Derb: For a change of pace: I’ll plead guilty to one count in your last post and agree with you on another.

I am a prejudiced observer. True: I discriminate in favor of immigrants. I think they contribute to the economy — especially during hard times, when the price of labor must be the most flexible.

In my ghetto days, I admired how immigrant families would pile into some sty, clean it, and run a business from it. I admired how they’d organize their big families into labor pools and arrange their work hours to succeed, no matter what.

I remember a Vietnamese clan that occupied a two-story, half-rubble house in the Little Italy section of St. Louis, where I lived. They started a horrid little Chinese restaurant on the ground floor, serving stock takeout fare cooked in old animal grease and smothered in MSG. Nothing but fermented soy separated one’s tongue from this horror! But it tasted good at 1am if you were hungry enough.

Not all the stories were cute. Years later, reporting on the Kansas City public schools, I ran a multipart expose on English-as-second-language programs. I discovered that the kids from Korea were getting great grades, despite the fact that the course was being taught in Spanish (of which they knew less than English). They were bribing their school mates to do their homework for them, because their folks beat their hides off if they didn’t get top grades.

Later I got to know to know Hispanic day laborers — hardworking guys who were generally good humored except when drunk. Most of them straightened out when they got married, and most of them eventually did. And the señoritas were the best moms.

The thing that struck me about the immigrants I met, whether they were entrepreneurs or workers, was their raw determination to use American freedom to better themselves and their families. If they swam across the Rio Grande to get that opportunity, I thought the more of them for it — and still do. They stood out in the ghetto. They were different.

I, too, can appreciate a good mass deportation, John. It’s just that these aren’t the folks I want to deport.

I see that it bothers you that they don’t complete high school, John. Well, neither did I.

Here’s where I agree with you: The majority of the American people are against illegal aliens, in a vague sort of way, for two reasons: 1) they’re illegal, and 2) they’re alien. But it’s millions of lives you’re messing with here — millions of families, millions of employees, tens of thousands of employers — and the people directly affected feel a lot more passionately about deportation than the “majorities” that refuse to vote on “illegal aliens” in election after election. Count the delegates that Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter got in the GOP primaries. Compare that to the millions who hit the streets after the Sensenbrenner bill passed.

If unemployment hits 25 percent, your alternate future may come true, John. But short of that, you lose. The demographics alone will bury you.

During the early days of the civil-rights movement, a lot of good conservatives waded hip-deep into ordure by demanding constitutional restraint. We asserted states’ rights while the American people watched thuggish officials deploy dogs, billy clubs, and “culture” tests to deny others the franchise. And even though the “states’ rights” folks had the better arguments, the American people rejected them, along with our good intentions. In the aftermath, we suffered the degradation of civil rights into statism.

We’re primed to repeat that mistake with Latinos. By insisting that millions of decent, hard-working people are illegal and unforgivable, you’re setting up the dogs, the billy clubs, and the hoses. The American people, unless pushed by some extreme event, will spit this revolution out. It won’t matter if you are technically right.

— Richard Nadler is president of the Americas Majority Foundation, a public-policy think tank in Overland Park, Kan.