Last week, the National Association of Evangelicals endorsed amnesty and increased immigration. (See NAE president Leith Anderson’s statement at Thursday’s Senate hearing; the CIS panel discussion on the topic, offering a dissenting view, is here.) Anderson’s statement is almost a parody of all the fallacies about otherwise law-abiding undocumented immigrants, immigrant family values (“Immigrants often model for us forgotten truths about the importance of love, commitment and mutual support within the family”), “for you were aliens in the land of Egypt,” and so on. Surprisingly, the NAE also shilled for cheap-labor employers: “In today’s globalized labor market there must also be a workable system for employers to be able to legally hire the help that they need.” Who was it who said that we’re better off with novelists animated by Christian principle than with Christian bishops writing novels? The same should go for making immigration policy.

We did a poll a few years ago that suggests how out of touch this latest elite group of amnesty-backers is with its ostensible constituency. While the majority of both Protestants and Catholics opposed amnesty and supported attrition through enforcement, those Protestants who described themselves as born-again were the most opposed to amnesty, and while that’s not a complete overlap with the member denominations of the NAE, it’s pretty close.

Roy Beck, a very active United Methodist layman, has a couple of blogs on this (here and here), including contact information for the headquarters staff of most major denominations, evangelical and otherwise.

So I’m not just picking on the evangelical hierarchs — a Roman Catholic priest I know who’s written about the immorality of illegal immigration (this is a different priest from the one I hosted on my panel discussion) tells me that when he speaks about this at parishes people come up to him afterwards, amazed, saying that from what they’d been hearing from the pulpit they didn’t realize they were allowed to think such thoughts.