Here's a long ready on the immigration debate from a religious perspective. It talks about how religious idealism is driving the immigration discussion within church circles (similar to what it did for pacifism in the past).
Quote:
We have succumbed to immigration idealismto the vague hope that we can live in a world free of conflict and violence, in which authorities need not bear the sword, and neighbors need not build fences. This view, like the pacifism to which it is related, dreams of an unfallen world. "No more death! No more exploitation!" Pope Francis exclaimed during a Mass at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2016. He was echoing Pope Paul VI's declaration before the United Nations in 1965, "Never again war, never again war!" These statements express our highest aspirations; in them we have a summary of paradise. But we were long ago expelled from paradise, and pretending otherwise will make our world into a closer approximation of hell.
Immigration idealism has less in common with the Christian faith than with sentimental liberalism. "In this liberalism," wrote Niebuhr, "there is little understanding of the depth to which human malevolence may sink and the heights to which malignant power may rise. Some easy and vapid escape is sought from the terrors and woes of a tragic era." Though they invoked the gospel, what pacifists really believed in was the Enlightenment myth wherein man "needs only to return to the order, harmony, justice, equality and equanimity of nature" to escape "the disasters of history."
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/05/immigration-idealismQuote:
A just immigration policy will recognize that whereas the Church welcomes all comers, no nation can. It will insist that migration policy give preference to those who share the history, culture, and creed of the welcoming nation. It will recognize that those who are, by reason of history and belief, hostile to the host culture cannot really aspire to join it. European states should not forget that they are, in Pierre Manent's phrase, societies "of a Christian mark," impressed with an indelible character. The same is true of America.
Above all, a more realistic immigration policy will recognize that not everyone can or should be admitted to any political community. Despite what some seem to believe, neither the United States nor Europe is a Celestial City from which no weary pilgrim can be turned away. Sentimentality about migration should be rejected as firmly as anti-migrant bigotry.
While advocating realistic and Christian migration policies, the Church must not forget that the most important migration is that of souls into heaven. In Exsul Familia Nazarethana, Pope Pius XII speaks of the need to "provide all possible spiritual care for pilgrims, aliens, exiles and migrants of every kind." He praises the Church's long history of care for migrants, including the Catholic colonizers of the New World. (Pius's view is not easily reconciled with today's sentimentalities.) According to the Pew Forum, 19 percent of the foreign-born, Hispanic adults living in the United States have given up their Catholic faithhalf before they arrived, half after. These are souls lost at sea, spiritual migrants stopped at the border between earth and heaven.