In the film Illegal Belgian police board a plane handcuffed to an undocumented immigrant they are escorting out of the country. The weeping woman cries out that she is being forced to leave her child and the other passengers immediately side with her. They berate the immigration officers who are ordered off the plane by the pilot with the woman. She gets beat up for her outburst and returned to a deportation center.

Stories of people struggling to make it in another country are a favorite plot line. Coincidentally it was in three of the last novels I read. The Northern African families in southern France in Bruno, Chief of Police. Polish war refugees in England in 22 Britannia Road.  The young Irish woman in New York in the book Brooklyn.

Adjusting to a foreign land, learning the language and the culture, missing your homeland and feeling often unwelcome and suspect in the new country make good stories.

And we relate, since except for Native Americans, most of us wouldn’t be here had an ancestor not come first as an immigrant. Maybe in a proper legal manner, maybe not.

But then there are today’s undocumented immigrants.  Lured here by the promise of work and a safer, better life for their family, like many of our own great-great-greats, they exist quietly, hoping to stay under society’s radar.

They are the voiceless ones in the middle of a loud, often angry debate over immigration. Republican campaigners argue over who would build the highest fence. Border vigilantes go on a hunt. The Supreme Court will get into it next year when it reviews a tough Arizona law targeting illegal immigrants. And the rest of us get all twisted up over what is the best way to deal with what we call “the immigration issue.”

Behind the issue are real people, of course, like Elida and Sam Mejia who escaped political violence in Guatemala in 1992 and came to California with their infant son Gilbert. They bought a home in Novato and had two daughters, Helen and Dulce. The father worked as a carpenter, the mother as a hotel housekeeper.

All was well until immigration officers, ostensibly looking for someone else, stormed the house and demanded their papers. And two years ago the family had to divide itself.

Their story is told in a short documentary, Sin Pais (Without Country) made by Theo Rigby and making the rounds of independent film festivals and social justice organizations. It will be broadcast nationally on PBS next summer.

I saw it at a Jewish synagogue in Santa Rosa where people don’t have to go back many generations to know about fleeing their homeland. College professor Madeleine Rose introduced the film and said that her father, a Holocaust survivor, came to this country from Luxembourg, also illegally. He knew, she said, that “a border can mean life or death.”

Elida and Sam Mejia were deported and forced to split up their children. They took their little girl, who’s an American citizen, with them back to Guatemala. The two teenagers, Helen, an American citizen, and Gilbert, who is undocumented, stayed in Marin County.

The parents and younger daughter are temporarily visiting California on a humanitarian parole and after the documentary joined the filmmaker on stage. Elida Mejia did most of the talking, at one point wiping her eyes and saying, “This is no life.”

The audience was crying too. Rigby, the young filmmaker, said he has found sympathetic audiences “even in places known for being immigrant unfriendly, such as Arizona or Texas.”

Immigration reform is not an easy issue but people like the Mejia family should not be demonized. They came here and got jobs, learned English, bought a house, paid taxes, educated their kids, bought refrigerators and cars. Give them the right papers and they’d be regular Americans.

The rich and powerful don’t want to pay any more taxes. In fact they think they should  pay less. And if it means that the streets fill with even more pain and suffering…and protesters… too bad. They’ll just build a bigger moat.

Do you believe that? I don’t. At least I don’t want to. Yet that’s what their lackeys in Washington would have us think. That all rich people are Scrooge McDuck or like mean Mr. Potter beating up on Jimmy Stewart.

But it’s hard to know who they are. The super rich don’t show themselves much. We only know that the likes of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell would throw the 99 percent under a limo to protect the one percent. And that the Newt Gingrich/Mitt Romney chorus line likes the rich better than the rest of us.

There have been a few who dared to come out and say they’d be willing to donate a few more bucks to the common good. Investor Warren Buffet took a heroic stand this summer when he wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times urging lawmakers to raise taxes on millionaires so that they pay the same or higher rate as middle class people.

