Dr. Richard Land heads the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. “I’m told by the Hispanic community that perhaps 40 percent of all the Southern Baptist Hispanics in America are undocumented — which shouldn’t surprise us,” he says. “I mean, they come here to work, and we aggressively evangelize and they find Jesus as their Savior.”

It’s rare indeed to find an “undocumented” illegal alien. To the contrary, illegal aliens tend to be as documented as any American – it’s just that their documents are forged.  Even those aliens not actively engaging in identity fraud – by that I mean taking the identity of an American citizen – they routinely break laws that Americans would routinely be fined or jailed for breaking.

Dr. Richard Land brushes criminal behavior off as “undocumented,” and essentially says Praise God! they’re being evangelized!

Well, I join him in celebrating when anyone – in any location – of any nationality – is saved.  But part of that amazing transaction – when we become God’s subjects and members of His Kingdom – is repentance and a turning away from sin.

Imagine, for a moment, an SBC leader congratulating himself that 40% of Southern Baptist men are embezzlers, but praise God! they are saved! How about 40% of SBC children are pot smokers, but praise God! they are saved!  40% of SBC women commit adultery, but praise God! they are saved!  That’s ridiculous, of course.  Such a statistic would be reported soberly, with a fresh commitment to preach and teach on subjects that will help those people turn away from sin.

Everyone would rejoice when a drug dealer turns to the Lord.  But no one would take his claim of salvation seriously if he carried on selling drugs.  But if that’s too dramatic an example, try this one – the man who swears incessantly and indulges his temper does not undergo sanctification so that people who know him, over the course of time, see no changes in his behavior.  They will reasonably wonder exactly what changes the Holy Spirit wrought in him, and treat his claims of being a new person in Christ with skepticism. As they should.

If 40% of Southern Baptist Hispanics are here illegally, they need to obey our laws, self-deport, and come back legally.  Alternatively, what a testimony to send them back to their home countries as missionaries! “I went to the US illegally and broke many laws, but now I know Jesus and I’ve stopped breaking the law to come back to tell you about Him.” Get Lottie Moon to put those folks on the payroll.

But rather than acknowledging each person has responsibility for his own actions, Land blames the government for the fact that we have so much illegal immigration.

Suppose the government informed me that they had been monitoring my driving and now they were going to fine me for every time I had exceeded the speed limit for two decades. I would owe a tidy sum, whereas if they had stopped me the first couple of times, I would have slowed down permanently. Most Americans would reject such a policy as unfair.

Most Americans would be wrong to do so. Would it suck? You bet! But is it unfair? Not at all.  I earned every speeding ticket I ever got and a lot more besides.  Is breaking the law not a sin? Surely Richard Land is not proposing that a sin that goes unseen is less of an offense against God.  As Christians, we are blessed with abundant mercy and grace.  But “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. We who died to sin, how shall we any longer live therein?”

Land continues on to propose a plan that most of us – as numerous polls have indicated – already think is rational, though not particularly fair or just: close the borders, enforce our laws so that only people legally entitled to work here can do so, and after those tasks are completed, provide a final amnesty – with fines and restitution and assimilation requirements – to those illegals who remain here.  Except even then, Land cannot bring himself to call it the amnesty that it is any more than he can describe illegal immigration as the crime that it is.  Is he just so desperate to keep people in his pews?

Alabama is cracking down on illegal immigration at the same time it is rebuilding after a catastrophic tornado. The head of the local Hispanic soccer league worries:

Tuscaloosa County’s 6,000-strong Hispanic population –including roofers, Sheetrockers, concrete pourers, framers, landscapers and laborers — is disappearing, he said, before a law cracking down on illegal immigrants takes effect.

Roofing and other construction jobs used to be considered solidly middle class jobs with which a man could support a family.  Now they are relegated to the same class as picking vegetables and washing dishes?

Unbelievable.

The court, on a 5-3 vote, said federal immigration law does not bar Arizona from suspending or revoking the licenses of businesses that employ unauthorized aliens.

