The Catholic Right at a Crossroads

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Just hours before Pope Leo XIV’s arrival in Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso turned the debate over the regularization of migrants into an almost perfect scene of our moral confusion. The president of the Madrid region mocked the left for having suddenly become so “churchy,” as if appealing to Christianity in defense of the poor foreigner were a sentimental imposture, an opportunistic maneuver, or a misplaced naïveté. But the problem was not the religious sincerity of her adversaries. The problem lay in the phrase she herself chose to define regularization: “importing mass poverty.”

The expression matters because it does not merely reject an administrative measure. It condenses an entire worldview. The migrant does not appear there as a person who works, belongs to a neighborhood, has a family, is religious or not, studies, cares for others, works as a waiter or a bricklayer, as a domestic worker or as a caregiver for other vulnerable people. No. Here the migrant appears as “imported poverty,” as a threat arriving from outside to degrade or corrupt an order that is presumed to be one’s own, legitimate, and threatened by exteriority. Poverty ceases to be a social relation produced by economic, labor, political, and urban structures. It becomes an attribute of the foreigner. The poor person is no longer someone who has been impoverished; he is someone who brings poverty with him.

The scene becomes even more significant because of its religious frame. Part of the Spanish right preserves Christianity as cultural heritage, as a civilizational marker, as a symbolic reserve against secularization, Islam, progressivism, or the loss of national identity. But when Christianity is translated into a concrete demand before the poor foreigner, when it ceases to function as a cultural banner and begins to politically challenge the organization of the community, it becomes uncomfortable. Then mockery appears: the others are “little chapel-goers,” “more papist than the pope,” naïve people who do not understand the harshness of the real world.

Now, this is not about judging anyone’s faith. The question is different: what happens to a right that invokes the Catholic inheritance as identity, but becomes uncomfortable when that same inheritance reminds it of the presence of the poor, the foreigner, and the vulnerable? What happens when a society that claims to be heir to Christianity turns the poor migrant into a threat and the rich migrant into an opportunity? (*)

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The right is not simply against migration. This is the first simplification we should avoid. The contemporary right does not reject all human mobility, or every arrival of foreigners, or every settlement of people from other countries. What it selectively rejects is poor migration when it appears as a subject of rights. By contrast, it enthusiastically accepts migration that arrives with economic capital, real estate investment, ideological affinity, luxury consumption, labor utility, or the capacity and willingness to integrate in a subordinate way into the segments the economy needs.

That is why anti-immigration discourse is never really a discourse against migration in the abstract. It is a discourse of classification. It separates the acceptable foreigner from the suspicious foreigner. The first invests, buys, starts businesses, shares certain cultural codes, presents himself as a victim of the proper political enemies, and does not question the existing social hierarchy. The second works in the worst-paid sectors, needs housing, uses the health care system, sends his children to school, asks for regularization, and demands not to be treated as disposable labor power. The first is presented as a driver of the economy, while the second is treated as a burden.

The decisive point is that both figures may come from the same continent, speak the same language, and share the same religion. It is therefore not enough to explain the problem in cultural terms. This is not only about national identity, a clash of customs, or religious difference. It is about class, rights, racialization, precarity, and political belonging.

Madrid’s right knows perfectly well that it needs foreign workers. It knows that migrants sustain fundamental sectors of the economy. It knows that construction, care work, hospitality, cleaning, domestic service, agriculture, delivery work, and many small businesses depend to a large extent on migrant populations. That is why it can defend, in the same gesture, the need for foreigners and the danger of regularizing them. As workers, they are useful. As subjects of rights, they become problematic.

This is the contradiction that must be analyzed: the migrant is welcome as long as he remains in the functional place assigned to him. When he claims legal recognition, administrative stability, social rights, and political belonging, he ceases to be necessary labor and becomes a threat.

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Discourse on migration often rests on a false image of the labor market. The economy is imagined as a single line, with a fixed number of jobs, in which every person arriving from outside automatically displaces someone who was already inside. From that perspective, migration can only be interpreted as competition, wage pressure, or the deterioration of public services.

