Needless to say, I agree with Eric Utne: 

I was in high school when the deeper horrors of slavery became apparent: dislocated families, deplorable living conditions, sexual servitude, torture.

I was just out of college and working for a bilingual newspaper in northern New Mexico by the time I recognized the irony: My fourth-grade classmates' parents were keeping local farms and businesses afloat by doing work no "legal" laborer would do. Living in cinderblock hovels hidden away behind the sand hills of southern New Mexio, they made less than minimum wage, suffered inhumane working conditions, and could not protest for fear of deportation.

Economically speaking, they served the same purpose as the Africans who slaved for American masters through the first half of our nation's history. They provided the cheap labor that allowed us to establish dominance in the international marketplace. And they were invisible.

A U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service report estimated that there were 7 million undocumented immigrants in the country in 2000. A more recent estimate of 11 million has been discussed in news accounts. Robert Justich, managing director of Bear Stearns Asset Management, says that 20 million could be a more accurate number.

Hiring undocumented workers is illegal. Yet we don't require that employers verify an applicant's documents, and there is no simple system for doing so.

We are systematically tolerating, even encouraging, undocumented workers to come to the United States. Then, in order to placate a vocal and ill-informed minority, enforcement agencies stage various law enforcement dramas at locations across the country. We erect costly and ineffectual fences on the Mexican border.

 What's most appalling is that we have the audacity to label entrepreneurial immigrants "criminals" when the vast majority of undocumented workers are sincere, skilled, industrious men and women doing what they must to support their families. Just ask the people who hire them. A Texas rancher recently told me he gets 50 percent more work from an "illegal" Mexican day worker than from his legal U.S. counterpart. The Mexican "is generally a family guy, working for his wife and kids," he said. "The American is some kid who doesn't really care, or he's got other problems -- alcohol or whatever -- keeping him out of the permanent workforce."

Somehow many of these laborers manage to save a share of their pitiful wages to send home. Justich reports that in 2003, Mexican workers in the United States sent home $13 billion in remittances. That's to Mexico alone, and that's triple the amount recorded in 1995. Talk about family values.

 If we required good documents starting tomorrow, the nation would plunge into an instantaneous economic crisis. Millions of workers would suddenly be missing.
The only practical and ethical solution is to provide legal status to honest, hardworking immigrants. Then we would have to acknowledge how we treat them. We would have to admit that jobs that offer a fair wage and humane working conditions cost money -- and that cost would be passed on to consumers, who, for starters, might see an additional 10 percent added to their rent or mortgage payment and pay 15 percent more for groceries.

If we shut down illegal immigration, a program to legalize our "guest workers" would be a matter of necessity to save American agriculture. At that point, the citizenry would have had to acknowledge how we were treating people like Max. But because nothing was done then -- and because it doesn't look like anything meaningful is going to happen in the foreseeable future -- illegal immigration endures as a testament to our hypocrisy.

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[Joe: I'd like to add, when oil is under $70/barrel, the #1 source of foreign capital flowing into Mexico is money sent home by undocumented workers.]