The current lively debate about immigration often overlooks or ignores that our country has been and is built by immigrants. The question is not how we face immigration, but how we face immigrants, real human beings with needs, talents and expectations. People do not go through the trauma of uprooting themselves and their families for frivolous reasons. Evidence mounts that the present global migration can be explained by several key factors; poverty, hunger, violence, disregard of human rights and the search for economic and intellectual fulfillment unavailable at home are among the root causes of this exodus. Any approach to migration which ignores the root causes of this phenomenon, thus nurturing an ideological attitude, is short-sighted and will ultimately fail. On the one hand, neither abstract legalism nor nativism are adequate responses to the question posed by the presence of immigrants. On the other hand, a naive, universalistic openness to immigration, which is forgetful of the profound and complex challenges which a society hosting and welcoming the immigrants has to face, is also not enough.

This year at the NY Encounter, January 17th at 2pm, Msgr. Ronald Marino, Vicar for Migrant and Ethnic Apostolates for the Diocese of Brooklyn, and Giulio Piscitelli, photographer, will delve into this issue of immigration and the questions that encircle it. What can overcome the distress of leaving your own country? What can surmount the mistrust to embrace an entire new way of living? And what can defeat the fear of welcoming a stranger in your home country?