But that image is simplistic. The real economy does not function like an immobile line. Workers also consume, generate demand, sustain sectors, create economic networks, open businesses, pay taxes, care for people, allow other workers to enter the labor market, and fill positions that the productive system itself cannot otherwise cover.

This does not mean idealizing migration or denying the inevitable conflicts involved in any social relation. It means that we need to analyze migration with precision, freeing it from the ideological uses it serves. Migrants do not enter a neutral economy, but a segmented labor market. There are protected, stable, recognized, and relatively well-paid jobs. And there are precarious, invisible, unstable, harsh, poorly paid, and socially undervalued jobs. Migrant populations are often concentrated in this second segment, not because of any natural inclination, but because of their administrative situation, their initial networks, economic urgency, the difficulty of obtaining recognition for their qualifications, discrimination, the weakness of labor inspection, and the structural demand for cheap labor itself.

That is why the phrase “importing poverty” reverses the causal order. Poverty is not imported as if it were a substance attached to the migrant’s body. Workers are imported and then placed in conditions of social vulnerability. Their labor is needed, but their presence is made precarious. Their availability is demanded, but their stability is made difficult. Their labor power is exploited, but their right to remain, to stabilize their lives, and to be recognized as part of the society they already help sustain is treated with suspicion.

In this sense, regularization is not a sentimental favor or a moralistic concession. It is a minimal way of recognizing an already existing reality. Migrants are already here. The question is not whether they exist or do not exist. The question is whether the society that depends on them is willing to recognize them legally, or whether it prefers to keep them in a zone of economic usefulness and political fragility.

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The Madrid case is not a local anomaly. It is part of a broader hardening of Western migration policy. The European Union is moving toward an architecture of returns, accelerated deportations, border externalization, and centers in third countries. The border is no longer merely a line located at the edge of the territory; it becomes a mobile technology of selection, containment, and expulsion. It is no longer only a matter of preventing entries. It is about organizing legal spaces where rejected people can be sent outside European territory, even when they have no link to the country that is supposed to receive them.

The comparison with the United States and Trump’s migration policy should not be made superficially. Europe does not simply copy Trumpism. It has its own legal language, its own humanitarian bureaucracy, its own way of combining border controls with constant references to human rights. But the convergence is obvious. The political horizon is shifting toward deportation, suspicion, administrative exceptionality, and the externalization of suffering. Migration policy is presented as a matter of efficiency. But beneath that technical vocabulary, a deep transformation is taking shape: the irregular migrant appears less and less as a vulnerable subject and more and more as an administrative residue that must be removed from the space of “participation.”

This is one of the most disturbing features of the European present. Human rights do not disappear from discourse. On the contrary, they continue to be invoked. But they can be invoked while increasingly harsh mechanisms of expulsion are being designed. They can rhetorically accompany policies that, in practice, reduce the space of protection. This is one of the fundamental paradoxes of our time: the language of rights can survive as the formal legitimation of an order that materially restricts effective access to rights.

Europe presents itself as a space of legal civilization, liberal democracy, and humanitarian memory. But in the face of poor migration, that self-understanding enters into crisis. The question is no longer only what Europe does with those who arrive. The question is what Europe does to itself when it organizes a policy whose main purpose is to prevent certain human beings from appearing before it as legitimate claimants of protection.

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Madrid allows us to see this contradiction with particular clarity. The city often presents itself as open, dynamic, cosmopolitan, capable of attracting talent, investment, and Latin American populations. But that openness does not function in the same way for everyone. There is a Latin American migration that is celebrated and another that is despised. There is a migration that buys luxury housing in the Salamanca district, invests in businesses, integrates into legal, political, and business networks, and finds in Madrid a European platform. And there is another Latin American migration that works in precarious jobs, in delivery work, small businesses, hospitality, care work, domestic service, or survival economies.

We are not dealing with two separate phenomena, but with one and the same city organized by hierarchies. The rich foreigner does not destabilize Madrid’s identity; he embellishes it. He brings cosmopolitanism, investment, restaurants, renovated properties, international connections, an anti-communist narrative, and class prestige. The poor foreigner, by contrast, appears as pressure on public services, an occupant of working-class neighborhoods, a suspicious user of aid, a labor competitor, or a potential voter manipulated by the left.

