Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention offers "God and immigration reform" (link). It's a misguided attempt to portray supporting, enabling, and rewarding illegal immigration as humanitarian. He's wrong about pretty much everything.

But, I realize some people might trust him and might think he's telling them the truth when that's not the case. So, if you're a Southern Baptist (or not) and you trust Richard Land, please leave a comment below indicating one specific part of the article you believe. Please don't just say "all of it", but choose one specific sentence or paragraph. Then, I'll reply and show how that one specific sentence or paragraph is misleading.

As a start, he says:

As I testified before Congress in mid-July, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, implied that it is immoral to not enforce the law.

I replied that it is, and it is also immoral for the government to ignore its own laws for more than two decades and then one day the government says, "Now we are going to enforce the law retroactively."

What if the federal government sent a letter to every American saying, "We have been monitoring your driving on the interstates by satellite and we have noted every time you exceeded the speed limit for the past 24 years, and we are now going to send you a speeding ticket retroactively for every incidence?" Most Americans would reject this as arbitrary and unfair.

Is this not what is being proposed by the hard-liners on immigration reform? "You broke the law, you must now leave."

Actually, an appropriate analogy for the current situation is that of a crooked sheriff who lets his cronies - or those who give him money - speed at will. The speeding law is clear, but the sheriff refuses to enforce it because he's on the take. One day the townsfolk might be able to finally put the sheriff in jail or send him packing, and then they can do what the sheriff should have been doing all along: enforcing the law.

In other words, the reason our immigration laws aren't being enforced isn't due so much to the will of the people but because those charged with enforcing the laws are corrupt: they want either money (example: donations from chicken processors) or power (example: the citizen relatives of illegal aliens voting, and illegal aliens becoming citizens and voting).

If the U.S. held a vote tomorrow on whether to enforce the immigration laws, the votes would probably be 80% in favor. The only reason those laws aren't enforced or are only partially enforced is because of political corruption. And, Richard Land isn't just (possibly unwittingly) supporting that political corruption, he's blaming the situation on those who are being ignored by their leaders.