News Journal: What would the Good Samaritan have done on immigration?

I have some pretty strong convictions about the immigration issue. I have been involved in legislation and endless political debates about it for the past forty years.
I know what a huge problem it is. I know and care about the millions of people it affects. I understand and share the concerns of millions more about border security.
I get the big picture.
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As I listened to a homily by Father Kevin Nadolski at a Columbus Day mass at St. Anthony’s last week, it struck me that sometimes, like most of us, I can get a bit lost in the big picture. His words were a forceful reminder to me that our immigration issue and the refugee crisis the world faces are, at their heart, challenges to our individual sense of humanity.
I had been thinking a lot about President Trump’s “America First” policies before I went to the Columbus Day mass. I have been uncomfortable with the phrase from the first time he used it in his campaign last year, most probably because I have never forgotten my father’s strong feelings about the America First Committee.
If you are old enough, or have read some history, you will remember that this was an organization formed in the late 1930s to keep the United States out of a war with Nazi Germany.
My father was a soft-spoken man who spent his life helping children as a social worker in Philadelphia, but he got visibly angry when he told me about the anti-Semitism spread by the Committee and its supporters.
“From this day forward, it’s going to be America First. America First.” That phrase from President Trump’s inaugural address has stuck with me, and endlessly worried me, from the time he said it.
Father Nadolski clarified just why the Trump approach to immigration is so wrong.
He started his homily by recalling the parable of the Good Samaritan. A badly injured traveler lies by the side of the road, but “good” people pass by ignoring him. Finally, a Samaritan, a social outcast at the time, stops and helps the man.
Jesus tells the parable in response to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” The neighbor, the parable teaches us, is whoever shows mercy to his fellow man.
Father Nadolski moved on to Columbus Day, reminding us that the discovery of America led to the creation of a new world made up primarily of immigrants. Then he quoted from Pope Francis’s “Share the Journey” campaign to help migrants and refugees, which includes a prayer that says in part:

“Even today, Lord, your people journey — immigrants, and refugees, pilgrims, and nomads, searching for hope, searching for opportunity, searching for peace…Call me beyond my comfort and into encounter. And when I meet a companion on the road, may we find you in each other’s embrace.”
It all became clear to me. It made such sense, sitting in a church filled with people whose parents or grandparents had come to this country looking for a better life for their children and had contributed so much to our country’s success.
We live in a country that became great because of immigration.
People who are opposed to just about any immigration often attack those who disagree with them as left-wing Democrats who want to take things away from American workers and give them to undeserving immigrants. But the church I went to on Columbus Day wasn’t filled with left-wing liberals, and you could feel how deeply they sympathized with what Father Nadolski said.
I left church that day reinvigorated in my commitment to oppose the Trump immigration policies.
Who is my neighbor? Whoever shows mercy to his fellow man. And although White House adviser Stephen Miller recently dismissed the words as “something added later,” I think most Americans, descendants of immigrants themselves, still honor the words of Emma Lazarus inscribed on the Statue of Liberty:
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. senator from Delaware.