If there’s a Butterball or some other mass-market turkey on your groaning board today, take a moment to think about Encarnación Bail Romero.

The Guatemalan immigrant, who lives in southwest Missouri, until a few weeks ago worked at one of the turkey plants that helped this nation’s poultry industry produce about 248 million turkeys in 2011. Of those, 17.5 million came from plants in Missouri, making it the fourth-biggest turkey-producing state in the nation.

Some of those turkeys made it to the market because Ms. Bail, and other workers like her, put in long hours of grim, stomach-churning work for little pay, all the while facing the threat of deportation.

Ms. Bail is an undocumented immigrant. Her American-born son, Carlos, is a 6-year-old U.S. citizen.

She hasn’t seen Carlos since the day in May 2007 when the Barry County chicken plant that employed Ms. Bail was raided by agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Mother and son have never spent a Thanksgiving together.

These days, Ms. Bail is allowed legally to stay in the U.S. as her appeal to regain custody of her son continues winding through the Missouri courts. It’s been a long battle with little hope.

Carlos lives with another southwest Missouri family that adopted him while Ms. Bail was awaiting deportation to her home country. The Missouri Supreme Court was faced with the ultimate in judicial challenges when the case came before the court in 2010.

There is no doubt Ms. Bail’s rights were denied when she was stuck in jail and a perhaps well-meaning conspiracy sought to provide Carlos a family by ending his mother’s parental rights. She didn’t speak English. She didn’t know what was happening to her.

But by the time justice was sought, the judges were faced with taking the boy away from the family that had raised him for most of his life or returning him to a mother who spoke a different language and would take her son home to Guatemala.

The court kicked the case back to the trial court, which this summer kept Carlos with his adoptive parents.

Last week, lawyers for Ms. Bail asked the Missouri Supreme Court to take the case again.

Today, all over this country, we offer thanks for the food on our tables and the families around us. We should pause, too, to consider the anguish wrought on other families by a broken immigration system. Ms. Bail is hardly alone.

Thanksgiving is the ultimate immigration story.

Most of what we know — or at least what we think we know — of the so-called first Thanksgiving we learned from a letter Edward Winslow wrote in December 1621 about a gathering between Pilgrims and about 90 members of the Wampanoag native tribe. The Pilgrims had endured some tough times, and the fall harvest that year was plentiful, so they celebrated.

The Pilgrims, of course, were immigrants to a land where they were vastly outnumbered by people who had been here for centuries. In the mythological version of Thanksgiving we’ve devised today, built around turkey and pumpkin pie, those details get glossed over.

“The Wampanoag, we sometimes forget, were the majority population,” Nancy Brennan, former director of the Plimoth Plantation museum, told The Christian Science Monitor in 2002. “In the 19th and 20th centuries, Thanksgiving was really a tool for Americanization amid the great influx of immigration. It was supposed to bind this diverse population into one union.”

The nation’s most recent presidential election, which was quite divided along racial lines, suggests our union could use some more binding.

Whether or notEncarnación Bail Romero ever sees her son again, she and Carlos are an example of everything that has gone wrong with U.S. immigration policy. The poultry industry is a more than $16 billion a year business, so when the huge corporations that dominate the field need workers, the government usually is willing to look the other way while those companies ignore the law to keep wages low.

The 2007 raid on the Barry County plant took place in the walk-up to the 2008 presidential election. Then members of both parties were busy trying to demonstrate their tough anti-immigrant bona fides by screaming “build the border fence.” Raids like the one that ensnared Ms. Bail were common.

Families were torn apart as parents were deported and their American-born children stayed behind. Companies, for the most part, got a pass.

This Thanksgiving, the trend is the opposite direction. On June 15, in one of the most important acts in his first term, President Barack Obama signed an executive order allowing children of undocumented workers, who were brought to the country through no fault of their own, to delay their deportation.

It mirrored the DREAM Act, which Congress refused to pass. It allowed those young people, most of whom have been educated in American schools, to continue to contribute to the only country they’ve ever called home.

Since the president signed that order, more than 53,000 young immigrants have been able to put off deportation. Hundreds of thousands of others are in the pipeline, beginning the process to eventual citizenship.

Republicans, reeling from Mr. Obama’s re-election, and his overwhelming popularity with Hispanic voters, are questioning their previous, harsh stances on issues of immigration. Their conversion should be a quick one.

Which policy is more likely to rekindle thoughts of that first Thanksgiving: The one that divides families, and the nation, or the one that keeps parents and children at the same dinner table?

America needs a bigger table. It needs to rekindle that simple spirit expressed in the Latin phrase that appears on the official Seal of the United States: E pluribus unum.

Out of many, one.