Politics & Power Quote by Roger Mahony

Mahony’s line is a calculated two-step: start with economics, then widen the moral frame. By invoking “most analysts,” he borrows technocratic authority to make a pastoral point. It’s a shrewd rhetorical move for a clergyman speaking into a polarized immigration debate: lead with a premise even skeptics might concede (labor markets, agriculture, service work, tax base), then argue that the spreadsheet still misses the story.

The subtext is a rebuke to the fantasy of instant mass deportation as a clean policy lever. “In one day” is not accidental; it’s a stress test, a thought experiment designed to expose dependency and hypocrisy. California’s prosperity, he implies, is entangled with people it refuses to fully recognize. The word “undocumented” keeps the focus on legal status rather than personhood, but he counters that flattening label with “cultural and spiritual gifts,” insisting the debate can’t be reduced to border enforcement or GDP.

Context matters: Mahony, as a prominent Catholic leader in California, is speaking from a tradition that treats migration as both a social fact and a moral claim. He’s also addressing an audience that includes politicians, parishioners, and donors who may want compassion without costs. So he names the cost of cruelty first.

There’s an edge beneath the benevolence: if deportation would hurt “our state,” then the state already benefits from lives lived in precarity. His final pivot to “spiritual gifts” is not sentimental; it’s a demand that the nation see immigrants as makers of meaning, not just hands in an economy.