The last time there was a wholesale deportation of Mexicans from the United States -- as well as Mexican-American citizens caught up in the dragnet -- was in the 1930s, in the throes of the Great Depression.

You may remember, if you saw the Gregory Nava-directed saga of three generations of Latinos in Los Angeles, "Mi Familia" or "My Family," a young Jennifer Lopez went out shopping one day and even though she was an American citizen, got sent to her ancestral village in Mexico and made a harrowing trip back to L.A.

That was fiction, but the incident was based on a little-known and shameful episode in U.S. history in which an estimated 346,000 people were summarily deported to Mexico between 1930 and 1935.

A front-page story in today's USA Today talks about the episode and a move in Congress to seek an official apology for the deportations, as well as remedies that could include payment of reparations.

One California legislator cited in the USA Today article says as many as 2 million people may have been coerced into leaving the United States, of whom 60 percent may have been U.S. citizens.

Also mentioned in the article is a book published in 1995 by the University of New Mexico Press titled "Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s," written by California scholars Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez.

Of course, times have changed. The economy is strong and there is even some grudging admission that illegal immigration keeps it humming, and the more blatant forms of xenophobia and anti-Mexican prejudice are nowhere near as pronounced as they were in the early '30s. And even though people are apt to embrace deportation as a solution to the illegal immigration problem (about 16 percent do in our informal, unscientific online poll), it's unlikely that policy-makers would relish moving vast numbers of people out of the country.

Yet, even in some of the more nuanced proposals now being floated in the U.S. Senate debate on immigration, it would mean the removal, expulsion or deportation -- whatever you want to call it -- of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

Under a proposal made earlier this week by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., illegal immigrants who could prove they'd been in the United States for five years could apply for a work visa and a chance to apply for citizenship and remain in the country as they seek a green card, according to a Washington Post story on Monday.

Those here less than five years would have to return to their native countries, according to the Hagel-Martinez plan.

Using the widely agreed upon figure of 12 million illegal immigrants already in the United States, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said on a CNN Sunday news show that an estimated 40 percent have been here for less than five years. That's nearly 5 million people to be sent packing.

Domenici on Tuesday offered a similar plan, in which any undocumented worker in the United States as of last Dec. 31 would be granted a special visa that would allow them to remain for nine years as long they pay a $1,000 fine, remain employed and pass background checks.

Those already here for more than five years could, after another five years applying for various available visas, apply for U.S. citizenship.

Those here for less than five years would, after up to nine years in the U.S., be required to return to their native countries for at least three years before they could apply for a U.S. visa, under the Domenici plan.

Be that as it may, those amendments didn't get to first base as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday refused to consider anything but the bipartisan plan that passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week -- a plan that would allow those already in the country illegally to get a six-year work visa and an opportunity for citizenship if they pay fines and back taxes, learn English and fulfill other requirements.

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