In January of 1948, a plane crashed in central California’s Los Gatos Canyon, killing 28 migrant farm workers and four flight crew members. Newspaper accounts provided the names of the crew members but referred to the 28 migrant workers, who had been ordered to be deported to Mexico, simply as “Mexicans” or “deportees.” The migrant workers – the deportees – were buried anonymously in a mass grave, nameless and forgotten. They were not treated as human beings but as “illegal aliens.” They weren’t people but statistics. This plane crash motivated folk singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie to write perhaps his second-most famous song (after “This Land is Your Land”), “Deportee: Plane Wreck at Los Gatos.” The song has been recorded by many artists through the years, including Judy Collins, the Kingston Trio, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Nanci Griffith, and The Byrds. Guthrie protested the dehumanizing way that the migrant workers were treated, including failure even to acknowledge their names: “Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita, Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria; You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane, All they will call you will be ‘deportees.’” I had been thinking about this song during the recent National Migration Week in the United States, which culminated in the World Day of Migrants and Refugees on Sunday, September 29. This column does not make any specific policy suggestions, as I fully acknowledge what a difficult issue it is. Instead, I am suggesting that the extreme voices on both sides of the debate do two things. The first is to appreciate that neither porous borders nor impenetrable walls is a solution to the problem. Good immigration policy will not happen through overheated rhetoric and blind adherence to rigid ideology. The second plea is that, without regard to their status, we recognize people who migrate as human beings, the vast majority of whom are motivated by making better lives for themselves and their families. And they have names. “The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon, A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills, Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? The radio says, ‘They are just deportees.’” For us Catholics, the way we frame the debate is crucial for seeking a reasonable policy. We must begin by considering migrants in the way that God called Israel to see the strangers in their midst. “You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you,” God commanded Israel. “You shall love the alien as yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt” (Lv 19:34). Israel’s mistreatment in Egypt is the paradigm for how Israel should not treat migrants among them. Hospitality, rather than oppression and exploitation, is our mandate. With this directive, the Church expressly acknowledges both the propriety of persons to immigrate from one country to another and countries’ responsibility to guard the well-being of their resident citizens. This means that we should welcome the stranger among us, on the one hand, while acknowledging the necessity of an orderly and rational immigration policy, on the other. And it means that migrants have an obligation to honor the terms and conditions of good immigration policy, including respect for reasonable immigration regulation and the laws of receiving nations. A presumption to welcome the immigrant means that we should not situate the debate primarily in nationalist terms. Too often, appeals to national borders are thinly disguised nativism or outright xenophobia. This is not to say that we simply open the borders without any policy considerations. Rather, we must begin with the rebuttable presumption that all who seek to enter should be welcomed. This presumption is, of course, subject to various prudential considerations. For example, refugees from political or religious persecution should have priority over economic migrants. The former are often fleeing for their lives, while the latter are seeking better lives. This is not to say that economic immigrants should be turned away. But the test for their admission is different from that for refugees from persecution. Blindly “building walls” is not consistent with this distinction. But neither are open borders the solution, especially when many communities in a receiving nation are overwhelmed by numbers of migrants that the community cannot support. We must not ignore the strain that immigration often puts on the assets of cities and other locations receiving them. Good immigration policy will not allow groups of migrants to be imposed upon communities that have neither job opportunities nor social services infrastructure sufficient to welcome them in a humane way. Nor, of course, should we be the repository of violent criminals from foreign prisons. Both these goods – welcoming the stranger while protecting the common good – require careful deliberation and calm conversation, both of which are lacking in American public life, especially in the current presidential campaign. Both sides treat immigrants as things rather than people. From the right, they are treated as parasites and criminals, to be deported without regard to any consideration of exigencies. To the left, they are nothing but anticipated votes – political pawns in a bitter partisan game. “Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards? Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit? To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil And be called by no name except ‘deportees’?” In the United States, we need comprehensive immigration reform that considers the humanity of immigrants and the well-being of the receiving community. As Catholic Christians, this must begin with a presumption that the immigrant is welcome among us. That presumption is qualified by prudential considerations but always with a view toward hospitality and generosity. And regardless of their status, we must never simply refer to our fellow humans as “deportees,” “aliens,” or “illegals.” They are people. They have names. Kenneth Craycraft, an OSV columnist, is an Associate Professor of Moral Theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology in Cincinnati. The post Both Sides Exploit Immigrants Like Things; Catholics Cannot appeared first on Today's Catholic.