Here it becomes evident that Madrid is not against migration. Madrid selects the migration it desires. It enthusiastically welcomes Latin American capital and problematizes the poor Latin American worker. It accepts the right-wing political dissident and suspects the economic migrant. It celebrates the foreigner who confirms its ideological narrative and questions the foreigner who makes visible the material precarity on which part of the city rests.

The Latin American case is especially revealing because it dismantles the culturalist argument. We are not talking about people with a radically different religion, or a different language, or an alien civilization. We are talking about migrants who often share a language, a Catholic matrix, a colonial history, and cultural references. Yet even there, the distinction between the desirable and the undesirable operates. What is decisive is not only shared culture. What is decisive is the place each person occupies in the class structure, in the labor market, in the regime of citizenship, and in the symbolic war of the right.

That is why Ayuso’s discourse against “imported poverty” must be read alongside the Madrid that welcomes fortunes, property owners, and investors. Poverty appears dangerous when it asks for rights. Foreign capital, by contrast, appears as “freedom.”

This same mechanism also helps us understand an affinity that might at first seem strange: the convergence between European identitarian Catholicism and certain forms of Christian Zionism—or, more precisely in our context, a right-wing civilizational philo-Zionism. This is not, strictly speaking, a theological adherence to Judaism, nor a universal concern for victims. It is the incorporation of Israel as a symbolic frontier of the West: fortified democracy, forward post against Islam, geopolitical ally against the global left, emblem of security, and armed state that does not apologize for defending its borders. In that operation, Palestinian suffering is displaced to the same place occupied by the poor migrant: it appears as demographic excess, a security threat, a manageable humanitarian problem, or collateral damage in a war presented as civilizational defense.

From there we can better understand the reluctance of sectors of the Madrid right—and also the Catalan right—to condemn what human rights organizations and an independent UN commission have characterized as genocide in Gaza, or even to admit that the word carries a legal, political, and moral density that cannot be dismissed as mere propaganda. The difficulty is not only diplomatic. It is ideological. To condemn Gaza would require recognizing that the poor, the colonized, the displaced, and the expelled are not mere obstacles in the defense of the West, but subjects whose suffering possesses moral authority. But that recognition disarms the affective architecture of identitarian Catholicism: a religion turned into a border, a politics turned into security, and an idea of humanity that becomes selective when the face demanding justice does not coincide with the strategic ally.

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The religious dimension of the problem is not secondary. It allows us to understand something decisive about the transformation of public Christianity within contemporary right-wing politics. Religion can function as a symbol of national belonging, as a reserve of identity against cultural change, as a language of civilization, or as a marker of historical continuity. But when Christianity is translated into a concrete demand before the poor, the foreigner, the vulnerable, or the excluded, its ethical power is neutralized or ridiculed.

What emerges, then, is a split between identitarian Catholicism and social Catholicism: between a religion turned into a badge of belonging and a Christianity of the neighbor that reminds us of our obligation to the poor, the foreigner, and the vulnerable. The first serves to say who “we” are. The second asks what we do before that human presence that disturbs us precisely because it can barely defend itself. The first turns religion into a cultural border. The second turns it into a moral interpellation. The first can coexist comfortably with policies of expulsion, border hardening, and suspicion toward the poor foreigner. The second is more uncomfortable because it forces us to remember that the figure of the neighbor does not necessarily coincide with that of the compatriot, the property owner, the ideal taxpayer, or the like-minded voter.

The sociology of religion allows us to observe this displacement without reducing it to a doctrinal discussion. The question is not who interprets Christianity better, but how certain religious symbols are mobilized politically. When religion serves to delimit identity, it is honored. When it serves to question exclusion, it is domesticated. When it accompanies the defense of the nation, it appears as tradition. When it accompanies the defense of the poor migrant, it appears as progressive naïveté.

