Tea at Trianon: Aquinas, Islam, and Why Trump’s Immigration Reset Is Just

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, November 30, 2025

Aquinas, Islam, and Why Trump’s Immigration Reset Is Just

From Amuse on X:

President Trump’s renewed halt on Islamic migration to the United States, alongside a policy of promoting remigration for certain Islamic refugees and migrants, is routinely denounced as xenophobic, unchristian, even fascist. The charges are serious. They are also philosophically sloppy and theologically uninformed. If we take St. Thomas Aquinas seriously, especially Summa Theologiae I–II, Question 105, Article 3, the picture looks very different. Aquinas offers a structured framework for thinking about immigration that is more charitable than contemporary slogans yet more realistic than contemporary wishful thinking. Within that framework, Trump’s policy is not only permissible, it is morally and prudentially justified.
To see why, begin with Aquinas’s basic question in I–II, 105, 3. He asks whether the judicial precepts of the Old Law, including its rules about foreigners, are reasonable. Aquinas notes that the Israelite law distinguished carefully among different kinds of foreigners. Some were passing guests who deserved protection from harm. Others were resident sojourners who lived among the people but did not share full civic standing. Still others sought to be admitted fully into the community’s “fellowship and mode of worship.” For this last group, Aquinas stresses, the law imposed an order. They were not to be admitted to citizenship immediately. Admission typically came only after the third generation, and some hostile peoples were to be excluded altogether or held as “foes in perpetuity.” On Aquinas’s reading, these rules are not expressions of ethnic hatred, they are rational instruments for preserving the constitution, worship, and common good of the people. (Read more.)