If I speed, I am breaking the law, and it’s likely I will get a ticket. Doesn’t matter whether I’m on personal or Church business. Likewise, if a missionary is in a country illegally, they are breaking the law. This is not an acceptable situation.

This doesn’t have anything to do with saying a person is somehow less than worthy or less than a person because their visa status is in question. I’m not sure where you got that. What I’m saying is that it’s in everyone’s best interests (the Church and the individual) that all legal matters are settled before (and maintained during) a mission takes place.

I suppose you could choose to read that as “denying someone the opportunity to serve”, but only if they choose not to obey the law…

To quote from Elder L. Tom Perry in General Conferences a few years ago:

The bar was raised by the leaders of the Church, and now the minimum standard for participating in missionary work is absolute moral worthiness; physical health and strength; intellectual, social, and emotional development. In every high-jumping competition there is a minimum height at which the competition starts. The high jumper cannot ask to start at a lower height. In the same way, you should not expect the standards to be lowered to allow you to serve a mission. If you want to be a missionary, you must be able to clear the minimum standards.

My question is: why wouldn’t legal standards apply as well?

Back in the mid-1990s, long before the Church “raised the bar”, our oldest son became active again and wanted to go on a mission. However, he had a criminal record, a single instance of stealing surplus equipment from his employers during his period of inactivity. He had to finish his probationary period and otherwise get everything cleared up before he could turn in his mission papers.

Now, I do understand the difference between a conscious criminal act (such as stealing) and being brought into the US by your parents as a child; one is a conscious sin and the other is no fault of your own and one that you may be unable to remedy. But, again, I think the Church has been putting itself in a very difficult position both domestically and internationally by allowing those who are in the US illegally to serve full time missions. ..bruce..

That being said, I do have an interesting story from my mission in 2000-2002 in South America where we ran into similar issues, but with US Citizens being the illegals. For an American to obtain a visa was a difficult process, and thus, long before my mission, church leaders decided to allow missionaries to stay in the country using the 90-day vacation visa. This required a quarterly trip to the border similar to the above mentioned. After a few of these trips, border patrol became so lax that they only required the passports to be brought for stamping, and not the missionaries. Then they went another step further and just decided to give one of the extra passport stamps to a church administrative official. Why they agreed to take it, is beyond me. Eventually, that particular stamp was reported missing, and customs officials were told to be on the lookout for that particular stamp.

I’m not sure how long this went on, but as I look through my passport, there are quite a few stamps from during my mission when I was not in possession of my passport (they were kept in the mission office and regional church headquarters for the duration of my mission). This story really began to unravel while I was serving in the mission office, and heard that four missionaries had been thrown in jail while trying to board a plane to return home from their missions. The reason? Having their passports stamped by a stolen stamp. We (the office elders, along with the regional church administrators) had to spend the next few weeks testing out different border crossing spots, and getting all the foreign missionaries out of the country via smaller, more lax, airports, boats, etc. so they could apply for longer term religious visas in the embassy offices of nearby countries. After that, everything was on the up and up as far as visas were concerned, but I was surprised to have seen it get to where it did.

Here in Utah, a 2008 state law authorizes (it stops short in ordering) all state law enforcement departments to function as immigration agents to track and apprehend illegal immigrants. One after another, police departments and the Highway Patrol have announced their formal rejection of the law, refusing to serve as ICE agents. They do this not because they want to promote illegal residency, but because they realize the risks faced by all Utahns in general and illegal immigrants individually increase dramatically if they do: if immigrants can’t report crimes to police because they fear deportation, then it’s open season for criminals of all kinds to victimize anyone who looks Hispanic. If illegal immigrants refuse to come forward when they have knowledge of criminal behavior or whereabouts because they fear deportation, then any of us — not just illegals — risk having crimes against us go unsolved and unpunished. If illegal immigrants are afraid to seek medical care, public health suffers. And on and on.

Evidently the Church feels somewhat the same way as the Salt Lake City PD feels: they can’t fulfill their greater mission of ministering to individuals and operating the Kingdom if they are forced to take formal notice of immigration status. Illegal immigration may be a crime, but the Church apparently doesn’t consider it a sin.

Iow, it’s not breaking ANY law ANYWHERE in what it is doing – and it can show that to other countries.

My concern is entirely about the legal impact on the Church as an institution, somewhat here in the US, but particularly in other countries.

For the past 40+ years, the Church has managed to get itself into a growing number of countries specifically by pointing out the 12th Article of Faith and D&C 58:21 to those governments. This is why, for example, the Church was able to build, dedicate, and operate a temple in East Germany while it was still part of the Soviet Union. I suspect it is likewise why the Church can still operate a mission and a temple in Hong Kong since Hong Kong was handed back over to the People’s Republic of China. It remains a major factor in gaining official (or unofficial) recognition in countries where the Church has not previously been allowed.

As I suspect most of you know, the Church has on-going problems with getting visas for missionaries to serve in countries other than their own. To the extent that this practice of having missionaries serve in the United States who are not here legally becomes widely known, that could jeopardize the work in many other areas of the world. ..bruce..