Consider the recent immigration raid in New Bedford:

Whenever a volunteer at the old church building in New Bedford asks Rosa Herrera if she needs anything, her answer is the same: "I need the father of my baby."

Eight and half months pregnant, Ms. Herrera and her husband, Santos Gonzalez, were two of the 361 undocumented workers picked up during last week's raid at the Michael Bianco Inc. factory here. She was released because of the advanced state of her pregnancy. But her husband is in detention in Texas and both still face immigration hearings.

The human consequences of the America's stepped-up immigration enforcement has brought into sharp focus the ethical conflicts inherent in a debate often presented in simple black and white. Depending on who is talking, illegal immigrants are lawbreakers or workers searching for a better life.

They're exploiters of America's largess or victims of a capitalistic system that thrives on cheap labor.

What is the common good here? To preserve immigrant families, especially when the children are American citizens, or uphold the rule of law? And what exactly is the economic common good? To have cheap labor or expensive goods? The Washington Post adds details on the human costs of this quandary:

NEW BEDFORD, Mass -- During her two years working in a garment factory alongside hundreds of other immigrants, there were few assurances in Marta Escoto's uncertain life. One of them was the promise she made to her children -- I will always take care of you.

It was a promise she was unable to keep this month. Escoto and at least 360 other illegal immigrants were taken into custody here March 6 after a raid by federal agents on the Michael Bianco Inc. factory -- a military contractor 60 miles south of Boston. Many of them, including Escoto, 38, were women whose detention separated them from their children, some of whom were stranded at day-care centers, schools, or friends' or relatives' homes.

Immigration officials said they made provisions for the children so none would be left alone. But in the days right after the raid -- as a 7-year-old called a hotline and asked for her mother, and a breastfeeding baby refused a bottle and was hospitalized for dehydration -- Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) began to categorize the raid's aftermath as a "humanitarian crisis."

Escoto, like most of those detained, was flown to a holding center in Texas as deportation proceedings began. A single mother, she was separated from her two young children, who were born in the United States and are U.S. citizens. Daniel, 2, asked for her constantly, while relatives worried about the care of frail 4-year-old Jessie -- who cannot walk and suffers from an illness that prevents her from absorbing enough nutrition.

There will be Congressional hearings on the New Bedford raid, but it isn't the first time this has happened. As long as these busts make good theater, they'll continue, at least under this administration. Whether it's more effective in the long run to hardass some poor Guatemalans to prison in Texas than pinch the defense-contractor executives who almost certainly knew they were breaking immigration law by employing them - well, that's an interesting question, isn't it?

Making the hard step away from the immediate outrage of mothers separated from their breast-feeding babies, the immigration issue presents an interesting challenge to religious moderates and progressives. It seems obvious enough to us that illegal immigrants are our neighbors, sometimes literally. They work tough jobs, pay taxes, try to send their kids to school and a little money home to make life a little easier. Many of us would be proud to live down the street from illegals and happy to call them "neighbor" in the Christian sense.

Many conservative Christians don't view immigration this way, however. They identify the common good not with the benefits for the largest number of people, but with the largest number of people following the rules:

"Our position really is consistent with Christian teachings and with the rule of law," said Manuel Miranda, chairman of the Third Branch Conference who has corralled more than 30 leading conservatives to enter the volatile debate.

What's good for everyone is if everyone obeys the law, that's the clear message. If everybody plays the role that has been assigned to them, things will work smoothly, and life will go on. But if people start bucking the system - say by entering the country illegally - it will just disrupt the natural harmony and bring unhappiness to everyone.

This is straight out of the "inherited obligation family" morality that I've talked about here several times, including as it relates to immigration:

Of course this doesn't have anything to do with family policy, at least not in any sense most people would understand it. The family in question here is that same Inherited Obligation prototype that we've discussed before, as spun by authoritarians. If immigrants are allowed to choose their national identity willy-nilly, it undermines the cultural structures that dictate our obligations to one another. Putting the worst face on it, if we allow Juan and Maria to just come and go as they please, pretty soon the kids will get the idea that they don't have to obey Dad, Mom, or in their absence Rush Limbaugh. That's not fair to these people, but not by much.

