In another comment on an earlier article I made one of the same points Eric is making. How can a person, a human being be "illegal?" He or she may be "undocumented," but cannot, as a human being, be illegal. Whenever one uses the term illegals one is accepting the framing employed by Help Save Manassas and the hard right anti-immigrants. I urge progressives who are looking for a solution, a way to ameliorate the situation, to use the term "undocumenteds." It takes the discussion at once to a different level.
 

First of all, a human being cannot be illegal.  That's wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to start.  Second of all, this whole focus on "illegal" is a huge distraction, as Michael Kinsley demonstrates (see comment below).  The bottom line is that the federal government could change immigration laws tomorrow if it wanted to do so and make everyone's status here "legal" (let's say, fine all "undocumenteds" $1,000 and require them to learn English within 5 years or whatever).  Would that calm down the "Help Save..." crowd?  I'm willing to bet a large sum of money that it wouldn't.

Michael Kinsley, "Kidding Ourselves About Immigration."

...We all oppose breaking the law, or we ought to. Saying that you oppose illegal immigration is like saying you oppose illegal drug use or illegal speeding. Of course you do, or should. The question is whether you think the law draws the line in the right place. Should using marijuana be illegal? Should the speed limit be raised--or lowered? The fact that you believe in obeying the law reveals nothing about what you think the law ought to be, or why.

Another question: Why are you so upset about this particular form of lawbreaking?  After all, there are lots of laws, not all of them enforced with vigor. The suspicion naturally arises that the illegality is not what bothers you. What bothers you is the immigration. There is an easy way to test this. Reducing illegal immigration is hard, but increasing legal immigration would be easy. If your view is that legal immigration is good and illegal immigration is bad, how about increasing legal immigration? How about doubling it? Any takers? So in the end, this is not really a debate about illegal immigration. This is a debate about immigration.

Brilliant, cuts right to the heart of what many of us have been trying to say for months.  

being denigrated by Ms. Chavez is amusing inasmuch as anectodal evidence was a mainstay of President Reagan's leadership, the same President Reagan who first opened the borders to the flood of cheap Mexican laborers supposedly needed (anecdotally, that is) by agribusiness to pick crops in California.

When she asked Eric for his anecdotal evidence, he made it clear that Save Manassas had employed threats to scare opponents into silence, thus short-circuiting the democratic process. That, of course, is another tactic of the hard right, used the world over as well as by President Cheney in stifling debate. Where is Ms. Chavez going with this hearing?