Letters page
Over the patriotic Fourth of July weekend my thoughts turned to our immigration problem. God bless the residents of Murrieta, Calif., for turning back the three U.S. Border Patrol buses loaded with illegal children from other countries who are bringing unwanted diseases into my country.
Where are their families? Not here. We have enough problems with starving children in the United States. Please send them back to their own countries.
There’s a valued U.S. marine who unfortunately made a wrong turn in San Ysidro, Calif., and entered Mexico. He’s been in their awful jail for more than three months. What has our government done to seek his release while they allow illegal children to enter our country freely? The president’s priorities are backward.
Last month a 28-year-old Oregonian and his girlfriend went to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, on vacation. He suffered a medical condition while in the water and was hospitalized.
To get him better medical care in the United States, his family had to pay Mexico $50,000 to get him airlifted to San Diego, where he’s in a coma.
SAN JOSE, Costa Rica — United Nations officials are pushing for many of the Central Americans fleeing to the U.S. to be treated as refugees displaced by armed conflict, a designation meant to increase pressure on the United States and Mexico to accept tens of thousands of people currently ineligible for asylum...
While such a resolution would lack any legal weight in the United States, the agency said it believes "the U.S. and Mexico should recognize that this is a refugee situation, which implies that they shouldn't be automatically sent to their home countries but rather receive international protection."...
Many Congressional Republicans attribute the increased immigration to a failure to secure the border and recent immigration policy changes that led many to believe child migrants would be allowed to stay...
Many of the migrants, in fact, stay for years as their cases wend through overloaded migration courts. Those who say they are fleeing criminal violence generally are not eligible for political asylum, which is reserved for groups persecuted for their beliefs or identities....
Violence by criminal organizations spread in recent decades after members of California street gangs were deported to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, where they overwhelmed weak and corrupt police forces and seized control of large sections of the countries...
Our president has threatened executive action to deal with the current crisis on our southern border. Great. I have a simple, effective suggestion: Seal the southern border.
The President has the power and legal authority to use the National Guard to that end. If we have the resources to care for these “refugees” we have the resources to build and patrol the fences this will require. Where fences can’t be utilized we have a Coast Guard and Navy that can seal off the Rio Grande. Easily. All it requires is the political will and some courage. What does the President have to lose? He can’t be re-elected.
The President would get little or no opposition from conservatives, and it must be a first step before any further immigration reform or “amnesty” can even be considered. Failure to seal this border will only lead to an escalation of the problems we see there now and further compromise our national security in countless ways.
The cost to do this, what ever it is, is minuscule in comparison to the costs of humanitarian assistance required to take care of these people flooding our border, regardless of the status one chooses to confer upon them. The cost of doing nothing is incalculable.
Additionally, with the threat of terrorism increasing daily, this should be a higher priority than ever. The president’s claim that the border is “more secure than ever” is ridiculous. The proof of that can be seen on television on every network, every day. How stupid does the president think we are?
It is well within our ability to protect our sovereignty and seal the southern border, and if the president is serious about anything, it should be this.
James P. Carrick
It's hard to imagine a more apt summation of the lunatic state of the nation's immigration debate than the split screen over the past week.
In Washington, most respectable opinion lined up, yet again, to condemn Republicans...
...the crisis on the Southern border continued. A massive influx of people -- largely driven by Central Americans, many of them children...
A Wall Street Journal story about the White House reaction to the crisis was headlined "Obama Plans Executive Action to Bolster Border Security," which has a man-bites-dog feel...
A leaked memo from a high-ranking Border Patrol official said that only 3 percent of non-Mexicans apprehended at the border are being returned to their native countries.
"It will not be open arms," Vice President Joe Biden thundered in Guatemala City ...
The administration is waving the families and children into the United States, dispersing them around the country, and giving them a date ...
Experience says only about a quarter of illegal immigrants released pending a court date will actually show up...
...According to Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, there are roughly 800,000 aliens who have been ordered removed but are still here.
...The key to reversing the tide is enforcement, and not just at the border...
For the left, and its fellow-travelers in the business community and on the libertarian right, there is only one side of the split screen that matters. It's always amnesty.
The middle class of this country is being forced to subsidize the Central American poor and will for the next 20 years.
