A danger that she grasps

One of the last great fictions of the illegal immigration crackdown in North Carolina is this:

Oh, we're not going to start just rounding people up.

Then comes yet another horror story out of Alamance County -- the tale of a library worker who has lived in this country since she was a toddler, arrested at her job, while doing her job.

Suddenly the line between identifying and deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes and simply rounding up people known to be illegal immigrants is beginning to blur.

No one recognizes the line fading more clearly than former state Rep. Ruth Cook.

"We're living in dangerous times," she said.

Cook, the first woman to represent Wake County in the legislature, has been a strong voice for progressive causes since the 1950s. She also knows something about dangerous times.

At age 9, Cook was a passenger on one of the last two "Kindertransport" trains that rescued Jewish children from Nazi Germany.

Unlike millions of Jews who perished in the Holocaust, Cook's parents got her, and themselves, out of Germany before World War II started.

Because of the United States' strict immigration policy in the late '30s, her parents landed temporarily in Cuba, where they worked on a Quaker farm. They were admitted to the United States in 1941.

Cook and 36 other children from her transport were taken to England and sheltered in a children's home in Cornwall. She was finally reunited with her mother and father in New York in 1943, when she was 14 years old.

For those who justify their view that illegal immigrants deserve whatever they get in this country because they've broken the law by coming here, Cook remembers all too clearly what it meant to be "illegal" in Germany.

Jews were not allowed to go to certain places or do certain things.

Her point: Sometimes there are laws -- but not all laws are just.

The facts that here in North Carolina we prohibit illegal immigrants from being trained and licensed drivers and that we may prohibit their children from attending community college infuriate Cook.

"Some of these people have been here since they were babies," she said. "I think this is a racist issue."

Of course, in Nazi Germany, the xenophobic, anti-Jewish, "master race" sentiment was coming straight from the nation's rulers.

Here, federal immigration laws and enforcement are such a confused mess that the immigration quagmire is being sorted out county by county and community by community.

Hence the situation involving the Alamance County library worker.

"Here's a woman who has lived here all her life, who has done nothing wrong," Cook said. "Her child is an American citizen. We're going to deport her?

"People say, 'Well, that is the law.' But the law in Germany put Jews in the ovens."

To be clear, Cook is not drawing a direct comparison between North Carolina now and Nazi Germany then.

But the stories of mistreatment of "undesirables" do resonate.

She believes, as I do, that people of conscience cannot sit by and let the immigration morass work itself out.

She knows from experience what can happen when they do.