Originally published at National Catholic Register
While the nation remains locked in a political battlefield over immigration, a far more pressing issue is being ignored: What happens after immigrants arrive?
Every year, about 2.6 million foreign-born individuals legally settle in the United States — enough to fill 43 football stadiums. Yet their challenges and concerns beyond entry are left out of the conversation.
As a Catholic priest and pastor at a parish community consisting mainly of African and Latino immigrants, I know firsthand that there are more immediate concerns than the immigration debate. Among these concerns are how to balance responsibilities between home and work, how to manage newly found wealth in the U.S. in a way that avoids wasteful spending and consumerism, and how to guard children against the sexification and secularization of the public-school system. And yet, these concerns are nowhere to be heard in public discourse.
This deficiency is what Sicilian Bishop Emeritus Domenico Mogavero from the Diocese of Mazara del Vallo, Italy, which saw massive immigration from Africa in the last decade, called Il problema del dopo (“The problem of the aftermath”), by which he meant the problem of integration.
According to the Pew Research Center roughly 7 in 10 of
