For a moment, it appeared that George W. Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox would work out an improved border accommodation. But when attention returned to immigration after 9-11, reform had turned into something else – concern about “illegals” burdening social services and school systems – paying no taxes, alarm at overpopulation, white supremacist hostility to a wave of people not like us speaking Spanish, a newfound concern for unfair competition with blacks for low-paying jobs, and a righteous desire to punish undocumented workers by deporting all 12 million of them.

House Resolution 4437 (the Sensenbrenner bill) reflects this view. Suddenly people who speed, drive drunk, cheat on taxes – and wives or husbands, who sell favors for campaign contributions and bless Israeli violations of international law – are obsessed with immigration law being scrupulously enforced. Close the border; send them home. Shoot to kill.

Yet, Congress very well knows that immigration law has too often reflected ugly national prejudices. Orientals built Western railroads; then we excluded them. So did the Irish; we cut them to a trickle, then Italians, Central Europeans. The only Africans we welcomed were in chains. Eventually, only English and Germans were welcome. Cubans in, Haitians out.

Most also have some vague memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement which revealed that some laws do not deserve obedience. Law is not always a reliable hook on which to hang an argument. Twain called it an ass.

But enforcing the law is where much of the country is. In other times, Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahoney’s declaration that the church there would disobey a law forbidding acts of mercy would have put an end to legislation that would criminalize “unlawful presence.”

In other times, Christian fundamentalists would have evoked Leviticus: “Treat the foreigner the same as a native.” And Matthew 25: “I was thirsty, and you gave me drink, a stranger, and you welcomed me.” Or ask, “What would Jesus do?” Certainly not man a border watch tower.

If we think outside the law box, we recognize respect for the dignity of every human person and common ownership of the planet. It is blasphemous to argue that most bountiful and fertile land on the planet should be the exclusive property of 4.6 per cent of the world’s population. Add recognition of the human right to migrate espoused by Vatican II, and one sees undocumented immigrants differently.

One sees need. Most of the 185 million migrants today were forced to move. NAFTA ruined a million Mexican farmers. We encouraged maquiladora manufacturing that then went abroad. Where do those farmers and workers and their families go for work but across the border?

Husbands risk their lives and suffer years of separation from families to work, be exploited, fear deportation and send lifeline remittances home. Felons? Hardly. Millions of Americans migrate from place to place in search of better opportunities.

Understanding that need, compassion kicks in. We recognize victims of bad policy and Mexican government corruption.

Government authority to regulate immigration is inseparable from need, the right to migrate and the societal obligation to welcome the stranger in our midst. The law? Under the legal doctrine of necessity, need justifies breach of the law when it does not greatly harm others: a hungry man may steal a loaf of bread. Fact: This bountiful land is far from full. And given migrants’ work records, they are hardly stealing.

The state must also be responsible. Given our declining birth rate and graying population, we need more than the present flow of immigrants to fund baby-boomer Social Security. Employers need workers to get crops in, to avoid closure or moving abroad.

In Social Security taxes from which migrants do not benefit, other taxes, reduced prices on produce they pick and goods they make, hard-working undocumented workers pay their way. As even George W. Bush himself has recognized, it is inhuman, senseless and practically impossible to deport 12 million people when we need their labor and there is no work in Mexico.

The problem is not porous borders but bad law – huge immigration backlogs, mean quotas, lack of an efficient guest worker program, exploitation of undocumented workers, divided families, criminal and deadly smuggling.

We should provide undocumented workers an opportunity to earn legal status. If we are to cherish family values, we should expedite the reunification of separated families or stop talk of family values. We should establish a guest worker program that can lead to permanent residence in the United States, a program to match willing workers with willing employers, and use identification cards and sanctions against employers, if necessary, to assure just treatment of workers. We should replace NAFTA with a North American Union that reforms the Mexican economy and raises wages and working conditions. We should afford immigrants the same treatment our citizens enjoy.

We should be decent, be good neighbors.

Bill Slavick is a member of the Maine Fair Trade Coalition and an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate.