here, not whether they need protection. This would amount to an asylum ban,” CSAN said in a March 16 statement.

“The Bill would: Remove the right to seek refugee protection in the UK for those who arrive irregularly. Breach the UN Refugee Convention, of which the UK is a founding signatory. Fail to provide the safe routes we need now. Leave thousands of men, women, and children in limbo, detained, and denied a fair hearing.” the statement continued.

The organization noted that the Bill ignores Home Office data which shows that most people who cross the English Channel are people escaping torture and conflict from countries like Afghanistan, Iran, and Syria.

“Most people who make the crossing are granted asylum following rigorous checks. There are very few safe routes for refugees to come to the UK. This Bill would be turning our back on the global common good and adding to the burden on poorer countries, which receive most refugees,” the statement said.

Earlier this month, Sarah Teather, The Director of the Jesuit Refugee Service UK, said the proposed legislation is the latest measure aiming to punish refugees for the realities of being forcibly displaced.

“Refugees travel however they can and there are vanishingly few formal routes for them. To deny sanctuary to people who need it based on their mode of arrival is grotesquely cruel and cravenly dishonest,” she said in a statement.

[…]

The government has given no timeline for when it expects the Illegal Migration Bill to be passed by Parliament.


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Hugo Drax
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This here's wosbald's shitting hole.
Weenies are us.
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Post by Del »

Hugo Drax wrote: 21 Mar 2023, 15:07 This here's wosbald's shitting hole.
Pope Francis acknowledges that governments and nations have a natural duty to defend their borders and protect their citizens. Wozzie's favorite sources consistently fail to mention this.

Pope Francis urges the world's wealthy nations to be generous in welcoming refugees and asylum seekers, as we strive to fulfill our primary duty of minding our borders and protecting our citizens. This was also Trump's policy, btw. America needs the population growth and workers, as we have failed to have children of our own.

Biden doesn't care about the migrants, nor their establishment and prospering. (He just hired 87,000 new IRS workers, when we need immigration officers. There is a nine-year backlog in NYC for asylum seekers just to have their cases opened.) Biden is content to overlook the extortion, rape, and trafficking that results from giving control of our borders to the cartels. He doesn't care about fentanyl deaths and street crime. Biden sees new generations of permanently poor and government-dependent Democrat voters, and Biden says this is good.
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Correction: this here is Wosbald's and Del's shitting hole.
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The Right to Migrate

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Joe Biden’s anti-Catholic shift on immigration [Analysis, Opinion]

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Migrants wait to be processed after crossing the border on Jan. 6, 2023, near Yuma, Ariz. The Biden administration says it will generally deny asylum to migrants who show up at the U.S. southern border without first seeking protection in a country they passed through. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File)

During the 2020 campaign, presidential candidate Joe Biden called for immigration reform and a restoration of basic rights for immigrants, including the right to asylum and family unity. He offered his platform as a clear alternative to then-President Trump’s immigration policies, which featured the separation of children from their parents, the prosecution and criminalization of border crossers, and the immediate return of asylum seekers to Mexico. One of his first acts in office was to propose a comprehensive immigration reform bill; he also introduced an aid package to address the root causes of migration, especially from the Northern Triangle of Central America.

More than halfway into his term, however, President Biden has switched course on his campaign promises and has returned to some of the enforcement and deterrence policies that characterized the Trump administration.

In January, the Biden administration announced the application of Title 42 — the obscure health regulation first deployed by Mr. Trump in order to turn back asylum seekers at the border during the Covid-19 pandemic — to vulnerable and persecuted populations such as Venezuelans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Cubans.

The use of Title 42 had its intended effect: It decreased the number of asylum seekers from those four countries arriving at the southern border by 97 percent. More recently, the administration doubled down on the denial of asylum at our southern border by proposing to rewrite and reinstate another policy that had been approved by Mr. Trump before being struck down by the courts. On Feb. 21, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a rule that would deny asylum, with few exceptions, to any individual who did not attempt to garner legal protection in a country through which they traveled en route to the United States. This rule ignores the reality that “transit countries” such as Mexico have very limited asylum systems, so many immigration advocates have labeled the proposed rule as a de facto “asylum ban.”

