In most respects, Yana Slobodova wasn’t your typical illegal alien when the feds shipped her back to Russia the other day.

The white, middle-class piano teacher was married to a naturalized American citizen. They have a 22-month-old son, born in the United States. The students at the music school where she taught rallied to her defense. A Jewish group in the San Francisco Bay area vouched for her character. However, nothing worked.

She had admitted using false papers to enter this country, and in a hyper-defensive, post-9-11 America, that means she forfeited any right to return.

“They are going to send me away from my family because I was stupid eight years ago,” Slobodova told the San Jose Mercury News at the airport. Then she was gone.

I’ve got nothing against the poor woman. Slobodova deserved to stay. It’s criminal to separate a good mother from her child. More important, she was the kind of decent, hard-working illegal immigrant who’d make a great citizen, if given a chance. And anyone who thinks this would open the floodgates to conniving, foreign women — all wanting to get pregnant and get a green card — is wrong and swept up in hysteria.

But certain aspects of this story rankle me. Illegal-immigrant Mexican women with U.S.-born children don’t get this kind of sympathetic press. The unbalanced coverage reminds me of what usually happens when a child dies tragically in a wealthy suburb and a similar thing happens in a poor barrio or ghetto. Guess which one gets on Page One or prime-time news?

So we shouldn’t be surprised if more than a few Americans blame the big, bad government for hammering a deserving, white immigrant while giving the brown invaders a free pass. As one letter-writer put it:

“We deport a Caucasian, married mother who thought she had entered this country legally, and who apparently is not a drain on this country’s social services,” she wrote. “Yet there are thousands of illegal immigrant Mexican men, who have made no attempt to enter this country legally, standing around in front of every home improvement store, every large hardware store, hoping for a day’s work, and they are invisible to the authorities.”

Never mind that the government deported 108,643 Mexican nationals in 2002. I’ve been writing about immigration long enough to know she’s not the only one who thinks this way. But it’s hard to dispel such notions given the lack of information available on who gets deported and who doesn’t. I got nowhere when I called the federal office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

I wanted to know how many undocumented parents of U.S.-born children were deported, and I wanted to know their ethnicity and national origin. After all, ICE arrested exactly 2,057 sexual predators and deported 61,505 criminal aliens last year. Don’t get me wrong. This is what we want the immigration police to do. I just figured, since they’re so good at accounting, they’d keep track of mommy deportations, too.

“I don’t think we keep that kind of statistic,” the ICE spokeswoman said. “I’ll pass on the question and maybe someone will get back to you.”

While I waited and waited, I called Maria Marroquin. She runs a day-worker center in Mountain View, Calif., the same Silicon Valley town where Slobodova taught piano. If anyone has a handle on the situation, it’s Marroquin.

“Thank God it doesn’t happen very frequently,” she said. “I can tell you that when one of the fathers is deported, he returns, obviously under the same system and maybe under greater risk. As for returning some day with legal papers, that’s financially impossible.”

Yana Slobodova may have had more help in her fight to stay, and I can’t blame her for trying, but she’s ended up in the same, hopeless situation as the average, deported Mexican.

So what’s a mother to do? Here’s an idea, based on the experience of many deportees: She can book a flight to Mexico, sneak across the Arizona desert, change her name, live and work in the shadows for a pittance, and pray for another amnesty for illegal immigrants. Lord knows her son needs her. And besides, we can always use another piano teacher in this country.

Joe Rodriguez is a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News.

His e-mail address is jrodriguez@mercurynews.com.