I'm certainly not unaware of the increasingly onerous legal plight of the undocumented in this country, as my own parents-in-law were in fact "Mexican illegals" for nearly 30 years, until they were eventually given immunity during the Reagan administration. They became naturalized citizens only after my wife and I were married.

Let's face some facts here. If we really want to have an honest discussion about the subject of immigrants (legal and otherwise), we must admit to ourselves publicly and forthrightly that there are underlying direct and tangential factors driving such punative legal behavior toward las migras, et al., and most all have to do with the gradually deteriorating conditions that have existed within the middle- and working-class personal and family economies over the past 40-plus years.

The aforementioned "ignorant masses", i.e., those who comprise much of our middle and labor classes, have been under considerable economic stress since possibly the latter half of the Johnson administration; when sccounted for inflation, real wages and earning power amongst those masses have actually declined significantly since the Nixon administration. The years of so-called national prosperity under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton saw a serious consolidation of wealth by the richest 5% of our citizens, at the ultimate expense of everyone else.

Regrding the topic at hand, I would therefore offer my own sad and somewhat discouraging observation that you and your fellow attorneys who practice immigration law will have to engage in a defensive holding action in the courts for the time being, at least until the general economic plight of the middle and labor classes in our country is somewhat alleviated, and some sociological "breathing room" for rational emotional compromise can be established.

But in order to do that, we must first somehow begin to convince the good citizens of Thomas Frank's Kansas to break their common cause with the Republicans and conservative Democrats on such divisive nativist and socio-economic issues as illegal immigration, and resist further attempts by their cynical race-baiting political "sugar daddies" to manipulate them into voting repeatedly against their own economic self-interests.

Simply put, we have our work cut out for us.

a.k.a. republican crimes: public corruption, organized crime, and white-collar crime.

That is just how the commodity market, and labor is a commodity, works.

If you want to help the "labor class" as some have described them, close the borders and enforce the law.