I am an illegal immigrant

This post is in response to Arizona's new law authorizing police to demand that people provide proof of legal immigration status. I am speaking especially to Arizona Mormons.

I am an illegal immigrant.

When the LDS Church sent me on a mission to the Dominican Republic, it sent me in on a tourist visa, which I then overstayed, meaning that for most of my time in the Dominican Republic, I was in that country illegally. That's how the Church did things—applying for proper visas required so much paperwork and time, and the government might not have allowed so many missionaries to enter the country officially. Near the end of my mission, the mission office did begin applying for visas for missionaries because an election was coming up, and there was concern that a new administration might crack down.

So: I was an illegal immigrant. I was—am, if we're going to use the essentialist terms in which some rhetoricians like to frame this issue—a lawbreaking person who entered a country under false pretenses and lived there in disregard for that government's efforts to regulate the passage of foreigners across its borders. I committed the offense that so offends supporters of Arizona's new law. And so did all the other American missionaries I served with.

How many of the Arizona Mormons who support this new law have similarly been illegal immigrants while serving LDS missions abroad? How many of them have sons or daughters who are currently serving LDS missions as illegal immigrants? How would they feel if their sons or daughters were serving their missions in countries that had laws like Arizona's—where they were constantly vulnerable to being harassed by police demanding to see proof of their legal alien status because, after all, they clearly look foreign?

I've seen supporters of the law try to evade charges of racism by insisting that this law is simply about enforcing the law. To Mormons who have adopted that party line, let me ask you this: If you are truly so zealous about obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law, where is your outrage over how your church routinely operates outside other countries' immigration laws? Or is this, in fact, about something other than your innocent devotion to the rule of law?