It is rare for Thomas Aquinas to appear in the fever swamps of political X (née Twitter), particularly on the topic of immigration. This rare occurrence is a result of Vice President J. D. Vance’s interview on Fox News in which he accused the left of improperly caring about migrants at the expense of U.S. citizens. In a follow-up on X he suggested googling the term ordo amoris, which as a result has probably been googled more in the past few days than it has in the past few decades and has introduced many to Aquinas’s thoughts on the matter. Though the intersection of Aquinas and immigration law is rare for many, for us—an immigration law professor married to a theologian who writes on Aquinas—it is a daily occurrence, and so we offer a few correctives to Mr. Vance and a few of our own thoughts on how Aquinas’s notion of “ordered love” might be relevant to the topic of immigration.
In his interview, Mr. Vance explained why he thought it was improper to focus on the plight of migrants when U.S. citizens are suffering:
There’s this old school—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.
We believe that Aquinas would look askance at the way Mr. Vance employed the idea of ordo amoris to justify cutting off concern for needy people at the nation’s doorstep. For it is a mistake to suggest, as Mr. Vance seemed to do in the interview, that Aquinas thinks that love or compassion is a zero-sum game, such that compassion for American citizens who are victims of violent crime is incompatible with compassion shown to immigrants. In fact, Aquinas thinks that love can be increased infinitely because it “dilates the heart.”
What Aquinas says about the order of love or charity (the Latin terms are amor and caritas) describes how we show love to people in the way appropriate to that person’s relationship to us, and we love those closest to us more because we have more ways and opportunities to love them. For example, we care for our children not simply by supporting them financially or granting them access to a safe haven, but also by changing diapers, driving carpools, reading with them, cooking for them, taking them to doctors, cuddling with them, and so forth. It would seem perverse to forego such acts of love and simply send them a check. But no one thinks check-sending is unfitting when dealing with needy strangers; their relative distance often makes this form of beneficence the most fitting way to show our love. Distance does not remove the obligation to help, though it might modify the nature and extent of the help that might be rendered.
Love of neighbor as contemplated in the ordo amoris does not require us to treat everyone the way we treat our own children, but it does require us to respond to cases of manifest need. The ordo amoris also helps explain a common experience that we both have had: people who generally take a hard line on immigration tend to make exceptions for immigrants they happen to know personally. This making of exceptions for the immigrants we encounter in our day-to-day life, whether documented or not, suggests that these individuals are in fact already the neighbors and community members whom Mr. Vance says we ought to love. (As of 2019, approximately 60% of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. had lived here for over a decade, with nearly a quarter having been here over twenty years.)
But the overall impetus of Christian love, as understood by Aquinas, ought to widen the scope of our concern to encompass even those who might seem distant or unlovable. Indeed, Aquinas says that love requires us to be prepared to help even our enemies in cases of urgent need. This suggests that the role of theology is not to lessen love’s demands, which appears to be how Mr. Vance is using it, but to help us to understand and answer those demands intelligently and well. The order of love is about how wisely to extend love, not how to withhold it.
It is a simple fact that there are human beings in urgent need throughout the world who are fleeing inhuman conditions in their homelands, and people on all sides of the question agree that our current immigration system is woefully inadequate in responding to that reality. What has come to be described as the immigration crisis has been caused in large part not by the individuals who, quite reasonably, seek shelter from the inhuman conditions in their homelands (as they are entitled to do under U.S. asylum law), but by our own unwillingness to forge an immigration policy that responds to a worldwide reality of 120 million forcibly displaced people. One of us has spent thirty years representing asylum seekers from across the world, many of whom fled their homelands with death snapping at their heels, having already suffered arrest, beatings, rape, and torture. The ordo amoris may not require us to treat these strangers as if they were our own children, but it also does not give us carte blanche to put off addressing their urgent human need.
Thomas Aquinas writes that, when confronted with two people in need, “If one of the two is more closely connected to us and the other is more needy, it is not possible to determine by a universal rule who should be helped more, because there are different degrees of both neediness and proximity, but this requires the judgment of a prudent person.” The ordo amoris does not mean that proximity always trumps urgent need. Aquinas rejects the idea that one can address such matters via universal rule (or executive order). Rather, prudent people must be allowed to make judgments in complex situations, which suggests less a closed-door policy on immigration and more the creation of a system in which people seeking refuge can have their claims heard in a timely and fair way.
Finally, in all this talk about the ordo amoris we should not lose sight of what is a more fundamental point for Aquinas about the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, which he believes are gifts to us from God: they are not finite resources to be rationed, but qualities that we should seek to increase without limit. It is impossible to believe, hope, or love too much. Aquinas describes how love can grow in us over time: “by one act of charity a person is made more ready to act again according to charity; and, growing in ability, that person breaks out into a more fervent act of love.”
The ordo amoris is not about love diminishing as it stretches beyond our immediate circle, but about how those acts of love that might be easiest for us—love shown to family and friends—ought to increase our readiness for acts of love we might find more difficult. As another philosopher, Mary Midgley, once put it,
Compassion does not need to be treated . . . as a rare and irreplaceable fluid, useable only for exceptionally impressive cases. It is a habit or power of the mind which grows and develops with use. Such powers . . . are magic fluids which increase with pouring.
There are no easy answers to the complex questions of migration in our day, but this theologian and this immigration lawyer are convinced that Aquinas would agree we need to pour more—not less—of that magic elixir, love, into our search for solutions.
Seeking the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary through prayer