For seven years Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski -- an arch hermit who had divested himself of all communal and familial ties -- turned for solace to an immigrant. The story is an ironic twist to the national campaign to rid Americans of their "useless burden" -- immigrants. PNS commentator Debbie Nathan is a Texas-based writer and author of "Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse - Making of the Modern American Witch Hunt."

EL PASO -- The news this month is full of our growing national mania to condemn the foreign-born as useless burdens. Border crossers savaged by law enforcement officials, Congress pushing to deny undocumented children schooling. We want to think we're self-reliant, self-sufficient; that we have no need of newcomers' labor, much less their souls. But the news also brings an irony; that our most self-reliant citizen of all -- arch hermit and Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski -- still desperately needed an immigrant in his life.

He is Juan Sanchez, a 68-year-old Mexican who resides just south of Texas, and who has been crossing the border for years to eke out a living. Unlike the hyper-educated Kaczynski, Sanchez can hardly read: orphaned at age eight, he had to quit school to help support his siblings. Later he worked in this country during the bracero program, when Mexicans were allowed to pick U.S. crops because of labor shortages.

The bracero program was canceled in the early 1960s, and the labor of millions of Mexicans like Sanchez was outlawed. It was still needed, though, and Sanchez -- who by now was happily married with children -- doggedly continued working in the United States.

He was needed, even in the sun-scorched, cactus-strewn boundary of Big Bend National Park in West Texas. The area looks virtually uninhabited, but isn't really. Since the late 1960s, realtors have broken up gigantic tracts of desert and sold them to thousands of city-dwellers hungry for vacation getaways. David Kaczynski, Theodore's younger brother from Chicago, was one such buyer.

In the 1980s, David hired Sanchez to work on his property. And he asked for more intimate help: for Sanchez to teach him Spanish, and even to compose love letters to a girlfriend David was too shy to ask to marry. In return, David helped Sanchez get immigration papers so he could work legally. Tit for tat, he also asked him to write to his brother the recluse and try to penetrate his friendless shell. Thus began the now famous seven-year correspondence between rural mailboxes in Montana and Texas.

The penpals had only one thing in common: poverty. Kaczynski's cabin has no water or electricity; Sanchez's house in Mexico, where he lives with his family, is sagging and crumbling. The American dressed in faded, stinking clothing; the Mexican greeted reporters last week in a tattered shirt and pants patched with pins.

But Kaczynski's asceticism was self-imposed and all-encompassing, while Sanchez's was involuntary and confined to material goods. "He always wrote sad things," Sanchez said of Kaczynski's letters, and he gave as an example the latter's plaint that he had no wife or children. So unnerved was Sanchez by his penpal's solitude that, though he began the friendship by (futilely) asking Kaczynski for financial help, he later offered to buy him a bus ticket so he could spend time with the Sanchezes.

Kaczynski never made the trip, not even when Sanchez asked if he would visit Immigration and Naturalization Service offices in El Paso to help get residence papers for his wife and children. Indeed, the family's inability to live legally in the United States with him was Sanchez's biggest unhappiness in his letters to Montana. Unlike Kaczynski, he had no desire for loneliness or low-tech. He wanted to be with his people. And they wanted to reside in a country that promises everything the Unabomber rejected.

As the Unabomber pointed out in his manifesto, that country includes a commodity culture gone half mad with social decay, with environmental depredation, and with injustice towards people like the Sanchezes.

But what the Unabomber overlooks is that his native land also offers the wondrous conveniences, and with them visions of liberating information, conviviality and democracy. For these splendors, we can be grateful to many people, including hardworking immigrants. Sanchez, perhaps, is more industrious than most. For years he not only labored, but also picked up a pen and painstakingly tried to commune with a terribly lonely American.

He is still waiting for America to commune with him.