INS Official, Archbishop on Illegal Aliens: Diverse Views

Archbishop Roger M. Mahony, head of the nation’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese, and Harold Ezell, director of the country’s busiest immigration office, are both concerned about the thousands of immigrants pouring into Southern California.

But their concerns, although both cite religious convictions, are vastly different.

“The world has arrived at the doorstep of each parish in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles,” Mahony said in his first pastoral letter in January, urging the 2.56 million Catholics in the area to help welcome immigrants.

Not every Catholic heeded his advice, of course. Like other Southern Californians, some grumble about paying taxes to clothe, heal and educate the immigrants. Others, recent arrivals themselves, fear competition from those here illegally.

Many find themselves in agreement with Ezell, Western regional commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, when he angrily complains about reports of pregnant women sneaking across the Mexican border to give their newborns instant American citizenship.

“They ought to wrap them in swaddling clothes and send them back to where they came from,” he said.

Not ‘Above the Law’

Ezell, the son of an evangelical minister, has denounced the stance taken by many clerics regarding immigration, saying: “Just because you wear your collar backward doesn’t mean you are above the law.”

Mahony suggests there is a higher law to consider, saying that good Christians should disregard the legal status of immigrants and think instead of their needs.

“People who come to us seeking shelter, clothing and food we will welcome and take care of regardless of their residency status,” he said. “The gospel does not require us to ask for documentation.”

Ezell says good Americans have no choice but to protect their flanks, with the alternative being chaos and decline.

“If America doesn’t do something to protect her borders, we will become a Third World country, with unemployment and uneducated people,” he said.

“We’ll have diseases that were eliminated decades ago. We’ll have housing shortages and natural resources shortages. We can’t take all the world’s needy. We can’t absorb them.”

Ezell, echoing the government view that illegal aliens from Central America are fleeing poverty rather than repression, also says that church leaders truly concerned about helping them should provide aid in their homelands.

“They can’t tell people to stay and just grin and bear it when they see people killed all the time,” Mahony replied. “We’ve had priests and religious women killed in all these countries.

“The idea that everybody wants to come to the United States, well, I’ve talked to an awful lot of people, and the impression I consistently get is that nobody really prefers to leave his homeland.

“I mean the country of your birth, where you grew up, where you were raised, where all your ties are, your allegiance, family; no one prefers to do that. But sometimes they are driven to it.”

Mahony thinks the government should grant an “extended voluntary departure status” to all Central Americans in the United States, allowing them to stay legally until their countries return to normal.

Both men question the so-called sanctuary movement by churches and government agencies to declare themselves places of refuge from federal law.

Mahony criticized a vote by the Los Angeles City Council, declaring sanctuary status for the city, as ambiguous and misleading.

Not surprisingly, Ezell complained even more strongly about the resolution, which has since been rescinded.

Called Voted ‘Irresponsible’

He called the largely symbolic vote “irresponsible,” warning that it would encourage more illegal aliens to enter the city, and threatened to get the Reagan Administration to cut off federal funds to the nation’s second-largest city.

Mahony also expressed reservations about churches that declare themselves sanctuaries--an action recently taken with considerable fanfare by the oldest church in the city, Our Lady Queen of Angels.

“I’m very, very concerned with the motives of that,” he said. “I think you jeopardize those people, you make them almost pawns in some type of a political struggle.”

Again, Ezell was much more adamant. “The example of how a minister should conduct himself is the example of Jesus Christ,” he said, “and I cannot see Jesus Christ standing on the steps of any church to encourage those to break the law.”

Mahony pointed in reply to instances in which Jesus “was upbraided by the Pharisees” for breaking the Sabbath to cure the sick or feed the hungry.

“One only has to look at the Gospels,” he added, “and see Jesus repeatedly upset with laws that are burdensome to the real human situation.”