U.S-born Pope Leo XIV sharply criticized the advocates who encouraged the deadly migrations that have killed many thousands of migrants over the last 10 years.

“Monsters lurk in these seas,” the Pope said in a June 11 speech in the Canary Islands, which are the first destination of many thousands of African migrants — including many who drowned — while trying to reach the welcome offered by European governments and pro-migration groups. He added:

Mafias that profit from despair, traffickers who enslave women and children, and those whose indifference allows the poor to be swallowed up by exploitation or forgetfulness.

Christ’s “voice continues to resound against the forces that devour, enslave and discard so many of our brothers and sisters,” Leo told his audience, which included migrants who survived the ocean trip from Africa.

The speech shows how Leo is trying to balance two forces: The many pro-migration advocates who welcome migrants yet ignore or worsen the economic harms and deaths from illegal or legalized migration, and the smaller number of advocates who seek to improve trade and civic conditions in the migrants’ home countries.

In Europe and the United States, the pro-migration side has been dominant. For example, since 1990, the U.S. government has adopted an economic policy of Extraction Migration, which seeks to grow the U.S. economy by importing consumers, renters, and workers from poor countries.

The extraction policy is great for retailers, the real estate industry, and Wall Street. But it also reduces CEOs’ incentive to raise Americans’ productivity and wages — or to invest in the developing countries plagued by political instability, corruption, and poor education.

Moreover, the huge profits earned by this consumer-economy colonialism help fund many U.S. advocacy groups that demand yet more deadly migration from developing countries, such as India, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan. Those groups include various Catholic charities that were given more than $1 billion by President Joe Biden’s deputies to shuttle many cartel-delivered migration survivors to jobs and homes throughout the United States.

Pope Leo’s speeches on migration are also prodding his pro-migration bishops to admit how mass migration retards the development of poor countries.

The Christian view of “human dignity demands legal and safe pathways, rescue and assistance, real cooperation against traffickers, effective protection for victims, serious processes of reception and integration, and policies that allow every person to live with dignity in their own land,” Leo said.

In a later June 12 speech in Spain, the pope also told migrants — including self-segregating Muslim migrants — that they should integrate themselves into the host countries: “Open yourselves with trust to the community that welcomes you, to learn its language, to respect its laws, to get to know its customs, to participate in communal life, and to offer your gifts with gratitude.”

But Leo also quietly rejected the idea of economic migration as he urged support for economic development:

While there is a right to seek refuge when life is threatened, there is also the right not to have to migrate: the right to remain in one’s own home without hunger, war, persecution, violence, the land becoming uninhabitable, corruption stealing the bread from the poor or weapons destroying the future of children. We cannot grow accustomed to counting the dead.

He made a similar two-sided pitch in a June 8 speech to the left-dominated Spanish Parliament, where he noted:

The situation of migrants and refugees calls for a response that focuses on people, addresses the root causes that force them to leave, and goes beyond the mere management of migration flows. This gives rise to a twofold demand for social justice: to offer safe and legal pathways, a respectful welcome and real opportunities for integration; and, at the same time, to promote the right to remain in one’s own land, working to ensure that no one has to leave their home due to a lack of peace, security or decent living conditions, including economic inequalities.

“In recent years, increasingly dangerous routes have highlighted the extremely high cost of this [deadly migration] reality, so often hidden or ignored,” Leo added.

“If your goal is to help the maximum number of people around the world, you have to direct your energies where they are,” Jeremy Beck, the co-president of NumbersUSA, which advocates for lower migration rates said:

No matter how generous an immigration system that you put together, that immigration system is never going to be the escape route for 95 percent, 99 percent, of the people around the world who live in global poverty … If you want to help the maximum number of people around the world, you have to help them where they live.

“Our position is that we have a responsibility to treat people humanely, and if we are going to detain them, we have to detain them in humane conditions,” Beck told Breitbart News.

Some GOP political leaders in the United States are spotlighting the damage done by migration — both to the destination countries and to the migrants and the countries they cross.

For example, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a June 3 hearing that mass migration is bad for migrants and the people in the destination countries, saying, “Mass migration is not good for any country that has to absorb it, and Europe is now facing the consequences of that … We do not have a mass migration event, and every country along that [migrant] route in Central America is grateful for it, because … they [do not] have to spend and less resources that are being taxed and less of a burden that they’re having to carry.”