In a recent essay, I quoted approvingly Oren Cass’s observation that employment, labor, and immigration law form a coherent legal whole that protects both national security and domestic workers. Summarizing Cass, immigration law determines who can work; employment law fixes “baseline” criteria for the employer-employee relationship; and labor law protects worker rights, individually and collectively. Together they form a synergy that seems to dovetail with erstwhile concerns of Catholic social teaching to protect labor.

I argued that focusing on work (a central concern of Catholic social thought) while ignoring the legal status of the worker is unjust and contrary to Catholic social teaching as hitherto understood. Yes, everyone has a right to dignity against abuse, including by the government and its law enforcement. But “dignity” does not include the right to work irrespective of national law.

While such illegal labor certainly benefits the immediate needs of the illegal immigrant, its long-term erosion of the position of both illegal and legal workers vis-à-vis capital is real and cannot be ignored. In both instances, it gives capital substantial leverage over labor, denying the common sense insight that is the central teaching (no. 12) of Laborem exercens: people have priority over money, capital exists for labor and not vice versa. Labor and capital each need the other (Rerum novarum, 19) and must share (Quadragesimo anno, 53, 54), but that does not mean they are equal. The worker is not just a living “cost factor.”

Today let me extend that argument further, beyond American borders. I’d argue that Americans have had experience with the baneful effects of disconnecting laws governing borders, employment, and labor that Cass warns against. I’d argue further that their experience is another reason why American politics are currently roiled by “populists” and why Donald Trump was elected and reelected. That experience is economic globalization.

Economic globalization is the national equivalent of uncontrolled immigration. Just as liberal immigration regimes tolerate mass illegal immigration into the country (not many Americans leave, the rhetoric of anti-Trumpers notwithstanding), so liberal economic regimes have tolerated mass import of cheap goods in tandem with the mass export of American work, primarily in manufacturing.

Borders in this mindset became as much encumbrance to free movement of goods as to peoples expressing their “dignity” by crossing them at will regardless of the law. Marginalization of borders progressively eroded the value of “made in America,” eventually calling into question what that phrase even meant when a majority of something’s components come from overseas. Driven purely by capital — costs and profits — employment law was essentially nullified: you had to hire an American over a foreigner if the job was in America but if the job itself was exported, it could go to the lowest wage earner. Having thus put the American worker on par with foreign competitors in countries where labor law was lax if not absent, the standards set by American labor law were also eviscerated: U.S. safety standards were simply inapplicable in Vietnam.

The result was that while American employment and labor law nominally remained intact, they were in practice rendered moot because the jobs they regulated were no longer in the United States. Like it or not, they were replaced by “global” lowest common denominators, typically driven by considerations of capital.

Whether Donald Trump’s trade and tariff policies are the solution to the “globalization of the economy” is not my consideration here. My observation is simply that when American elites — Democrats and Republicans — talked about “free and fair trade” starting back in the 1980s, they gave the “free” full-throated endorsement while “fair” tended to get choked in the back of their throats. Almost half a century later, the economic impact on Americans is evident.

This should be apparent to the Catholic bishops of the United States. Many of today’s bishops, “renewing” their dioceses by consolidating and closing parishes, preside over regions — largely coextensive with the economic “Rust Belt”– hollowed out by economic dislocation. These are the same places where their predecessors once defended the dignity of the American worker. There’s a reason Catholic Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Boston are less Catholic, with fewer of the faithful to fill the churches, schools, and other institutions those bishops’ “brick-and-mortar” predecessors once built. The reason is those “brick-and-mortar” bishops stood up for the American worker, i.e., they recognized the inherent injustice posed by both imports that sent jobs abroad and illegal aliens that took jobs at home. It is incoherent to lament the export of American jobs while welcoming the import of foreign labor without regard to legality or justice.

Cass makes a compelling point demanding that we see immigration, employment, and labor law as a coherent whole, one of whose legs cannot be removed without the whole stool falling down. Let me suggest bishops consider whether Catholic social teaching is rendered equally incoherent and unstable when we laud the “priority of labor over capital” and denounce the “worship of markets and consumerism,” but then ignore the question of the legal status of immigrants and constantly subordinate it to an already attenuated lip service about nations’ rights to regulate it.