We Rope 'Em and Brand 'Em

Is there a more powerless and disenfranchised group of people in this country than undocumented workers? And yet the right hates them, fears them, and demonizes them as a the threat to everything we hold dear. "Illegal" immigrants, it seems, are more dangerous than Islamicism. I read some random  comments on this story about evangelical pastors supporting immigration reform, and discovered a few things:

• Our ancestors are morally better because they came to America legally. I suppose that the slaves came here legally, but I wouldn't call that anything to brag about. Anyway, I figure that if Ireland shared a border with the United States, my forebears would have come here legally or illegally because the conditions of 19th C. Ireland would have forced it. In fact, I'd have more blood brothers and sisters because a shared border would have eliminated any reason for their ancestors to go to Liverpool or Australia.
• Undocumented workers are lazy parasites. You try working in a produce field for a few days before you sing that song.
• Round them up and deport them. Supposedly, there are all kinds of easy, inexpensive ways to send 11,000,000 people back to Mexico, such as making them leave by cutting off their benefits. Since their opportunities would still be better here, this would have the effect of making 11,000,000 poor people desperately poor, a petri dish for violent crime.

Then there was this gem: "They bread [sic] like rabbits..."

The Daily Meaux laments the subordination of science to business.