Growing fear and spreading hardship are the bitter harvest of the country's failure to deal with its illegal immigration problem.

Nativist forces are urging more aggressive round-ups and deportations, and for those immigrants not caught in this widening net, a war of "attrition," by making life miserable for unauthorized workers, so that they voluntarily leave.

We had two very good examples of the two approaches this past week. Immigration and Customs Enforcement descended on the Koch Foods chicken processing plant in Fairfield, Ohio, arresting 160 workers suspected of being in the country illegally.

Once again, mothers and fathers separated from their children and from one another; once again, extended family members, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, along with friends and neighbors, experiencing the pain of separation and the disruption of normal family life.

Also last week, the AFL-CIO, ACLU and other concerned parties filed suit against the
federal government's recent new rule requiring employers to fire within 90 days workers whose names don't match the social security numbers under which they're working. In his first State of the Union address on Sunday, Mexican President Felipe Calderon used the word "persecution" to describe this attempt to evict Mexicans from the US workplace.

As far as the deportation weapon is concerned, it's clear that, even with the huge increases in budget for immigration enforcement, only a small percentage of the current undocumented population will ever be apprehended in this manner. According to ICE statistics for FY2006, 185,431 aliens were removed from the United States, a number that probably doesn't even offset the annual gain of new unauthorized workers, although the Border Patrol is trumpeting the success of new measures to control illegal entry on the southern border.

As far as the "iron fist" strategy of attrition is concerned, one major consequence will be a huge surge in people working off the books, thereby depriving the treasury of the estimated 50 billion in tax revenue paid by unauthorized workers from 1996 to 2003. Of course, being "on the books" with an invalid social security number, and in effect, making a contribution to the people of the United States to sustain the social security system, is now, by some twisted logic, considered further evidence of wrong-doing.

Moreover, driving undocumented workers further underground creates a lucrative business opportunity for human traffickers, recruitment opportunities for organized criminal gangs, further weakening of labor law enforcement and standards, and a ready-made formula for the creation of a new underclass in the United States.

The stereotype of the unauthorized worker is the footloose single male. The reality is that most unauthorized workers live in families, and many of those families are of mixed status, meaning some members are citizens -- either born in the US or naturalized -- others are legal residents, others have temporary status or have pending applications for legal status, and others are illegal.

If you look at the real impact of the iron fist strategy, you're talking about millions of additional family members beyond the estimated 12 million unauthorized immigrants. If you count friends, sweethearts, neighbors, co-workers, and landsmen from the old country, the degrees of separation, especially in a state like New Jersey, are probably fewer than six.

Surely as a nation, we can do better than this. Is it too much to admit that legal channels for unskilled labor to enter the United States for the last two decades were inadequate to meet the economy's need? Is it too much to admit that powerful commercial interests in the United States, in collusion with federal authorities, encouraged desperate Mexicans for generations to cross the border illegally in search of seasonal and other employment?

And now the xenophobes want to drive them out of the country, much as they drove native-American tribes west of the Mississippi after passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and tried to persuade northern freed slaves to go back to Africa prior to the Civil War? Shouldn't sweat equity, whether earned in the cotton fields of the South or the vegetable fields of California, whether earned as house slaves in New York 200 years ago or as nursing home workers in New Jersey today, be recognized in deciding who belongs to this great nation?