"Francis sees the rise of nativist and anti-immigrant feeling as signs of a dangerous moment in politics, and his mission is to offer an alternative vision," said Austen Ivereigh, author of The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope.
During the week leading up to the pontiff's visit here, the center will provide bunk beds for 45 Mexican immigrant "farmworker pilgrims" from Mobile, Ala., said Welch, and will host hundreds of Vietnamese families for a marriage-enrichment course.
Always on message, the pontiff has spotlighted immigration on stages big and small. At the European Parliament in France last year, he said: "We cannot allow the Mediterranean to become a vast cemetery."
A month later, in a quieter gesture, he sent Christmas presents to 2,000 immigrants at the Dono di Maria shelter near the Vatican. The gift packages included a card signed by the pope, postage stamps, a prepaid international calling card, and day pass for Rome's Metro rail system. On an even smaller scale, also around Christmas, the pope sent a letter to a group of teens at a Catholic immigrant-advocacy group in Arizona.
He praised them for rejecting "stereotypes" propagated "by people who only see in immigration a source of illegality, social conflict, and violence."
It was signed "Fraternally, Francisco."
"This pope has political capital. More importantly, he has an enormous reservoir of moral capital that he is not afraid to use, because in doing so, he actually replenishes it," said Demetrios Papademetriou, president emeritus of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.
Papademetriou is a former adviser to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which in May visited America's Southern border and issued a report calling for the U.S. immigration detention system to be dismantled. Some conference members hope the pope will address that issue during his time in America.
Papademetriou thinks the pontiff may also weigh in on the issue of unaccompanied-minor immigrants, and what to do about the 11 million to 12 million living here illegally.
