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Recently seen on Yahoo, direct from the Associated Press image wire:

Here’s a suggestion: The next time you let some activist persuade you that it’s not a form of abuse to have your child take part in a demonstration, at least make sure the sign you thrust into his unknowing hand was written by a functional literate.

Let’s look at what’s wrong with this sign:

1. It begins a sentence with a numeral. Everyone who has graduated high school should know that in no accepted writing style does one begin a sentence with a numeral.
2. It uses the possessive apostrophe-s to express the plural. This is a common mistake, admittedly, but it’s also a glaring sign of patent ignorance. (Actually, the sentence should be simplified to “One more child asking for his parents’ liberty,” which is simpler and lets the author retain his apostrophe, albeit removed one character space.)
3. “We come here to work and be someone in the future” has so many problems, it deserves its own section in a remedial English textbook.
   1. Because you are using the plural we as the subject of the sentence, you cannot use the singular someone as the object.
   2. You can’t “be someone in the future.” You can “become someone,” but being takes place now, not later. And therefore, if you are going to “become someone,” “in the future” is moot. Or, as phrased in this sign, “be someone in the future” suggests you’re nothing now. Which thus begs the question: If you’re nothing, why should I care what you think?

But, then again, if you’re not above exploiting your child, I suppose you don’t mind making him, and you, look stupid in the process.

The truth is that immigrants from Latin America and Mexico are good for America. Latinos do not take good American jobs; Canadians do. Alex Trebek, Jim Carrey, Morley Safer, Margaret Atwood — these people have taken away good, American jobs.

Some Latino willing to work 16 hours in a strawberry field for $20 is not taking a good job, he’s taking an awful job no American wants. He’s certainly doing us a much greater service than Pamela Anderson, who has killed billions of innocent bacteria, viruses, ants and other living things, prattling on about some PETA nonsense.

I am sure that there are problems elsewhere in this country with shiftless immigrants leeching off the state and causing all sorts of criminal trouble. I refuse to believe, however, that there is any qualitative difference between that trouble and the trouble you find in other parts of the country where poor people are clumped together in ethnically similar groups.

In other words, I bet there’s little qualitative difference — if not quantitative — in the troubles of a West Texas border town, versus the troubles one finds in Appalachia, Detroit, an American Indian reservation or Downeast Maine.

Poor people + economic malaise + opportunity for mischief = crime and stupor. Doesn’t anyone watch Cops? Don’t they notice that sloth and malefaction know no race or region?

I do agree with the sentiment that a person who enters this country illegally should not be allowed to receive entitlements or public assistance. That seems like common sense: If you weren’t welcomed into someone’s house, raiding his icebox is a double no-no.

But it also seems to me that you can’t reap economic benefit from cheap, migrant labor that is tacitly encouraged, then complain when it costs you something on the back end. That’s like bitching about the splinter you got from a chest of drawers you bought for $5 at a lawn sale.

And lest I forget, there’s also this:

(Did I really have to produce Ninel Conde, once again, to prove that we’ve militarized the wrong border? OK, probably I didn’t. OK, fine, I was just looking for an excuse to post this video of Ninel’s badonkadonk. ¡Ay, me gusta culos grande y yo no puedo mentir!)

So basically, I agree 100 percent with the intent of this sign: Most of the debate on immigration policy is entirely wrong-headed. It’s clearly not working and, if anything, counterproductive.

We can’t (and, to some degree, won’t) enforce the border laws we have now, all sorts of tax and labor laws are effectively violated with government approval when it comes to migrant labor, and the end results are jingoism and racism, which have never been good starting points for public policy (ask any Polish Jew over the age of 70 if he agrees — assuming you can find one).

But it’s terrible to employ a child in a demonstration — not only because it’s intellectually dishonest, since no child of this age can possibly understand the issue, but because it’s intended to cut off reason and logic. Hysterics thrust up children in defense of the inane, knowing that doing so will end the argument.

Portraying an issue as being harmful to the defenseless makes anyone against your position seem cruel. Using children as a crutch, especially when the issue has nothing to do with them directly, immediately eliminates cogency and turns the debate over to emotions, at which point the matter is no longer a debate.

That’s cheap, and it’s wrong. If you can’t make your argument stand on its merit, don’t hide behind a child like a coward. Resign to the fact you’re wrong and change your opinion to match.

But even if you do resort to employing a child to belabor your argument, at the very least, have the common sense to make it grammatical.