Disregarding the law is a moral issue for Dr. Richard Land, just not in the way I’d expect. In this case, we’re supposed to ignore it:
“First and foremost, it’s a kingdom issue, and, second, it’s a moral issue,” Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, told POLITICO. “We have hundreds of thousands of Hispanic Southern Baptists and many of them are undocumented. … It’s no secret that we practice aggressive evangelism. Many of these people were converted after they got here.”
He’s been promoting amnesty since at least 2007, though he carefully refutes that word the way John McCain and liberals do: It’s not amnesty because we’ll make them do some of the things, like learn our history and to speak English, that we make legal immigrants do. I’m still waiting for any kind of argument that doesn’t depend on emotionalism and essentially throwing his hands up in the air and accepting the status quo because that’s the easier path. It’s also interesting that he calls upon Christians to “forgive and act redemptively” toward illegal alien lawbreakers, but he does not call upon illegal alien lawbreakers to repent, return to their home countries, and come back legally.
I’m unpersuaded, and I still stand by what I wrote in 2007:
So, how should Christians respond? If the plight of Mexicans and Central Americans is breaking our hearts, there are better ways to help them than importing their citizens. (If suffering is the criteria that drives our immigration policy, why not airlift most of Darfur over here – they are suffering a great deal more than the average Mexican; their very lives are at risk.) Christians should support churches and private charities. We should encourage our government to make it easy for banks to make micro-loans, and continue with trade policies that will increase the ability of people to earn money. Above all, promote capitalism in every way possible. It is their own governments who are most harming their citizens, and it is not the place of our government to prop up failing leftist and socialist governments – especially at the expense of the citizens the US government is actually supposed to be serving.
The governments of Mexico, Guatemala, and other nations that export their poor to America as a political safety valve to stop or delay some well-deserved revolutions are in office at the sufferance of their citizens; people who have declined to stay and try to fix their own countries, and declined to undergo the (ridiculously and unnecessarily long, drawn-out) legal process to become Americans. At what point do we say, “enough” ? And at what point do we finally hold American businesses accountable for their lawbreaking which has contributed so mightily to this problem? The addition to government subsidized “cheap” labor has cost us all – including the countries from which they draw their labor – a great deal.


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