Texas desperately needs and depends on immigrants. Our agriculture, construction, entrepreneurship and high tech is a wide array of student immigrants and labor from Latin America. Given that our economy, tax base (the state taxes on sales and property) and attractive cost of living are all dependent on immigrants (who are statistically the least likely to break a law) it is a perverse irony that fear of “the border” and imagined countless dangerous immigrants has become a avenue for fear mongering demagoguery — an imagined “bogeyman” to organize emotional mob behavior deliberately used to avoid calm, rational and data based conversation. The ruling power prefers distraction, obfuscation and attention deficient ideological zealotry over actual quantifying issues and collaborating using ideas. People, including immigrants, are a distant 2nd to our current machinery of power. I apologize for such an opinionated comment as part of comparing two states — Massachusetts and Texas — who find their fates tied to the common denominators of nearly all the United States and all it’s history … immigration, imagination, commerce and education.