This is the crossroads of the Catholic right. It can preserve Catholicism as a symbolic repertoire, as cultural memory, as civilizational rhetoric, and as a language of belonging. But then it risks emptying it of its ethical force. Or it can take seriously the interpellation of the poor, the foreigner, and the discarded. But then it must accept that the tradition it invokes does not simply confirm its border politics, its social hierarchy, or its contempt for those who arrive without capital.

Cultural Christianity can be celebrated as long as it does not question the moral economy of exclusion. But the Christianity of the foreigner, the poor, and the vulnerable is uncomfortable because it recalls something that security politics needs to forget: that a community is not defined only by the defense of its borders, but by the way it responds to those who remain outside its protection.

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The migration question is, finally, a question of human rights. But not in the abstract and decorative sense in which rights are so often invoked. Migration reveals a deep paradox of the modern order: rights are proclaimed as universal, but their effective exercise depends on belonging to a concrete political community. Whoever remains outside that belonging may have rights in theory and yet lack the real conditions to exercise them.

That is why regularization is not a minor procedure. It is a dispute over who can appear as a subject of rights. A person in irregular status may work, care, consume, pay rent, sustain family networks, raise children, participate in the daily life of a city, and yet remain in a zone of legal vulnerability. He is inside society, but not fully inside the political community. He inhabits social space, but does not count in the same way.

The right fears regularization because it understands very well what it entails. To regularize is not simply to organize papers. It is to allow someone who was already present to begin to exist legally in a different way. It is to transform vulnerable labor power into a subject with a greater capacity to claim rights. That is what the idea of the “right to have rights” is about: not merely having rights proclaimed in the abstract, but belonging to a political space in which those rights can become effective. It is to make visible the person who was useful precisely because he could remain partially invisible.

The problem, therefore, is not that the migrant arrives. The problem, for the right, is that the migrant begins to count. To count as a worker, as a neighbor, as a member of a family, as a legitimate user of public services, as part and voice of the city he inhabits; in short, as a subject of rights and, eventually, as a citizen. To count, ultimately, as someone who cannot be reduced to labor power, to threat, or to imported poverty.

Regularization touches the political nerve of democracy because it forces us to ask who really forms part of the people. Not the people as an “imagined community,” but the real people who work, care, age, fall ill, and die, and who, in their passage through life, participate in sustaining the everyday life of the society in which their existence is anchored.

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The migration question thus reveals something deeper than a dispute over borders. It reveals what a society understands by humanity when the other does not arrive as a tourist, investor, consumer, or ideological ally, but as a poor person claiming the elementary right to have rights.

Europe and Madrid look at themselves in this mirror. They say they defend civilization, law, democracy, human rights, and the Christian tradition. But at the same time they organize a hierarchy of the foreigner: at the top, the investor; in the middle, the necessary worker; below, the poor person eligible for regularization; outside, the deportable. This hierarchy is not accidental. It expresses the way our societies combine economic openness, political closure, and moral selectivity.

That is why the phrase “importing mass poverty” should not pass as a mere exaggeration. It names a central ideological operation: turning into a threat those who make visible the injustice of an order that needs their labor but fears their recognition. Poverty does not arrive from outside as an invasion. Poverty is produced and administered within structures that unequally distribute housing, employment, rights, protection, and belonging.

Do the poor have a right to have rights? That is the question the migration debate returns to the Catholic right. Not in the abstract, not in homilies, not in solemn declarations about human dignity, but there where human dignity becomes socially costly: at the border, in regularization, in housing, in precarious work, in public services, in the recognition of those who are already inside but continue to be treated as if they did not belong.

Perhaps that is why the figure of the poor migrant is so disturbing. Not because he comes to destroy society, but because he clearly shows how it works.

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(*) Juan Diego Quesada, “Ayuso, a horas de la llegada del Papa a Madrid, sobre la regularización de migrantes: ‘Es importar pobreza masiva,’” El País, Madrid, June 4, 2026. The article reports on Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s intervention in the Madrid Assembly, where she linked the regularization of migrants to a supposed strategy of “importing mass poverty,” in a context marked by the imminent arrival of Pope Leo XIV in Madrid and by competing appeals to Christianity, migration regularization, and responsibility toward vulnerable groups.