Think there’ll be some kind of reinstatement fee? Maybe some other applicable fees for auditing, inspections, or safety? In cash-strapped states, laws like Arizona’s may turn  into  a welcome new fundraising method.  And for those of us who would like to see our border and laws enforced, it’s heartening news indeed.

I think there’s a way to revive the Dream Act in 2011: Link citizenship only to military service, which Americans see as a sacrifice, dropping the link to college attendance, which most see as a subsidized benefit to the individual.

Sorry, but that’s a really dumb idea. Not only will there be demands to drop standards (because it’s not fair to be so mean to the poor kids who are forced, forced to join the military in order to become citizens) but you may as well just have a draft.

Do we really want a sullen, unwilling, didn’t-have-a-better-option military? While it was common practice in the 2000s to wail about “the kids” Bush unfairly sent to war, the truth is that new recruits are typically well-educated upper middle class; in other words, people with a wide variety of choices of what to do after high school.

Members of the all-volunteer military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods. Only 11 percent of enlisted recruits in 2007 came from the poorest one-fifth (quintile) of neighborhoods, while 25 percent came from the wealthiest quintile. These trends are even more pronounced in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, in which 40 percent of enrollees come from the wealthiest neighborhoods-a number that has increased substantially over the past four years.

A truly all-volunteer military has been working out really well so far. Let’s not mess with it.

People are generally pretty reasonable on what to do with young people whose parents brought them over here. I favor making them apply for citizenship from their home countries.  After we’ve generously given them a better education and medical care they would have otherwise enjoyed, is it too much to ask they obey our laws? But poll after poll has shown that most people will support some kind of amnesty. AFTER the border has been closed and AFTER businesses are made to enforce the employment laws they evade in order to have cheap, illegal labor. So why is that the one option Congress will not seriously consider?

Proof, I guess, that the media isn’t liberal, and is in fact promoting conservative causes.  Doesn’t the media realize that improving border security and opposition to amnesty are massively popular viewpoints in this country? “Blaming” conservatives for not voting for an amnesty is practically making a 2012 GOP campaign ad. Not that Michael Steele would have the wit to use it, but that’s a post for another day.

The sob stories are tiresome.  Nearly everyone has some tragedy in their lives – most, more than one.  These students were presumably raised as Americans; they’ve had the benefit of living here all these years.  They’ve had the benefit of better medical care.  They’ve had the benefit of an American education, which as bad as some of our schools are, is still better than they would have received in a third world country.  The designated media sob story representatives are usually college students.  Some of these – we’ll never know how many – have enjoyed better educations than American kids, thanks to some colleges’ race-based admissions policies.

If nothing else, the GOP should – in Obama’s parlance – hold these young people hostage until we finally get real border security and interior enforcement, particularly employer enforcement.  But there is nothing shameful or wrong about sending these people to the very back of the line behind everyone who has followed the rules all along – even if that means making them submit their applications from the countries of their birth.  This is not punishing them for the sins of their fathers.  It’s not permitting them to benefit from the sins of their fathers.  It’s an important distinction.

“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.

Mr. Hume is too kind. They didn’t simply flat have it wrong. They’re willfully lying because they know if they keep it up long enough the lie will take hold and they’ll win.  They’re relying on us not to fight back effectively.  And they’re probably right.

CBS, while moaning that Arizona has made illegal aliens feel “unwelcome” disingenuously reports that 51% of people think the law is about right.  The screen graphic omits the 9% who feel it doesn’t go far enough.  Sixty percent of Arizonans support this law, versus 36% who oppose it, a fact CBS downplayed while it hyped the heartbreak of the 12 year old girl whose best friend’s family fled Arizona for California because of the mean ol’ law!!

A couple hundred people crowded into the grade-school gym to hear a chilling message from Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West.

“You farmers, I’m telling you right now, arm yourselves,” he said. “As they say the old story is, it’s better to be tried by 12 than carried by six. Damn it, I don’t want to see six people carrying you.”

That seems like a real sensible approach. As opposed to preemptively announcing that we won’t use our most powerful weapons to impede narcotics traffickers smuggling poison over our border.  Or even better, prosecuting homeowners for defending themselves and their property.