This is why it's so important for them to jettison birthright citizenship:

Out of concern for keeping families together, the religious leaders propose granting citizenship to any illegal aliens in the country who are related to U.S. citizens. This would include anyone who has had a child born here, often referred to as an "anchor baby."

In return, the federal government would end birthright citizenship, which automatically grants U.S. citizenship to anyone born here, regardless of his parents' legal status. The 14th Amendment says "all persons born or naturalized in the United States ... are citizens of the United States."

Because they understand culture as the family writ large, they can't abide the idea of multiculturalism. That's the social equivalent of same-sex marriage: it declares that not all boundaries are as firm as they seem because of difference within what is supposed to be a unified front. If little Yuki Lin can become an American simply by being born here, then how are we supposed to know what we owe to one another, and who we owe it to? Being an American, for these people, cannot be an accident. It must be the result of taking on a standardized identity and the obligations that accompany it. Otherwise, you won't know which end is up, morally or politically. That supposed lack of coherence terrifies the kind of people that make up Families First. Compared to gaining clearly structured authority, the disenfranchisement of a few brown-skinned babies seems like a bargain.

This exposes the limits of common good thinking. Traditionalist authoritarians don't see themselves as having much in common with immigrants (or gays and lesbians, or residents of New Orleans' Ninth Ward), because they don't perceive themselves as playing by the same set of rules. They (the authoritarians) work hard, raise their kids right, and obey the law. Illegal immigrants cheat their way into the system, break laws to keep themselves here, refuse to contribute to the good of the country, take jobs from Americans, and when they're all done, go home leaving Mom apple pie and America in sorrier shape than when they arrived. It's going to be difficult to bring Christian traditionalists around on this issue, and you can forget the true authoritarians. They don't give a crap about Mexicans because they don't think Mexicans play by the rules, and they're never going to think Mexicans play by the rules. The limit to the use of the common good ideal as an outreach strategy is precisely where it buts up against racism, tacit or overt , because racism is incapable of accepting The Other as neighbor.

Some folks are going to object that not all evangelicals are racists, of course. They're not even all conservative. That's true. Appeals to the common good still won't much inroads to "persuadable evangelicals". It simply goes too far against the grain of what the evangelical churches teach, which is fairly explicitly the inherited obligation model. So the common good would be a tough sell even to the most sympathetic. Consider the case of tax reform in Alabama, which went down to an ignominious 2-1 defeat when even the people it was designed to help voted against it because it would have encouraged Alabamanians to rely on government, not their families or communities.

And that's selling to the sympathetic. For the not-so-sympathetic, immigration takes second place only to abortion and homosexuality on the list of social issues. It's possible, I suppose, that immigration reform could wind up on an expanded evangelical social policy agenda, along with creation care and children's issues, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

In sum: if you're working on the issue-by-issue basis I've been talking about lately, this isn't a winning issue.

But what might work is to use the concept of the common good to explain how smart immigration policy could strengthen and expand the middle class. Lots of socially conservative people could be induced to go for that concept: industrial-state Catholics and with somewhat more difficulty black evangelicals. Conveniently enough, these folks are already supporters of the Democratic party. Appealing to the common good as they understand it might even attract enough of a coalition to actually get a sane immigration policy passed. We'd have to give up on the fantasy of bringing conservative Southern evangelicals into the progressive coalition, of course, but that one's bound to die sooner or later.

I do hope progressives get this figured out, though. We're going to see this dynamic playing out in our politics time and again. As Glenn Greenwald famously argued, the fault line in our politics is becoming more and more between "authoritarian cultists" and everybody else. He was thinking in terms of national security, but it applies to domestic policy just as well. We need to find some credible way of standing together before the common good simply melts away in tribalism. We're divided these days, but we could wind up thoroughly Balkanized, isolated from and suspicious of even our closest neighbors. That's not a faithful way to live, nor is it one that should be acceptable to even the most conservative among us.

(More information on the raids at Stop Hurting Children - Stop The Raids and MIRA Coalition.)