These unlawful immigrants are being shepherded into this country by the drug cartels.
At the same time, the cartels are using this chaos to bring in more illicit drugs, gang members, etc.
We are also serving as a relief valve for Mexican and Central American oligarchs who run these countries.
Instead of getting revolution or needed change, they will get remittances from these illegal immigrants and thereby bolster their corrupt governments
Massachusetts became the 11th state in 2014 to consider driver’s licenses for undocumented residents.
It was argued it would make Massachusetts a magnet for illegal immigrants, rewarding illegal behavior and shielding illegal immigrants from federal law enforcement.
New Mexico, which has granted licenses to undocumented residents since 2003, has actually seen the rate of uninsured motorists increase and now has the second-highest percentage of uninsured drivers.
Oregon’s November ballot will ask some variant of the question regarding driver’s licenses for illegal residents, thanks to the heavy lifting of Oregonians for Immigration Reform.
Had Oregon Gov. Kitzhaber vetted this idea properly before the Legislature in the first place, this bit of election drama could very well have been avoided.
I’ve been living in Murrieta since 1989, when it was a rural area with few homes, many dirt fields, and ranches dotting the hills. Murrieta incorporated as a city a couple years later, but at that time my home remained outside the city limits.
Then the housing boom hit full throttle, and with annexations and an incredible import of new residents, Murrieta’s population leaped over the 100,000 threshold, and the sleepy little bedroom community became a bustling city tucked between the Los Angeles Basin and San Diego County...
For eight months, the Murrieta Border Patrol station has been receiving illegal aliens, sometimes in small numbers, and sometimes when you add up the busloads during the week, hundreds per week. The shipments have been during the dead of night, at times when nobody notices, and in small increments in order to keep the truth hidden from the average Murrieta resident.
The Illegal Immigrants [aliens] are being shipped in from overcrowded facilities in San Diego, and Texas, where the massive onslaught of new arrivals have overwhelmed the locations on the front line. Escondido, a quick half hour drive south of Southwest Riverside County, at one point, was designated as a location to dump these people, but Escondido fought back, and turned the nightmare away. So, the federal government moved to the next location further north along the Interstate 15 Freeway - Murrieta, California...
A month ago, my granddaughter was diagnosed at an urgent care center with having a viral infection called hand and foot disease. This disease normally breeds in areas where conditions are not the best, usually infects communities, and there is no treatment available for it. It is a four-day viral infection that includes fatigue, a sore throat, and sores in and on the mouth, and on the feet and hands. When my son took his daughter to the doctor, the man told him that incidents of hand and foot were on the rise in the local area, but he did not know why. I immediately put two and two together, and began to do a little investigating.
Local politically-involved folks tend to know each other, so I contacted my group of friends that are involved in Murrieta, and the surrounding area politics, and they informed me of the influx of illegal aliens coming in through the local Murrieta Border Patrol station from San Diego and Texas. These undocumented aliens, however, are not being deported for breaking American immigration law, but are being processed, held for 72 hours, and then are being released into the general public.
The numbers I have been told have changed based on who I have talked to, ranging from 500 a week to 50 here and there. However, based on my conversations with local officials, the number recently has been jacked up to 200 every 72 hours. Two hundred people, strangers in a strange land, who don’t speak the language, and are often sick with communicable diseases, are being shipped in, processed, and then released into the general population, every three days.
For a legal immigrant like my wife, who came to the United States with her family as a child from Mexico, and naturalized in 2007, allowing illegal immigrants into the country and letting them stay through de facto amnesty, is a slap in her face. However, to then endanger that woman’s family with disease when she left Mexico and came here legally in order to place all of that behind her, is just wrong...
In Murrieta, it all came to a head on Tuesday Night, when bus loads totaling about 140 illegal immigrants arrived at the Murrieta Border Patrol Station. Between 200 and 300 protesters were waiting, blocking the road, and demanding that the buses be turned around...
Such is the deceptive nature of the federal government, and their scheme to import illegal aliens, whether the citizens like it, or not.
George W. Bush was complicit in the invasion of the United States...
Barack Obama is taking it to a whole new level...wants to give these law breakers $2 billion of our money
This at a time when honest, law-abiding citizens — including our heroic veterans needing VA hospital care — go wanting...
