Letters page
Welcome to the OFIR Letters and Op-Eds section. Here you can read Letters to the Editor and Op-Eds that have been published in various newspapers and news sources.
Immigration: There are several things wrong with Robert Owen's letter on immigration (Letters to the Editor, July 30)....
The surge of illegals coming into the U.S. through Mexico now are not refugees. Their countries are no more dangerous than Chicago...
The U.S. is overloaded with immigrants — both legal and illegal. Our population is far beyond carrying capacity for the natural environment, due mostly to excessive immigration...
Concerning the AP article “2008 law unexpectedly at center of border debate” I read on The World’s national page of July 22, it is true that President George W. Bush signed H.R. 7311, the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, on Dec. 23, 2008, thinking he was fighting the global traffic in sex slaves, many of them children. The Democratic Congress that passed the bill agreed.
But the article fails to mention the unintended consequences of the additional catalyst behind the mushrooming numbers of children making a beeline for our border. Conveniently omitted is President Obama’s June 15, 2012, announcement that DHS will use discretion to halt the deportations of eligible immigrant youth. That day, Janet Napolitano, secretary of DHS, had issued the memorandum: Exercising Prosecutorial Discretion with Respect to Individuals Who Came to the United States as Children.
Predictably, Obama administration officials deny that lenient policies, including it’s 2012 program, have encouraged the sudden surge. Once again they are saying, blame it on Bush!
But the numbers don’t lie. In FY2012: 6,775 unaccompanied alien children were detained. In FY2013: 24,668, in FY2014: 60,000-plus estimated total. ICE numbers show only 1,669 deportations of immigrants under age 18 in 2013 (LA Times: Deportation data won’t dispel rumors drawing migrant minors to U.S.). That’s only 6.8 percent!
On “Fox News Sunday,” July 20, Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz largely pinned the border crisis on Obama’s 2012 executive memo. “The cause of this crisis is the promise of amnesty,” he said. Cruz argued the number of children trying to enter the U.S. illegally has “skyrocketed” since 2012, when Obama allowed some young illegal immigrants to be eligible for delayed deportation. He says roughly 6,000 children were apprehended in 2011 coming into the U.S. illegally, compared to an estimated 90,000 coming this year and 145,000 in 2015. Cruz said that the way to help the children is to “eliminate the magnet, which is President Obama’s amnesty.”
The new “shot heard around the world” is send your children anyway you can to the USA. They will be allowed to stay, be well taken care of, get free legal help and education.
What happens when the bill for that care comes due? Veterans Affairs, Medicare and Social Security funding, among others, can all take a back seat for this newest Obama fiasco.
Raymond Straub
Charleston
Where in the world are the sane people?
I don't care where you come from or how much money you do or don't have. If you lie, cheat and break the laws of our country, you should be either sent home or go to jail.
The so-called children (how come they all have adults with them in the pictures?) are not refugees. If that was the case, then the children of Chicago and Detroit should be called refugees.
Get a life.
Everyone says, "Oh, poor people," until they are the people. Then it is a different story. No one is above the law. Not even the president. I think he is the first one who needs to go to jail.
We should have the emigration policy of Mexico and stick with it. Illegal immigrants who picket our White House and then yell down a born-and-bred American should not only be ashamed but sent to jail. They are breaking the law and no one cares.
Well, I care. And my vote is going to be with the person who says enough.
Go home and ask to come here. We don't care if you come; just do it legally.
Mr. President, where are you?
It seems like our fearless leader (ha ha) has been really busy lately doing fundraising campaigns for the Democratic Party. I guess that is more important than the crisis at the border, 298 people getting shot out of the sky in Ukraine, or Hamas and Israel firing missiles at each other.
The crisis at the border seems to get me fired up the most, because where do you think the money comes from that is used to house and care for all of those illegals? That’s right: the taxpaying citizens of the USA! Instead of using our money to house the illegal immigrants, how about that money that Mr. President earned while he is supposed to be working for us and not against us.
It seems that our president has a tendency to blame the Republicans for the problems. The thing I don’t understand about that is why can’t the Mexican government take all those illegals back in their country? It would not be right to just give them a free path to citizenship, when I know first-hand it takes time and money to get someone here from a foreign country.
Speaking of foreign country. whose side are we on? The USA is sending 47 million of our dollars for humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, some of which goes to Hamas. Yet one of our allies is Israel. I have the answer: We are helping the thugs and not our own!
If the USA is to survive, we need to take the following steps.