Finally, recent media reports have revealed that the Biden administration is considering the detention of families, a practice Mr. Biden promised to end during the campaign. Many Americans should still remember the disturbing images of children being held in tiny cells, with little to eat and nowhere to sleep.

Why has Mr. Biden changed course in such a dramatic fashion, even garnering strong opposition from within his own party? In a word, politics. Polls show that the American public, while supporting positive reform of the immigration system, also wants better control of the borders. As we have seen with past Democratic administrations, the ability of mostly conservative Republicans to demagogue the immigration issue has forced Democrats to abandon our nation’s history as a safe haven for the persecuted. President Obama, for example, was known as the “deporter-in-chief,” while in 1996 President Clinton signed legislation that eviscerated due process rights for immigrants.

[…]

While the church supports the right of a sovereign nation to control its border, it equally supports an individual’s right to migrate and seek protection from persecution.

What is most disappointing is that Mr. Biden, a Catholic, should know better. As an admirer of Pope Francis, he should know that the pontiff opposes such policies. While the church supports the right of a sovereign nation to control its border, it equally supports an individual’s right to migrate and seek protection from persecution. Pope Francis has been powerfully clear on this point — and so have his predecessors.

Instead of ignoring the pope and other Catholic voices on this issue — not to mention many in his party — Mr. Biden should work with the church to come up with lasting solutions. His recent meeting with Bishop Mark Seitz, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration, in El Paso, Tex., was a good start.

It is well known that President Biden and the U.S. bishops have disagreements over several moral issues, particularly abortion. It should not prevent them from working on another one in which they can find common ground.


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Hugo Drax wrote: 23 Mar 2023, 10:05 Correction: this here is Wosbald's and Del's shitting hole.
What else is this Jesuit's hole to be used for?
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Archbishop blasts ‘inauthentic’ politics in UK asylum law debate

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A group of people, thought to be migrants, are ferried ashore by Border Force officers, from HMC Seeker, on a Border Force rib at Dover marina in Kent, England after a small boat incident in the English Channel, Tuesday Sept. 22, 2020. (Credit: Gareth Fuller/PA via AP)

LEICESTER, United Kingdom — It is “absolutely essential” that we recognize that we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper in the ongoing immigration debate in the UK, says a leading Catholic archbishop.

Archbishop John Wilson of Southwark, whose archdiocese extends from South London to England’s southern coast, said politics has to be at the “service of the dignity of the human person.”

Wilson spoke to the Catholic News podcast of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales after the launch of Caritas Southwark.

His remarks came as the British Parliament is considering the Illegal Migration Bill, which would ban migrants crossing the English Channel from seeking asylum in the United Kingdom.

[…]

“A few months ago I visited the lifeboat station at the port of Dover and heard of the incredible work they have been doing to rescue people who have taken an incredible decision to try and escape persecution, hardship, war in many cases and cross the Channel,” said Wilson.

“It was incredible to hear the testimonies of those who work on the lifeboats in Dover. They simply said, ‘Our mission has always been and will always be to save people in danger at sea. We don’t ask who they are or where they’re from.’ I was really, really impressed by that,” the archbishop said.

“And they faced a lot of criticism the lifeboat association, the RNLI [Royal National Lifeboat Institution], and to my mind they are doing and incredible work, as are the Churches and the different community organizations that work to welcome and support refugees in that part of the world,” he continued.

“And this has been a sort of great controversy and there are great political issues at stake here, which to me really don’t face the crucial issue, which is we have people before us who are in desperate need. And if we lose sight of the desperate need of the people, we lose sight of our conscience as a country,” Wilson added.

Human rights experts say the proposed legislation could violate both the European Convention on Human Rights — which is not a European Union treaty, and by which the UK is still bound — and the United Nations Refugee Convention.