David Luck
Lake Oswego
Contrary to the perceptions of Gene Starns in his June 29 letter, "Young immigrants hold promise of bright future," the U.S. does not need more people.
Population here is growing exponentially, and there is not an unlimited capacity to absorb immigrants. The U.S. is overpopulated now. Our natural environment is in tatters from too many people.
The speed at which our population is growing is dramatic. The Census Bureau's population clock shows one birth every eight seconds, one death every 13 seconds, one international migrant every 38 seconds – a net gain of one person every 13 seconds.
Based on Census figures, the Center for Immigration Studies estimated that 80.4 percent of population growth between 2000 and 2010 was due to immigration (immigrants and children of immigrants).
President Obama has virtually abandoned immigration law enforcement. His claims about deportations have been proven false by DHS statistics and his statements concerning deportation for child migrants cannot be depended on.
We now have de facto open borders, and word spreads quickly around the world. The current surge is the result of the demise of law enforcement and can lead to ceaseless large-scale immigration with dire consequences for this country.
Elizabeth Van Staaveren
McMinnville
To see how industry lobbyists and Big Labor can collaborate to harm both law-abiding employers and low-skilled Americans, look no further than the new political action committee formed to push for illegal-immigrant driver cards.
Two trade-association executives head the PAC: Bill Perry of the Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association and Jeff Stone of the Oregon Association of Nurseries. Among the PAC’s first donors: the political arm of the Service Employees International Union, which has contributed $20,000. The PAC will work to garner “yes” votes for the November ballot measure via which Oregon voters will approve or reject driving privileges for illegal immigrants.
Perry’s and Stone’s support of driver cards is easily explained. Illegal immigrants inflate Oregon’s supply of low-skilled labor. By doing so, they depress wages. This juices the profits of the restaurants and nurseries that knowingly hire those illegal immigrants or make no effort to ascertain their presence in their workforces. Driver cards would better enable illegal immigrants to get to the jobs these businesses provide.
But they’d do something else as well: namely, wrong Oregon employers who, via the free federal E-Verify worker-verification system, strive voluntarily to avoid illegal labor and assure their compliance with laws mandating employees’ legal U.S. presence.
Among those employers are some in the very industries Perry’s and Stone’s lobbies purport to represent. They include Shari’s Restaurants, Albany Taco Bell Inc. and several Portland-area Baskin-Robbins outlets; the Benson Hotel in Portland and Phoenix Inns in Eugene and Bend; and Woodburn’s Amaral, McMinnville’s Country Garden and Ashland’s Valley View nurseries. By using E-Verify, these conscientious employers put themselves on the right side of the law — but at a disadvantage to competitors who knowingly use cheap and often paid-under-the-table illegal labor.
And the SEIU? The union decries fast-food workers’ low pay and agitates for their trendy new cause — the $15-an-hour wage. Indeed, USA Today reported last month, the Center for Union Facts has estimated the SEIU “has spent more than $15 million supporting (fast-food workers’) protests since January 2013.”
The irony? By championing driver cards, the SEIU works to assure the continued oversupply of low-skilled labor, which dampens fast-food workers’ wages. Even the liberal Center for American Progress, according to Eric Ruark and Matthew Graham of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, has admitted that “reducing the illegal-immigrant population in the United States by one-third would raise the income of unskilled workers by $400 a year.” “The average high-school dropout,” writes National Public Radio’s Adam Davidson, would see “about a $25 a week raise if there were no job competition from immigrants.”
In April and May 2013, the Legislature passed and Gov. John Kitzhaber signed the law granting driver cards to illegal immigrants. It was “rammed through the Legislature so quickly,” wrote Rep. Sal Esquivel, R-Medford, “that most Oregonians barely got the chance to scrutinize it and weigh in with their opinions.” But over the next five months, the law’s opponents, led by the citizen activists of Oregonians for Immigration Reform, collected the signatures of more than 71,000 Oregon voters and successfully referred the law to the November 2014 statewide ballot.
This fall, Oregon voters should reject illegal-immigrant driver cards. By doing so, they’ll reward the honest businesses that reject cheap illegal labor and help raise wages for their low-skilled fellow citizens.
— Cynthia Kendoll is president of Oregonians for Immigration Reform and authorized agent of Protect Oregon Driver Licenses.