Microsoft king Bill Gates has said he’s “generally in favor of the idea that the rich pay somewhat more than everyone else.” Earlier this month a small group calling themselves Patriotic Millionaires went to Capitol Hill not with their hands out, but, amazingly, with their wallets open, offering to pay more taxes. And while we don’t hear much about it, they are apparently not alone. In fact, 68 percent of millionaires say they support a tax increase for those earning $1 million or more, according to a survey by the Spectrum Group.

But the Republican leadership says no, no, no, we must spare the rich. When the non-rich complain about the rich the Republicans say we’re all simply jealous. They insist the rich need even more tax loopholes. They make it sound like the rich are the downtrodden Americans.

Yet, by their silence we can only assume that the very richest of the rich are fine with their fat-cat image. And with the desperation of all the stray dogs.

That’s a nasty picture.  But if the rich don’t like their portrait why aren’t they standing up to change it? They don’t even have to do the Warren Buffet thing. Maybe they have a good explanation for why they can’t make it on their bazillions alone. I don’t hate the rich, but I would feel a lot kinder toward them if I knew they were willing to help balance this grotesque inequality so many of their brethren have exploited. They behave like they own this country. When in fact they owe this country.

As the wise Elizabeth Warren points out, “There is no one in this country who got rich on his own.”

Michael Moore is plenty rich. He made his personal fortune pointing out the inequities in our system and was recently called on by Piers Morgan to defend his wealth and his sympathies for Occupy Wall Street. Moore told Morgan that having money and caring about poor people is not mutually exclusive. No more than being white and marching with Martin Luther King or being straight and voting for gay marriage. It’d be nice to see a few more super rich celebrities show us who they’re marching with.

Can you imagine this? Rich people declaring, “I am wealthy and I do not approve of this image.” Rich people standing up to Republicans. Republicans standing up to Republicans. Heck, Obama could sell tickets to that and pay off the deficit.

I think about this every Thanksgiving. Somewhere a woman is crying. Some of you understand her suffering. It is gravy time.

The turkey is out of the oven and waiting to be sculpted by some proud swashbuckler. The mashed potatoes are fluffed and sitting patiently. Aunt Stephanie’s creative broccoli and a Cranberry Something are lined up and ready to go.

It is time to create that unholy mixture of meat fat and flour that will suffocate all those subtle tastes labored on by the contributors to this feast. Even if it’s the only time of the year that anyone even makes or eats gravy people expect perfection. In the end, all the guests will taste is the gravy. All they will remember is the gravy. The dinner will collapse or succeed on the perfect, silken, salty beauty of this chemical mix.

They will make little puddles of it in their crater of potatoes. They will sluice it into the moist stuffing. They will let it flood their crisp veggies and make the turkey slippery with it.

Gravy is the glue that holds the dinner together. But it is not supposed to taste or look like glue. Neither is it supposed to look like an oil slick, nor pour out in chunks. It should not be mistaken for tiny dumplings.

Thanksgiving and its allegiance to tradition – for why else do we continue to eat this stuff? – demands that the hostess or the mother or the grandmother be the gravy maker.

But not everyone knows how, nor will they ever. I have been gravy challenged since the days when cooks slid marshmallows and cream cheese inside green jello and called it a salad.  My cooking and my tastes have progressed since then.  But then comes Thanksgiving and that means turkey and the trimmings which include gravy. And while I have fond memories of my grandmother’s and my mother’s and my mother-in-law’s gravy, it now represents nothing but heartburn to me.

So there you are with everything ready and you have to take time out to have a breakdown over this brown goop which tradition dictates cannot come out of a can or a bag. Not only are you expected to do it well, you are to do it effortlessly and in those last three minutes when the kitchen fills with starving guests, swilling wine, having a great old time as you dump flour into a pool of gurgling grease. You stir. You pray. It clots. You weep, more salt for the gravy.