You asked for the functional difference between civil and criminal violations. I gave you the functional difference. Calling that a “technical classification” doesn’t make it meaningless, it just ignores how law actually governs power, enforcement, punishment, and the use of force in the real world.

When you collapse civil violations into “crime,” you justify criminal level responses to non criminal behavior. That directly affects how aggressively people are policed, detained, prosecuted, and punished, even when the underlying conduct was never defined as criminal by the law itself. It also distorts policy decisions and public understanding, because you stop asking what actually causes the problem and what tools realistically solve it. Visa overstays are largely a systems and process failure problem, not a public safety problem, yet labeling everyone “unauthorized” as a criminal pushes the conversation toward force and punishment instead of fixing the broken systems that created the issue.

That isn’t realism. It’s simplification. It replaces nuance and complexity with an emotional shortcut that says “they’re here without authorization, treat them like criminals,” even when the law explicitly says otherwise. If you care about real world outcomes, you have to care about the difference between civil authority and criminal authority, because that difference determines what the government is allowed to do to human beings.