Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, N.Y.) recently explained the reason for his longtime support of unlimited illegal immigration.
"Now more than ever, we're short of workers," he told reporters outside the U.S. Capitol on November 16. "We have a population that is not reproducing on its own, with the same level that it used to. The only way we're going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants, the 'Dreamers' - and all of them, because our ultimate goal is to help the Dreamers but [also] get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here."
Schumer's is a curious calculation. This past year, his primary goal in the Senate has been to nationalize Roe v. Wade legislatively. Thanks to that Supreme Court ruling, over fifty million unborn Americans have been aborted in America since 1973,
And Schumer wants to abort tens of millions more.
Yet, "we're short of workers," and Chuck Schumer doesn't know why. But so what? If there aren't enough Americans to achieve a "great future in America," then we just have to replace them with illegal aliens.
Chuck Schumer's math doesn't add up, but this perpetual paradox is nothing new for the population control movement. Whatever the current crisis, we can always find abortion at the core of the movement's matrix. Ultimately, its goal for America is not a "great future," but an increasingly empty one.
Riding on the wave of the sexual revolution, the controllers' agenda has it all: feminism (a woman's "right to choose"), "alternate lifestyles" (all of them unfruitful), vasectomy as a sacrament, euthanasia, pornography, premarital sex, unmarried cohabitation, easy divorce, promiscuity, abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, polyamory, transgenderism, and more.
Anything but wholesome, faithful families with lots of kids.
Population Control is apparently good business as well. In fact, the Biden Administration now offers "benefits" for defense workers that many businesses and other institutions have offered for years: subsidized pregnancy leave and ample time for "rest and recovery" after the "products of pregnancy" have been "removed."
After all, a mother who takes a week's leave with pay to abort her child costs her employer a lot less money and trouble than the mother who takes pregnancy and child-care leave to bear her child to term and bring her home.
That loving mother's absence requires that her employer hire an expensive temporary replacement.
And there arises another paradox: such "human resources" are designed to eliminate humans, just like Chuck Schumer's math. In his years of zealous support for aborting the unborn, Schumer has worked overtime to make sure that there will never be enough Americans. All the while, he claims that there can never be too many illegal aliens.
The logical conclusion reads something like this: "unlimited abortion and unlimited illegal immigration will guarantee a great future in America." And for Chuck Schumer it has become a moral imperative.
Let's call it the Schumer Doctrine.
We note that all of the ingredients of the population control agenda conflict with the timeless moral teaching of the Catholic Church. That is, they are objective evils. They are sins .
America's Catholic bishops know this, of course, and it is their consecrated duty to teach it, "in season and out of season" (2 Tim. 4:2).
But Catholic bishops are also stalwart advocates of immigration. What do they make of the Schumer Doctrine?
In 2019, looking forward to the 2020 elections, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) declared that abortion was the bishops' "preeminent political issue."
Thereafter, however, they fell silent on the issue.
Meanwhile, the bishops' support of immigration - both legal and illegal - picked up steam. Abortion might be their "preeminent issue" in theory, but immigration is their highest priority in practice.
However, while they agree with Schumer on the desirability of illegal immigration, clearly the bishops don't share his support of abortion.
Yet, most bishops are reluctant to confront the "very devout Catholic" Joe Biden on the abortion issue, so they're not going to confront Chuck Schumer either. Nonetheless, they do support both men's open border policy .
Thomas Sowell's masterful Migrations and Cultures details how America's bishops have welcomed legal immigrants for over two centuries. But their current shift to supporting illegal immigration on such a massive scale is unprecedented.
What caused this shift?
Ten years ago, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez predicted a Hispanic "Next America." He thought immigration legal and illegal, was good for the country - and for the Catholic Church as well. Today, Hispanics constitute over half of American Catholics under the age of thirty, and that percentage is rising rapidly.
In the meantime, some 50 million Catholics have left the pews since the 1960's. Moreover, to use Schumer's phrase, the remaining Catholic population "is not reproducing on its own."
Is that due to the bishops' silence on the Church's teaching on marriage and family? Humanae Vitae , Saint Paul VI's 1968 encyclical, teaches the beauty of marriage and children, and warns against the inescapable damage inherent in the sexual revolution, fueled especially by the contraceptive pill and its inevitable companion, abortion as "birth control."
Pope Paul's teaching personifies God's command in Eden - "be fruitful and multiply." Had bishops preached on that beautiful teaching since 1968, would they need to fill the empty pews with foreigners today?
We'll never know. But it' clear that the death knell for Catholic demographics came long ago, with the massive wave of opposition to Humanae Vitae . Alas, the core of that opposition was within the Church herself, including the hierarchy. The atmosphere was so combative that Cardinal James Stafford, a young priest at the time, later described that era as "Gethsemane."
But even that opposition had precedents. In the 1960's, as historian Donald Critchlow recounts, America's bishops had already refused to oppose taxpayer funding of contraception in government family planning programs at home and abroad. Their abdication of that consecrated duty persists today. And so does their silence.
We do know that, while bishops undoubtedly oppose the Schumer Doctrine's embrace of abortion, they "accentuate the positive" - promoting immigration while laying low on Humanae Vitae and even on abortion (it's interesting to note that the pro-life movement in the United States has been entirely the project of the laity, while the Catholic pro-immigration movement is primarily a project promoted by the bishops).
In the past fifty years and more, America's bishops have increasingly tended to make the optional magisterial, and the magisterial optional.
And they focus their energies on the optional. Today, their agenda features support for, and funding from, a vast array of government programs and policies, rather than standing firm with Catholic teaching against the sexual revolution that feeds the population control movement.
That support includes support for Schumer's immigration agenda, which reflects a peculiar alliance between the bishops and Schumer. Here we have the most pro-abortion Majority Leader in Senate history saying out loud what the bishops will not say but apparently support: Americans are not having enough children, so we have to import someone else's children.
Another fascinating facet of this alliance emerged with the bishops' longtime support of federal taxpayer funding for abortion and contraception in the "Family Planning" programs included in the U.S. Foreign Assistance programs, popularly known as "foreign aid."
Bishop Howard Hubbard * of Albany was a prominent leader in the family planning effort. In 2010, as chairman of the USCCB's International Committee on Justice and Peace, Hubbard joined with other secular NGO's lobbying for federal funding to support half a billion dollars specified for contraceptives, and $65 million for abortion, in foreign aid "family planning" programs.
When I asked Hubbard how he could support such immoral initiatives, he assured me that Catholics could disagree with his decision after "prayerful consideration," but he did not apologize for his position. And support of those foreign aid bills is still the official policy of the USCCB today - and Chuck Schumer supports them as well.
It's curious. On the one hand, while welcoming to our shores millions of illegal aliens from Third World countries, the Schumer Doctrine supports "foreign aid" programs that fund abortion in those same countries. Are our bishops really on board with this?
Perhaps it's time for America's Catholic bishops to reconsider their priorities.