Bishop Wester meets with President Obama on immigration reform

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a meeting March 11 with President Barack Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, the Most Rev. John C. Wester, bishop of Salt Lake City, spoke of the need for comprehensive immigration reform.

"This meeting was called by the White House, and they wanted representation of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops," said Bishop Wester, who is chair of the USCCB’s immigration committee. Also in the meeting were other faith leaders and representatives of unions, immigrant aid and human rights organizations. The USCCB is advocating a system that keeps families together, provides for an earned path to citizenship, increases the number of temporary worker visas, restores full authority to immigration judges and seeks to solve the root causes of immigration.

"It was a good opportunity for us to make our case for comprehensive immigration reform and it was significant in that I think it signaled that President Obama agrees with us and that he wants to move forward on comprehensive immigration reform, so that was good news," Bishop Wester said.

The meeting came after the USCCB’s campaign urging Catholics around the country to sign postcards addressed to their legislators asking for immigration legislation reform. Also, bishops in Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Oregon have published letters or columns or given speeches in recent weeks urging Catholics to support the reform as a Gospel call.

Many of those efforts echoed a sentiment expressed by Archbishop John C. Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis in his March 11 column in The Catholic Spirit, the archdiocesan newspaper.

"Welcoming the stranger is essential to our Catholic faith," he wrote. "This corporal work of mercy builds up the body of Christ, for in reaching out and welcoming the immigrant, we serve Christ himself: ‘I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.’"

It was the first time Bishop Wester had met President Obama, and he said he found him very conversant with immigration issues. "We met with him for over an hour, which was a signal that he cares about this issue," Bishop Wester said. "He gave us a good deal of time. I think it was a productive meeting in that we covered a lot of issues."

Among those issues was how to achieve comprehensive immigration reform, the bishop said. "What I mentioned to the president was that my strategy is to put a human face on immigration because I think people, when they respond to an issue, they stay at a cerebral level, but when you put a human face on it they get their hearts involved and they tend to take a different approach."

Much of the discussion was about political strategy and how the representatives of the various groups "could work with our constituents to express our opinion on what we’d like to see happen and how we could educate people to help them to support comprehensive immigration reform," Bishop Wester said. "I think when you educate people on the subject because there are a lot of half-truths out there that we have to get the word out what the truth is, how it’s a win-win for both the immigrant and the country."