This article is reprinted courtesy of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

Yeats is on my mind, following last evening's election returns. Remember the line? "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold..."

The wave of deportations is remarkable both for the nakedness of its racism and the ugly shadows from history it has let loose.

Horse Sense on Immigration

Meg Whitman, a candidate for governor of California and a frequent critic of employers who hire paper-challenged workers, found herself in a paper jam of her own this month. It was revealed that Ms. Whitman fired her long-time housekeeper in June 2009 after a belated discovery that she had been dusting chez Whitman for years without legal residency. The champion anti-immigration bloviator Lou Dobbs had similar paperwork problems at his 300-acre New Jersey estate and horse farm. An investigation by The Nation magazine turned up undocumented workers tending its grounds and horseflesh and no doubt ducking every time the self-appointed border watchman made his rounds. It is always great fun to catch public figures in glass estates, but the apparent hypocrisy about immigration is a less striking aspect of these gotcha news stories than what they reveal about our national bipolar disorder on illegal immigration.