Berkley Center

The human rights framework Rev. David Hollenbach, S.J., has developed in his latest book—and over his career—provides an invaluable tool for analyzing contemporary moral challenges like those facing forced migrants and refugees. For example, Human Rights in a Divided World (2024) features the centrality of participation to his understanding of justice; applications of just war principles and negative duties to avoid harm and unjust force; and use of the Kew Gardens principles to frame positive duties of response to those on the move. This framework of analysis is persuasive in terms of highlighting rights to remain and migrate, the injustice(s) of exclusion, and graduated duties of reception. At the same time, dominant cultural and political dynamics increasingly suggest robust human rights arguments remain necessary but insufficient. Non-rational influences abetting inhospitality and indifference also demand attention to (re)shaping imagination.

Whereas reigning rhetoric and policy interventions too often frame forced migration in terms of “crisis management,” or focus on individual border crossers alone, Hollenbach’s attention to the social dimensions of rights, histories of relationship between nations, and the global nature of the common good allow for broader and deeper analyses. To begin, the intrinsic link between basic justice and minimum levels of meaningful social participation echoes throughout Hollenbach’s scholarly corpus, along with his contributions to the U.S. bishops’ economics pastoral and educational and peacebuilding work with Jesuit Refugee Service. Understanding the chief challenges to justice as marked not merely by relative inequities in distribution but the prospect and consequences of being entirely cut off from participation in the life of the community helps orient his considerations of forced migration in terms of rights violations rather than charity, largesse, or even hospitality. Excluded from membership in a political community, refugees and forced migrants often remain deprived of this “right to have rights.” Hollenbach’s framework also signals to receiving communities how the exclusion of newcomers from full integration into the life of societies harms both, perpetuating injustice, weakening social cohesion, and diminishing the common good. Understanding justice as participation also counters patterns of exclusion that mask mutual relatedness. Such marginalization prevents both the fulfillment of migrants’ claim rights and acknowledgment of settled community members’ complicity in pushing and pulling people across borders.

Justice as constituted by participation also enables contextual assessments of what enduring, interdependent patterns of displacement reveal. Here Hollenbach’s employment of the Kew Gardens principles offers norms for effectively negotiating relative duties of reception that account for histories of relationship and complicity. Drawing on the 1964 Kitty Genovese case in terms of positive moral duties to aid others in emergencies, he proposes that countries that have gained economically from their colonies or with histories of military involvement in another nation have particular positive duties to people in flight from that nation, in light of moral proximity to harm. Existing economic relationships also confer relative duties, such that guest workers whose work contributes to the life and well-being of the society they have entered should be welcomed as citizens. The Kew Gardens principles aptly center the roles historical relationships and transnational actors play in abetting migration. Social frameworks of rights and duties like Hollenbach’s suggest how migration analyses must consider receiving countries’ economic and political complicity in generating migrant flows.

Indeed, given such systemic culpability, some have proposed an “instability tax” be levied upon private and governmental entities that destabilize migrant and refugee-producing regions—whether hedge funds profiting off of commodity-trading in African minerals, weapons manufacturers profiting from selling arms to the Middle East, or multinationals who profit from degrading or destabilizing poor nations. Others propose a “migration tax” directly to parallel the “carbon tax” on polluting industries or in terms of reparations more broadly. As Suketu Mehta puts it in This Land is Our Land (2019), rather than punishing migrants driven from home, host nations should “[p]ay the costs of colonialism, of the wars [they] have imposed on [refugees], of the inequality [they have] built into the world order.” Alternatively, in order to work preventatively and avoid a migration tax, he suggests that wealthy countries refrain from propping up dictators and allowing their corporations to amass profits by bribing local officials, operating polluting factories and mines, or sustaining unjust trade practices.

Throughout his volume, Hollenbach returns to solidarity as a virtue for enabling repair of exclusionary dynamics and their consequences. He advances institutional solidarity as a necessary means of moving patterns of global interdependence from ones marked by domination and oppression to ones marked by equality and reciprocity. Institutional solidarity demands the development of structures that offer marginalized persons a genuine voice in the decisions and policies that impact their lives. It requires the inclusion of comprehensive sets of stakes at decision-making tables, structures of institutional accountability and transparency, and empowered participation. Praxes of solidarity—at institutional, intellectual, social, and personal levels—can help resist harmful currents of indifference and marginalization and cultivate the culture of encounter Pope Francis models and invites.

Yet, Hollenbach rightly laments the inadequate responses from religious communities, despite foundational teachings in support of justice for migrants and refugees, including his own Catholic community. This suggests that human rights arguments and institutional reforms, like data on migrant impacts, remain inadequate for eliciting warranted responses. Appeals to affect and shifts in perception are equally necessary for helping religious (and other) communities resist exclusionary temptations, to become instead “islands of mercy in the midst of the sea of indifference,” as Pope Francis has urged. Religious practices, narratives, and symbols hold potential to (re)shape believers’ moral imagination and counter the collective delusion that we are not responsible for the often death-dealing consequences of forced migration. Cultivating empathy, justice, and civic virtue require formation efforts that help resist forces that distort our perceptions and disrupt pervasive apathy. Addressing persons’ tendencies to favor information that bolsters their existing views, susceptibility to manipulative narratives, and deeply seated fears remain necessary measures for counteracting the lure of nostalgia or various totems of loss purveyed by white Christian nationalist forces.

Hence here, Hollenbach’s work on institutional and intellectual solidarity could be supplemented with attention to practices of incarnational solidarity, whether encounters with first-person narratives, art, and poetry; subversive hospitality (Pope Francis’s foot washing); lament and public repentance; witness to boundary transgressing (posadas and border fence liturgies); or anti-racism training. While fear of the other is easily mass-marketed, mutual understanding across difference can be harder to engender and sustain. Hence, reshaping moral imagination entails counteracting myths and xenophobic scapegoating, while remembering ways in which our own deep stories can tempt us to select facts.

Renewing imagination is not unconnected to advancing structural change, as the dynamics of structural sin (with its institutional and cultural dimensions) reveal in shadow. Fed by increasingly incendiary news, an idolatry of security and a culture of comfort conspire to desensitize and to estrange those settled from those forced from home. Beyond the contributions his social and reparative frameworks offer to resisting unjust harms and redressing individualistic paradigms, at a conference launching a festschrift in his honor a few years back, Hollenbach’s closing remarks indicated that if he had to write his common good book over again, he might couple his “intellectual solidarity” proposal with one on “imaginative solidarity.” This would offer an apt complement to the already wide-ranging and valuable Human Rights in a Divided World.