Close Reading Pope Leo On Migration
A quiet but deadly serious attack on most rich nations' policies
Pope Leo addressed a joint session of Spain’s Congress yesterday and had some striking things to say about migration, from around 16:00 in this recording. The following translations are mine.
The situation of migrants and refugees requires a response that looks at people, addresses the causes that force them to leave, and goes beyond the mere management of flows.
In the first place, migrants and refugees aren’t a subclass of people: they are people, and thus bearers of the concomitant rights. The phrase “beyond the mere management of flows” is notable. “Flows” is the language of hydrology and logistics, the vocabulary of states treating migration as a problem of volume rather than a question of persons. Leo places limits on that framing before he has says anything else. He returns to the question of why people migrate later and accepts that states can manage immigrant flows, but he doesn’t sound too thrilled about it.
From this arises a double demand for social justice: to offer safe and legal pathways, respectful reception, and real possibilities for integration…”
Safe and legal pathways is a direct rejection of ocean crossings in rubber dinghies and the hundreds of drownings in the Mediterranean and Atlantic every year. Note that he says “safe and legal” together: the implication is that if legal pathways don’t exist or are systematically blocked, states bear some responsibility for the lethal ones that fill the vacuum. Respectful reception means what it says. And real possibilities for integration means that immigrants cannot be expected to be content doing the difficult and dangerous work that locals reject, living as a permanent underclass, grateful simply to have arrived.
…and at the same time to promote the right to remain in one’s own land, working so that no one has to leave their home because of a lack of peace, security, or decent living conditions, including economic inequality and the effects of the climate crisis.
This must be read carefully in the context of the previous sentences. Rich states cannot say “Oh but we’re doing our best to help them stay where they are” as an excuse for blocking immigrants. The “right to remain” is not presented as an alternative to migration but as an additional duty, layered on top for states that are already expected to provide pathways of entry. The passage also implies a right to emigrate not only to flee persecution but in search of economic betterment and to escape the effects of climate change. This is a significantly broader basis for migration rights than most Western legal frameworks and political consensuses currently recognise.
In recent years, increasingly dangerous routes have highlighted the very high cost of this reality, so often hidden or ignored. Many people continue to fall victim to traffickers and smugglers who take advantage of their desperation. It is necessary to strengthen prevention, rescue, and assistance for victims, especially within the framework of regional and multilateral cooperation.
We are back to safe and legal routes. The observation that this cost is “hidden or ignored” is a direct rebuke to governments and media ecosystems that treat drownings in the Mediterranean as background noise. The reference to traffickers and smugglers is an accusation: those industries thrive precisely because legal routes are closed. Demand does not disappear when you shut the door; it finds a way, however risky.
No nation can face a challenge of this magnitude on its own. For this reason, a coordinated, solidarity-based, and effective response is essential, capable of guaranteeing protection, reception, and real opportunities for integration for those who migrate. When the institutional response becomes close, fair, and coordinated, borders cease to be places of abandonment and can become spaces for the responsible protection of human dignity.
Pretty much the opposite of the direction the EU is travelling.
Leo acknowledges the right of states to manage their borders, but he does so in a way that strips it of most of its usual justifications. What he constructs across these remarks is something closer to a hierarchy of obligations: the duty to offer safe and legal routes comes first; the duty to receive people respectfully and integrate them genuinely comes second; the duty to address the conditions that produce migration in the first place comes third; and only in that context does the question of how states regulate entry arise. Border management is not refused but it is demoted, placed at the bottom of a moral order in which human dignity is the governing principle.
Leo is not simply asking states to be nice. He is identifying a series of failures. The lack of legal routes leads to cruelty outsourced to the Libyan authorities and to mass drownings in Mediterranean and Atlantic waters.
It is worth pausing on how radical this is. This was not a homily or a papal encyclical addressed to the faithful. It was a speech to a sovereign parliament, and it amounted to a systematic dismantling of the policy framework that most European and many other rich country governments currently operate under.
The right to emigrate for economic reasons, the right to flee climate change, the insistence that integration must be real rather than nominal, the explicit condemnation of what happens when legal routes are closed: none of this sits comfortably with the border policies of most European states, or the European Commission. Delivered in Madrid, it sat rather more comfortably with the government in front of him.
The Sánchez administration is currently in the process of regularising the status of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants. That programme has been fiercely attacked by the opposition and produced signs of unease in Brussels. Leo’s framework provides something close to a moral vindication of that approach.
In further debates on immigration policies , Sánchez will no doubt have recourse to quoting from the Pope’s remarks yesterday.
It is not every day that a socialist head of government finds the Bishop of Rome, Christ’s Vicar on Earth, making his argument for him, from a seat in his own parliament.