The truth about the New Bedford raid

Two Globe columnists today come up aces today in the ongoing controversy over last week's immigration raid in New Bedford.

First, Eileen McNamara fills in the details of something that's been out there from the beginning: that Gov. Deval Patrick was informed of the upcoming raid even before his inauguration, and that Department of Social Services Commissioner Harry Spence was involved in planning at various stages — right down to a phone call he received the night before "to coordinate law enforcement and child protection aspects of the raid." (Spence, as I've observed previously, is the grand master of avoiding blame.) McNamara writes:

So, enough with the breast-beating pretense that the Patrick administration was blindsided by the stealth tactics of shadowy federal immigration officials. This is political grandstanding of the most transparent kind.

Read it all — otherwise you'll miss the priceless comment from Patrick's communications director, Nancy Fernandez Mills.

Next up is Jeff Jacoby, with the first of a two-parter that examines the real problem with illegal immigration:

[I]f hundreds of thousands of immigrants come here illegally each year, is it realistic to conclude that we have a massive crime problem for which a ferocious crackdown is the only solution? Perhaps it is the case instead that America's immigration quotas are simply too low for the world's most dynamic economy. And perhaps the persistent influx of industrious workers is not a plague to be cursed, but a blessing to be better managed.

Buttressing both McNamara's and Jacoby's arguments is a profile by the Globe's Irene Sege of Barthila Solano, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador whose tenuous family situation has been thrown into chaos following the arrest of her husband, Valencio Salas, last week.

"I don't understand what harm we're doing," Solano tells Sege. "We work so hard."