There's illegal and there's illegal, right?

In life almost everything is illegal under some circumstances, especially in a country and state like ours where activists and do-gooders succeed in adding more punitive laws every time the lawgivers meet. (And because of the initiative, in Oregon they don't even need the legislature to turn ordinary behavior into an offense. Think of the fines imposed for forgetting to buckle up.)

Which brings us to reader Randy Mitchell's question in Thursday's Mailbag.

What part of "illegal" don't I and 12 million illegal immigrants understand, he wanted to know. "You wrote about them in a recent editorial as if it were akin to jaywalking."

The editorial, on Jan. 10, was about members of drug gangs based in Mexico. Court papers filed with an indictment of half a dozen Mexican gang members in the Salem area said some of them had been arrested and deported, or convicted and deported, before. I opined that these people deserved special punishment cause they were doing harm in two ways: They were enabling people to ruin their lives with meth and other junk, and their cases were hardening already hostile public attitudes toward "otherwise honest immigrants" whose only offense was their illegal entry itself.

The point: There's a whale of a difference between a guy who comes from Mexico (or anyplace else) in order to commit serious crimes, and who in fact commits such crimes for years until he is finally caught, and someone who crosses the border without permission in order to work for a living at a tough job in all kinds of weather - think of landscaping or construction - so he can do a better job supporting his family.

And come to think of it: What would you rather live next to, a meth house that serves as a hangout for a dozen addicts who happen to have been born in this country but wasted all the opportunities that this implies, or a place rented by a family of undocumented aliens where the adults go to work every day, make sure the kids are taken care of, and mow the grass and sweep the drive when they are home?

Sure, there are plenty of problems with illegal immigration, and no one has a good answer that satisfies everyone. But it makes no sense to stomp our feet and declare: Illegal is illegal, so treat them like the "criminals" they are.

Another letter in Thursday's paper invites an explanation. Carol Golly of Lebanon questioned why on Page 1 Monday we had printed a little story from Albany, N.Y., about some entertainers accused in a case about steroid use.

It was only about four or five column inches in the bottom left corner of the page, and it wasn't the kind of story that normally would end up on the front, if it made the paper at all.

Sometimes, though, we run into a jam right about 11:40 a.m. or so, when our news editor, Kim Jackson, has to finish the page.

Something else planned for the front that day had just, at the last minute, fallen through, and it was a question of grabbing something off the wire. With only minutes to spare, the main criterion was that it fit.

The editor can be reached by e-mail at hhering@dhonline.com.