After seeing the recent reports and moving videos of Pope Francis making an unannounced visit to a migrants’ shanty town outside Rome, I was doing some reading and stumbled across a papal statement on the issue in the American context, which at first sight seemed pretty prosaic. After commending American and Mexican bishops for conferring and cooperating “in order that Mexicans who emigrated to foreign countries might not become the prey of the enemies of Christ, nor lose the Christian ways of their fathers”, the Pope went on to discuss a recent meeting with American senators from a committee on immigration. He had “urged them to try to administer as liberally as possible the overly restrictive provisions of their immigration laws”. For some, a typical exampl