The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Cross Borders

12.2.05 @ 12:01AM

(Page 3 of 6)

In summary; would our roads be less crowded? Would our cities be safer without 100,000 gang members roaming the streets? Would health care be accessible and affordable? Would our schools be better if illegals were shown the door? Here's my recommendation; call time out, meaning no immigration for a five or ten year period while the current group assimilates. And if you're here illegally; have a nice day, see you soon!
-- Bob M.

I fully agree that those currently in the country illegally should not be parachuted back into the center of their country.

I do not, however, agree that those currently here be enrolled in an amnesty program. They broke the law coming here, so they should be returned to their country of origin. Many of the illegal aliens are drug smugglers, MS-13 gang members, and other common criminals.

Living in Florida for the past several years, I followed a white slavery trial two years ago. The main perpetrators were Mexican nationals, who recruited the young girls by promising they would be placed as domestics inside the U.S. Once they got them into Florida, they kept them imprisoned, using them to service young, illegal men who were working primarily in the fruit and construction industries in Florida.

Recently, a nephew of mine who lives in West Virginia, very near Washington, D.C., was singled out and threatened by avowed MS-13 gang members who have recently enrolled in his high school. The reason for the threat: he objected to one of them making lewd and suggestive remarks to his girlfriend. While you might say this is an isolated incident, I suggest you check with local police in the D.C. area.

The border needs to be closed, now, in the interests of national security! If the administration in Washington is serious, they should use the military if necessary....
-- R. Goodson
Vero Beach, Florida

Mr. Tyrrell's notion of a legitimate demand -- of a "market for immigrants" -- makes me wish there was some standardized, internationally accepted credential for journalists and editorialists. Such credentials exist for engineers, physicians, nurses, and other American professionals whose wages are being depressed because of the sudden application of ivory-tower free trade and free-immigration ideas to America's real-world, flesh-and-blood, labor force. Carrying these credentials, foreign-trained immigrants compete for jobs in America, and, predictably, wages and benefits are diminished downward from the American scale toward the world scale.

If such a journalistic credential existed, and if the immigration of journalists were encouraged to the same degree as other professions, then journalists likewise would experience depression of their wages and benefits toward the world-journalist average. Not to mention that aspirants would then have to compete with five- or tenfold as many individuals for a job.

As it is, the peculiarities of the American media labor market virtually guarantee that only the home-grown citizen is able to earn a living in such an occupation. As a result of this homogeneity in the journalist population, immigration and free-trade practices are, to many opinion writers, mere abstractions. The journalist is more inclined to embrace the ideas of the free-immigration policy theorist than the unemployed American engineer whose job was given to an Indian immigrant willing to work for much less than he.

On the other end of the salary scale, many unskilled American citizen laborers' jobs are now filled by illegal immigrant Mexicans. "American citizens just don't want those jobs...," is the usual cant we hear. But is this not a tautology? Without the huge illegal Mexican labor force long present in the United States, would not Americans have already taken many of these jobs? And is it not conceivable that the wages and benefits of these jobs, held by Americans instead of illegal immigrants, would be much better than what they are now?...
-- Francis Dillon
Indianapolis, Indiana

Countries happy to export their people don't realize that, once Americanized, these de facto deportees and their children will change the futures of the mother countries. Latin America, in particular, will be changed by Hispanic-Americans, who will be instrumental in prying loose the grips that corrupt oligarchies have on their native countries. Latin America will become less Latin and more American, to the general benefit of the hemisphere.
-- David Govett
Davis, California

The United Kingdom is suffering from an immigration crisis every bit as severe as that being endured by the United States.

With all due respect to Bob, his article reads as if it were written by a guy who doesn't mow his own lawn.
-- Martin Kelly
Glasgow, Scotland

TOO DANGEROUS FOR THE PRIESTHOOD
Re: Patrick O'Hannigan's Fighting Tendencies:

Mr. O'Hannigan writes an interesting article dealing with a difficult subject. However, I was surprised to read in the article that "the idea that sexual abuse and cover-up scandals in the church prove same-sex attraction is 'too dangerous to tolerate'" is incorrect. In point of fact, same-sex attraction is far too dangerous to be tolerated in the priesthood.

Letter to the Editor

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