Poll: How serious an offense is illegal border crossing?

Blogger has "retired" its Poll gadget, so I'm just going to wing this, because I really want to know...

I suspect the divide between left/right on illegal immigration is driven by how serious an offense you think border-hopping is. Leftists make their views known by dropping the qualifier "illegal" entirely -- everybody's an immigrant. They invented a linguistic dodge -- "undocumented" which allows them to distinguish between legal immigrants and illegal without having to use the term illegal. Their media enablers have gone along with this.

So, how serious an offence is illegal immigration? Please "vote".

a) Not at all serious or important -- open the borders!

b) about as serious as speeding or illegal parking

c) about as serious as shoplifting

d) about as serious as cheating/lying to the authorities on your income tax

e) about as serious as cheating/lying to authorities AND breaking/entering into someone's home or property

f) more serious than (e) above (explain)

Schumer rejects US border separation solution - Why Did The News Cycle Drop This??

Schumer rejects GOP proposal to address border crisis

Asked if that meant Democrats would not support a bill backed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to keep immigrant families together while seeking asylum on the U.S. border, Schumer said they want to keep the focus on Trump.

Why wasn't this Democrat move shouted from the media mountaintops?

Implementing zero-tolerance is just another way of saying "we will uphold the laws of the United States".  If you don't like the law, change the law.

US Border Separations: "All this can be avoided if --

... These kids... are brought over in extremely dangerous conditions, in extremely dangerous terrain, and all this can be avoided if they just go through the port of entry. There would be no crime committed by them and they wouldn’t get separated. Why they don’t do this is beyond me,” explained Cabrera, adding, “As we all know, when you get arrested, you don’t get to stay with your family.”

RedState -- Border Patrol Agent Teaches CNN Just How Ignorant The Network Is About Migrant Children 

The Truth about Separating Kids: just the facts, ma'am

A fact-based explanation well worth the read by Rich Lowry @ National Review.

Why try to hold adults at all? First of all, if an asylum-seeker is detained, it means that the claim goes through the process much more quickly, a couple of months or less rather than years. Second, if an adult is released while the claim is pending, the chances of ever finding that person again once he or she is in the country are dicey, to say the least. It is tantamount to allowing the migrant to live here, no matter what the merits of the case.

.... The option that both honors our laws and keeps family units together is a swift return home after prosecution. But immigrant advocates hate it because they want the migrants to stay in the United States. How you view this question will depend a lot on how you view the motivation of the migrants (and how seriously you take our laws and our border).

So true, so true.

Notes:

1st offense misdemeanor: Separation of less than one day while the violation is being processed. "The migrants generally plead guilty, and they are then sentenced to time served, typically all in the same day, although practices vary along the border. After this, they are returned to the custody of ICE."

2nd offense: felony. Criminal proceedings apply.

Appeals for asylum:  "In that scenario, the adults are almost certainly going to be detained longer than the government is allowed to hold their children." "Flores Consent Decree from 1997...  unaccompanied children can be held only 20 days. A ruling by the Ninth Circuit extended this 20-day limit to children who come as part of family units. So even if we want to hold a family unit together, we are forbidden from doing so."

Why hold adults at all? "... if an asylum-seeker is detained... the claim goes through the process much more quickly, a couple of months or less rather than years. Second, if an adult is released while the claim is pending, the chances of ever finding that person again... are dicey, to say the least. It is tantamount to allowing the migrant to live here, no matter what the merits of the case.

Lowry ends by saying, "Congress can fix this". See my post on Chuck Schumer -- not interested in a fix by Congress.

Who’s Really to Blame at the Border: Activist judges, perverse incentives, and the law of unintended? consequences

The backstory to the current border crisis via Heather Mac Donald writing in City Journal: "the current distress and hysteria is the fault of illegal aliens and their enablers in the courts":

So it was a ruse. The hysteria over the separation of illegal-alien asylum-seekers from their children (or their purported children) was in large part pretextual. The real target of rage was the Trump administration’s policy of prosecuting all illegal border-crossers for the federal misdemeanor of illegal entry....

.... The extraordinarily complex thicket of interpolated rules and rights that govern U.S. immigration policy (the result of decades of nonstop litigation by the immigration bar) contains a series of judicial mandates that defeated even the Obama administration’s tepid efforts to bring some semblance of lawfulness to the border. A long-running class-action lawsuit in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, originally styled Flores v. Reno, has held that alien minors cannot be confined by the government for longer than 20 days. This 20-day cap contributed to the flood of Central American child-toting asylum seekers that picked up steam during President Obama’s second term [my bolds]. Asylum petitions typically take months, if not years, to adjudicate, given the long backlog of such cases in the immigration courts. If an adult crosses the border alone and utters the magic asylum words—a fear of persecution in his home country—he could in theory be held in detention until his asylum claim was adjudicated. If, however, he brings a child with him and makes an asylum pitch, he puts the government to a choice: detain the adult separately until his claim is heard and release the child after 20 days, or release both adult and child together.

