A top vatican official denounced the U.S. plan to build more fences along the Mexican border yesterday, calling the plan “inhumane” and comparing the fence to the Berlin Wall.
VATICAN CITY - A top Vatican official Tuesday denounced a U.S. plan to build more fences along the Mexican border as “inhumane” and compared the project with the Cold War-era Berlin Wall.
Cardinal Renato Martino, who heads the Holy See’s office concerned with migrant and itinerant peoples, urged the United States to allow more foreigners to enter legally.“I must note, unfortunately, that in a world which greeted with joy the fall of the Berlin Wall, others are being erected between neighborhood and neighborhood, city and city, nation and nation,” he said in a news conference to present Pope Benedict XVI’s annual message about migrants.
I’m not Catholic, so I’m not even going to get into the obvious question of why the Vatican is even concerning itself with something it seems like reasonable, faithful Christians can disagree about. But I do want to point out one huge flaw in the Cardinal’s comparison of the fence along the Mexican border to the Berlin Wall–the Berlin Wall was built by an authoritarian government to keep people IN East Germany…the US is not building the fence to keep people from leaving the United States–the US is simply attempting to have immigrants come in to the United States through legally prescribed means.
I’m generally very pro-immigration, but asking people to follow some basic rules when coming to the United States doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Furthermore, comparing a fence along the Mexican border is not only innacurate, it is offensive and trivializes the impact of the Berlin Wall.