The Conservative government has also come under fire for its plan to send many of the asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing, despite the African country’s spotty human rights record.

Wilson said the issues surrounding asylum seekers arriving in the UK “need humane resolution, not simply isolating people or cutting them off or rejecting them or transporting them elsewhere.”

“That doesn’t help anybody. Global solutions need countries to speak to each other and they need partnership, and they need compassion that puts into practice real solutions, not simply knee-jerk reactions that seemingly solve a problem at the expense of the dignity of human life. That to me is just preposterous,” the Southwark archbishop said.

“I think the key response is to cut through politics — politics matter, of course they do — but politics have to be at the service of the human person, and the dignity of the human person,” he said.

“Politics that isn’t at the service of the human person is inauthentic. Of course, there are other considerations in all of this — I appreciate that, I am not naïve — but when a person is in need the presenting requirement is that we reach out to them. That to me is the fundamental truth of the gospel, that when a person is in need, my response as a Christian — my response as a human being — is to reach out in love and in support.”


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A 'nation of immigrants' should identify with migrants' plight and human dignity, says Boston cardinal

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Boston Cardinal Seán O’Malley speaks on the challenges of migration and immigration at The Catholic University of America's School of Canon Law in Washington March 22, 2023. (OSV News photo/Rui Barros, The Catholic University of America)

Washington — A political climate hostile to the needs and existence of immigrants is not only morally wrong, it also weakens the structures of democratic governments, said Cardinal Seán P. O'Malley of Boston.

"As a nation of immigrants, we should seek a sense of identification with other immigrants trying to enter the country," O'Malley reminded his audience March 22 in delivering the James H. Provost Lecture at The Catholic University of America in Washington.

For the cardinal, this identification began in 1973 when he founded Centro Católico Hispano (Hispanic Catholic Center) in Washington, an organization providing assistance, including legal help, to immigrants.

"I didn't celebrate Mass in English until I became a bishop in the Virgin Islands (in 1984)," he observed. But even then, O'Malley found himself celebrating Masses late at night on cruise ships for their Filipino crew members.

"Our immigrant population contributes mightily to the economy and the well-being of this country," he added, and is a major challenge to Catholic social teaching.

Further, "States have an obligation to provide reasonable responses to immigration," O'Malley said. "280 million migrants (worldwide) conveys the scope of the problem."

Migration by those escaping poverty and violence, such as what has occurred in Venezuela, "is one of the best examples of what are called transnational problems" not controlled by state boundaries, he said.

But it requires a type of cooperation that so far is evasive, the cardinal said, since "no manner of political authority exists as a global government."

Guidance for the responsibilities of nations exists, he pointed out, in Catholic social teaching, especially about the dignity of the person. "A shared dignity is the basis of the equality of persons," he said, transcending ethnicity and wealth.

"Human rights flow directly from human dignity," but, O'Malley concluded, "The moral claims of immigrants may provide more demands than the current legal system provides."

In reference to the U.S. political climate, he said, "These divisions are most intense between Congress and the executive branch. The division is in plain sight to the country as a whole."

O'Malley, a Capuchin friar named archbishop of Boston in 2003 and a cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006, has been consistent in his criticism of national immigration policy across Democratic and Republican administrations.

[…]

The cardinal's themes on migration have dovetailed with those emphasized by Pope Francis, who taught in his 2018 teaching Gaudete et Exsultate ("Rejoice and Be Glad") that Catholics were not to treat the plight of migrants as "a secondary issue compared to the 'grave' bioethical questions."

The Holy Father said this view is not right for a Christian, "for whom the only proper attitude is to stand in the shoes of those brothers and sisters of ours who risk their lives to offer a future to their children."


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Neither faith nor news.
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Del wrote: 25 Mar 2023, 09:59
Hugo Drax wrote: 23 Mar 2023, 10:05 Correction: this here is Wosbald's and Del's shitting hole.
What else is this Jesuit's hole to be used for?
Resisting Father Martin joke....
Weenies are us.
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