The Obama administration usually chose the second option. Word coursed through Mexico and Central America that taking a child across the border was a get-out-of-jail-free card that would exempt its holder from both criminal prosecution and detention. This child-release lever, coupled with Obama’s announcement in 2012 that he would grant amnesty to the so-called Dreamers, meant that Obama soon had his own family border crisis on his hands. In 2014, 70,000 adult-child units and 70,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended illegally crossing into the U.S. The administration tried building large family detention centers to hold the children and their accompanying adults, but the same Flores decree that has bedeviled the Trump White House stymied that effort. In 2015, a federal trial judge, Holly Gee, herself appointed by Obama and the very definition of an activist jurist, vastly expanded the scope of the original decree and ordered the administration to release the detained minors. The Department of Homeland Security warned that ending family detention would trigger another border surge. Judge Gee dismissed this concern as “fear-mongering,” according to the Associated Press. 

Obeying the law... is something that must never be demanded of politically correct victims. If lawbreaking carries negative consequences, the fault lies with the legal system, not with an individual’s decision to break the law in the first place.... 

The “progressive” solution to these dilemmas is to confer an immediate benefit on the alleged victim that will alleviate the problem in the short term, perverse incentives be damned. Illegal aliens with children must be exempt from immigration rules. The likelihood that such a policy will encourage more illegal aliens to come is out of sight, out of mind (if not covertly viewed as an affirmative good).... 

Strangely, after Trump issued his recent executive order, a few media voices tentatively raised the problem of the unintended consequences of purportedly humane rules. CNN anchor John Berman asked Schiff on Thursday morning if exempting illegal aliens with children from detention “incentivized” such illegal crossings. Schiff ducked the query: “Well, it’s not a simple question as whether somebody has a child or not.” But the problem of perverse incentives will not go away. America’s loss of sovereignty over its borders and the incursion of millions of barely literate campesinos and their progeny is the result of years of victim-favoring policies that ignore personal agency and court the consequences.

City Journal 

The ‘Mustard Seed’ That Liberated Spanish Christians from Islamic Rule

Way back when, a solitary Spaniard stood against the Islamic invasion:

Exactly 1,300 years ago, in the year 718, a little-remembered kingdom was born in Spain. It soon led to the liberation of the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic occupation. To appreciate the significance of that development, we must travel back seven years earlier, to 711, when Arabs and Africans, both under the banner of Islam, “godlessly invaded Spain to destroy it,” to quote from the Chronicle of 754. Once on European soil, they “ruined beautiful cities, burning them with fire; condemned lords and powerful men to the cross; and butchered youths and infants with the sword.”....

“I will not associate with the Arabs in friendship nor will I submit to their authority,” Pelayo responded [to the dhimmi bishop]. Then the rebel made a prophecy that would be fulfilled over the course of nearly eight centuries: “Have you not read in the divine scriptures [e.g., Mark 4:30-21] that the church of God is compared to a mustard seed and that it will be raised up again through divine mercy?”....

(Here, in the Chronicle of Alfonso III, we have possibly the oldest record of the two sorts of Christians that developed under Muslim-occupied Spain: those who defied Islam and fled to the Asturian wilds, and those who accepted their lot and maneuvered within the system as subjugated dhimmis — and grumbled against their northern coreligionists for bringing Islam’s ire against them. The two will meet and compete again in centuries to come.)

National Review.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- Spaniard George Santayana.

How Does Christianity Differ from Other Religions On Homosexuality?

How Does Christianity Differ from Other Religions On Homosexuality?

That's a good question. Here's an answer by Terrell Clemmons at Salvo magazine.

Man and woman being created in the image of God is a blasphemous concept to Islam, a foreign concept in any pantheism, and an absurdity in any naturalistic secularism. Only the biblical worldview, which holds that all men and all women bear God's divine image, gives any objective grounding for inherent human dignity and value.

The argument could perhaps be summarized as this: God has a higher view of human beings than we have of ourselves, and expects us to act accordingly.

Jordan Peterson: A Christian Critique

Jordan Peterson is neither a Christian nor a conservative. But, he is thoughtful and brave, and his message of personal responsibility resonates with conservatives and Christians.

Perhaps he is, as Jesus might put it, "not far from the kingdom".

Here's a blunt Christian critique of his Jungian philosophy from the Daily Caller.

Here's another; more of a review than a critique: Jordan Peterson, Unlikely Guru, by Matthew Schmitz at First Things.

Peterson is a latter-day Norman Vincent Peale, offering sympathy and practical advice. He tells his fans to get a job and become worthy spouses.... But Peterson has an instinct for cultural combat that Peale lacked. He flirts with positions that the Religious Right gave up on long ago, such as opposition to contraception and divorce. “Was it really a good thing,” Peterson asks, “to so dramatically liberalize the divorce laws in the 1960s? It’s not clear to me that the children whose lives were destabilized by the hypothetical freedom this attempt at liberation introduced would say so.” He refuses to use gender-neutral pronouns, such as “zi” and “zir,” that blur the line between woman and man.
Most stunning of all, Peterson criticizes the liberal rhetoric of freedom. “Rights! Rights! Rights!” he exclaims. “It’s appalling.