1. Barack Obama needs to be impeached and removed from office as soon as possible.
2. The Democratic Party has become the open border party of national suicide, thus all Democrats should be removed from office in upcoming elections.
3. The religious right should be voted out of office.
4. Americans need to elect libertarian-minded independents who believe in protecting our borders from invasion and promoting a sane energy policy based on science, not on faddism and fairytale thinking.
5. The false doomsday religion of Climate Change needs to be recognized for what it is: an anti-science, anti-fact, hysterical fad developed by people who do not believe in or understand the scientific method. Paying scientists to find evidence for a predetermined conclusion is not science at all. It is hucksterism.
Send them to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That’s what President Obama should do with the children surging across our country’s borders in search of a better life...
Rather than let the children be treated as political pawns, the president should send them to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station. While this U.S. military installation is known as a prison for enemy combatants, that penal colony occupies just a small portion of the 45-square-mile base...
At the Navy base, which boasts movie theaters, American fast-food restaurants and excellent recreational facilities, care of the child migrants should be put in the hands of officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, rather than the Department of Homeland Security.
Scattering them across the U.S. to immigration centers that lack the space and staff to deal with large numbers of children will turn the problem into a ticking time bomb. Relocating them to Guantanamo would ratchet up the pressure on their home countries to repatriate them...
The U.S. has a long history of offering haven to dispossessed children, from World War II’s Operation Pied Piper that evacuated children from Britain, to Operation Pedro Pan that moved more than 14,000 children out of Cuba, to Operation Baby lift’s rescue of youngsters from Vietnam.
But today’s child migrants present a special problem. They are neither refugees of a war the U.S. was involved in, nor the product of a lingering ideological tug of war. Instead, they are part of what, for many Americans, is a crisis of little concern....
The best way to do that is to house all the children, temporarily, at Guantanamo Bay.
This letter is in response to Don Rea (July 22). You can not be so naïve as to believe this border crisis is not orchestrated for the political gain of some.
No mother would hand over a child still in diapers to a stranger on the road to who knows where with no home in sight. I personally believe these babies are kidnapped or worse. Have you seen the tattooed pictures of gang members coming in? The only way to put an end to this fiasco is to return them to their homes. This is human trafficking. How many children are in the hands of sex traders? They have to go home in a humane way.
The state of California has no water now — add a few million more people and what will happen? Shut our borders now. We need to demand it of our president, who prefers to shoot pool and drink beer than to go to the border.
How much more are you willing to pay for welfare? It’s not the babies’ fault, but it must be stopped. The gang bangers just drop them off in Mexico. Why are we putting up with lawlessness? We should be ashamed of what we are becoming as a nation! It will only get worse until the citizens say “stop.”
Economy has a tipping point
It seems that we have reached and passed the “tipping point.” I read an analysis of U.S. Census figures by Terence Jeffrey for CNS News that concluded that 86.5 million private workers actually carry the economic load of the nation, supporting 148 million Americans who rely on government benefits. With close to twice as many on this wagon as are pulling the wagon, it’s obvious that the tipping point has been passed.
If you compound this with the influx of illegal immigrants currently crossing our southern border who will be seeking government subsidies, then our country will be totally consumed with this debt burden.
U.S. Marine Corps General Kelly stated that our border with Mexico has been invaded and we have lost control. There is no verification of who these migrants are. Many minors are being assisted by the drug gangs, while some are being used as coyotes (to smuggle people across the borders). Who knows how many terrorists could be among them?
After all of these “phony” scandals with their subsequent stonewalling and cover-ups, why has nobody ever been held accountable?
To quote President Ronald Regan, “A country with no borders is no country.”
Tell your reps. to enforce laws
I’m tired of being treated as a third-class citizen by the government.
For example, to fly commercially, I must prove who I am with authorized photo identification and be subject to searches, even after proving I’m a law-abiding U.S. citizen. Yet illegal immigrants with a piece of paper and their word can board a commercial airline. And Homeland Security is implying I am more dangerous than an unknown person, with no history, who is here illegally. Either treat us all equally and fairly, or give law-abiding U.S. citizens the same or better privileges.
I urge you to write to your congressmen and senators. Tell them to enforce the laws equally for all people in the U.S. These double standards must stop!
Whenever the illegal immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras and San Salvador are photographed and displayed by the media, we see nicely groomed, physically clean, well-dressed and apparently healthy youth and adults.
So are we being duped by conspiratorial nationals in Central America who are practicing population control by sending their unwanted numbers for us to care for?
