Policy & Advocacy

Catholic Social Ministry Gathering 2013 Message to Congress

Topic
Office/Committee
Year Published
  • 2013
Language
  • English

Catholic Social Ministry Gathering 2013 Message to Congress, February 2013

Includes materials in leave-behind packet for congressional visits.

The Catholic Church urges Congress to protect human life and dignity while pursuing responsible deficit reduction by prioritizing programs that shield poor and vulnerable people at home and abroad, passing comprehensive immigration reform that restores family unity and due process, and sustaining international relief and development funding.

Domestic priorities

  • Protect safety-net programs: Preserve SNAP, WIC, school lunches, and other food assistance to reduce hunger among over 16 million food-insecure children.
  • Affordable housing and community development: Defend funding that stabilizes families and reduced poverty in 2011.
  • Health programs: Safeguard child and maternal health initiatives and community health centers; pursue Medicare reforms that do not harm seniors with modest means; avoid Medicaid savings that cut benefits, eligibility, or shift costs to states.
  • Workforce and job creation: Maintain workforce development programs to address insufficient decent job creation.

International priorities

  • Protect poverty-focused development accounts: Preserve and strengthen funding for international poverty-focused and humanitarian assistance in FY2013–14, supporting the Senate-level proposal of $19 billion for these accounts.
  • Shield key accounts from sequestration: Protect International Disaster Assistance and Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance from cuts.
  • Maintain broader assistance where it helps the poorest: Avoid reductions in the Economic Support Fund and programs for places like South Sudan and Haiti that would harm vulnerable communities.
  • Release withheld Palestinian assistance: Urge the House Foreign Affairs Committee to lift the FY2012 hold on $500 million in assistance to address humanitarian needs and support institution-building toward a two-state solution.

Comprehensive Immigration Reform - core elements

  • Path to citizenship: An achievable, verifiable earned path from undocumented status to permanent residency and eventual citizenship.
  • Future Flow Worker Program: Optional path to citizenship; family unity (immediate family allowed to join); job portability; worker-rights enforcement; living-wage protections; mobility between U.S. and home country; labor-market test to protect U.S. workers.
  • Family-based reform: Reduce backlogs, reallocate unused visas, reclassify spouses/minor children of permanent residents as immediate relatives, and include humanitarian waivers for separated families.
  • Restore due process: Repeal 3- and 10-year bars, restore judicial discretion in removals, eliminate the one-year asylum filing deadline, and authorize community-based alternatives to detention.
  • Address root causes of migration: Invest in development, fair trade, labor rights, and environmental standards in sending countries to reduce forced migration pressures.
  • Include DREAM Act and AgJOBS: Place qualifying youth on a path to citizenship with tuition access and regularize migrant farmworkers’ status.

Specific Legislative Tasks

  • Preserve poverty-focused international assistance and protect it from sequestration.
  • Release FY2012 Palestinian aid to meet humanitarian needs and support peace-building.
  • Protect domestic safety-net programs, housing, health, and workforce funding from deficit-driven cuts.
  • Enact comprehensive immigration reform with the elements above that emphasize family unity, due process, worker protections, and pathways to citizenship.

Practical recommendations for advocates

  • Prioritize messaging that connects fiscal responsibility with moral obligations to protect the poor.
  • Emphasize concrete program impacts: housing stability, child nutrition, community health, refugee relief.
  • Frame immigration reform around family unity, fairness, and economic stability for workers and communities.
  • Mobilize parish networks and service agencies to present constituent stories demonstrating the human stakes of budget and immigration choices.

CSMG-2013-Message-to-Congress.pdf