“That is what I find most difficult to understand in all this,” stated José Ornelas, confronted with the fact that much of the xenophobic, populist, and anti-immigrant rhetoric invokes the Catholic faith and the Judeo-Christian roots of Europe.
In a conference following the XVI Meeting of Bishops from Portuguese-speaking Countries, José Ornelas cited the response Jesus Christ gave to his contemporaries who accused him of violating the Jewish faith in which he was raised: “The answer is, ‘I do not know you’.”
“We not only need immigrants, but we also need to evolve” and move away from a “culture of fear,” something that the proposed nationality and foreigner laws seem to accentuate, warned José Ornelas.
In this planned amendment, “the [legislation] mostly contains prohibitions and concerns about the fear generated,” while, in contrast, the proposed wording is “very, very scant on what is the duty, the necessity, and the challenge of integrating” immigrants, a topic on which “practically, the discourse has disappeared,” Ornelas assessed.
[Updated at 13:16]
