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.

Letter author:
Shain Thompson
Letter publisher:
democratherald.com
Date of letter:
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Letter body:

Assuming SB 833 becomes the law of the state, it will give me pleasure to see/hear police radio use of codes 10-27 (drivers license information) and/or 10-28 (registration information) without regard to ethnicity. Specifically, I refer to insurance or the lack thereof!

Shain Thompson

Sweet Home

 

Letter author:
Frank W. Brown
Letter publisher:
The Register Guard
Date of letter:
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Letter body:

So Marina Herrera Hajek believes immigrants should have driver’s licenses (letters, May 3). I agree. But here’s the rub: The immigrants she was talking about are illegal immigrants and, in that case, I strongly disagree.

What I find so irritating is people dancing around the fact that “illegal” means “illegal.” Look it up.

I believe all illegal immigrants should be rounded up and sent home. They are in our country illegally and have broken our laws.

It’s unbelievable to me that Congress is even considering granting them amnesty, yet Congress holds out the carrots of food stamps, welfare, driver’s licenses, Social Security, etc. The U.S. Department of Agriculture even prints fliers for the Mexican Embassy that tell immigrants they don’t have to reveal their immigration status to receive food stamps.

I’m sorry, but Hajek was flat-out wrong.

FRANK W. BROWN
Eugene

 

Letter author:
Jerry Marr
Letter publisher:
StatesmanJournal.com
Date of letter:
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Letter body:

Concerning immigrants getting their license in Oregon to drive, why don’t they go to Mexico and get their licenses? They would be recognized here with proof of insurance.

My own driver’s license has been recognized in Mexico, Canada and all across Europe as a legal right to drive, if I obey their laws.

So my advice is to sneak back into Mexico again. Get your Mexico driver’s license and sneak back again, then you can drive to work, take your kids to school, church, doctor’s and where ever else they need to go.

Learn to speak English, get a job and apply for a work visa, and then ask to become a US citizen the legal way.

Jerry Marr

Gates

 

Letter author:
Lyneil Vandermolen
Letter publisher:
The Bulletin Local Columns
Date of letter:
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Letter body:

Some people consider illegal immigration a victimless crime and new civil right. However, it inflicts enormous human costs on Americans every day. Citizens who have suffered its effects and found themselves ignored are the ones truly “living in the shadows." Consider the stories of three people I know:

In 2011, Jose Rosario Mendoza Lopez, an illegal immigrant, followed a young woman into the women’s locker room at a stable where they both worked and sexually assaulted her. He had been deported three times but always returned. His last re-entry was just four months before the attack.

Lopez was sent to the Oregon State Penitentiary in Pendleton for methamphetamine possession and sexual abuse. His victims could have been any of the grade school or high school girls who rode at the Portland area stable every day. If the national amnesty bill passes, Lopez could qualify for citizenship because he has only one assault conviction.

Then there’s Lisa (not her real name). Confined by spina bifida to a wheelchair, she was crossing the street to go to church in June 2012, when an illegal alien, texting while driving down the bike lane, slammed into her and threw her thirty feet. Lisa survived but suffered a broken neck.

The Beaverton police discovered the driver had no license and was using someone else’s Matricula Consular card, an ID card the Mexican Consulate dispenses to illegal aliens on demand. Despite his reckless driving and ID fraud, the Beaverton police declined to turn him over to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He has since sued Lisa twice for the emotional damage he suffered by hitting her and for the dents to his borrowed car.

The third victim was Kay Blaser, 26, who attended my church in Tualatin. In 2008, she died when a drunk illegal immigrant with a valid Oregon driver’s license broadsided her car in Oregon City, leaving a child motherless. That year Oregon stopped issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. But only four years later, Gov. Kitzhaber and some legislators have bowed to the pressure of illegal immigrant lobbies and agriculturalists and are rushing SB 833 through the process to restore access — apparently to create the illusion of safe lawbreaking. In fact, its supporters claim that if illegal immigrants insist on driving anyway, which several threatened to do at the bill’s only hearing, they will at least be insured.

However, the bill doesn’t require the illegal immigrant driver to carry insurance. Only a car registration requires that. He can get along with a borrowed car and his permit, while citizens can only hope the car’s owner carries insurance.

The real reason for SB 833 is to keep employers of illegal labor happy and to placate activists in the “immigrant rights" movement. In the meantime, our citizens are at risk from the increasing number of lawbreakers who kill and maim on our roads whether or not they carry licenses.

Without exception, journalists and politicians who defend illegal immigration have dismissed my reports of the suffering it causes, telling me that crime and accidents happen everywhere. However, these particular tragedies would not have occurred if our government had done its job to prevent these illegal immigrants from arriving in the first place. While illegal immigrants organize on the state and national level to demand their right to break our laws, their American victims often remain isolated, silent and unknown. Their grieving families often find it too painful to launch into related political activism.

So illegal immigration’s financial costs aren’t the whole story. More important are its human costs: its costs to people — to our fellow citizens — whose lives have been altered forever by the depredations of an illegal immigrant. If I know three victims of this “victimless" crime, I suspect everyone does.

— Lyneil Vandermolen lives in Tualatin.

Letter author:
Stanley Kurtz
Letter publisher:
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com PRINT
Date of letter:
Friday, May 3, 2013
Letter body:

Granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants at a time when our patriotic assimilation system is broken makes no sense. With this criticism of Schumer-Rubio gaining ground, advocates of amnesty have adopted a new strategy: Praise the bill as a fount of assimilation. Today’s Christian Science Monitor features an article that claims even critics of Schumer-Rubio are pleased with its provisions for the integration and assimilation of immigrants. Bad timing, since John Fonte has a piece today here at NRO that tells the truth about Schumer-Rubio’s assimilation provisions.

Schumer-Rubio almost quadruples federal funding for immigrant-integration programs, while also setting up a bureaucratic apparatus designed to channel tens of millions more in corporate funding into public-private partnerships designed to support such assimilation. Sounds good. But in practice this will channel tens of millions of dollars into the coffers of “non-profit groups,” many of them Alinsky-style community organizations that focus on recruiting and politicizing immigrants. As Fonte explains today on NRO, that’s exactly where money for immigrant integration already goes in many states. This bill will add a huge federal bonanza on top of that, to be overseen by Obama-appointed bureaucrats who will no doubt do everything in their power to channel those dollars into the hands of left-leaning community organizers.

In Radical-in-Chief I tell the story of Obama’s involvement with a hardcore Alinskyite group that catered to immigrants, many of them illegal, in Chicago in the 1980s. Fonte shows that Joshua Hoyt, an organizer Obama met and worked with in those early days, now runs a successor group in Illinois, where a “strategic partnership” with state government channels public money to the group. So a supposed state-backed effort at immigrant assimilation has turned into state-subsidized political agitation for leftist-Alinskyites instead.

This pattern repeats in other states, and Schumer-Rubio gives the Obama administration a chance to spread it still further. Just as the Community Reinvestment Act forced banks to fund a huge network of leftist community organizations charged with supervising sub-prime loans (ACORN and many more), Schumer-Rubio could give birth to a vast network of Alinskyite “non-profits” across the country catering to immigrant “integration.” In practice, these groups are more interested in pushing immigrants to agitate for increased government spending (see Hoyt’s activities in Illinois), than in patriotic assimilation in the classic sense.

Today’s Christian Science Monitor piece makes much of effusive praise for Schumer-Rubio’s “assimilation” provisions from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI). No wonder. MPI is a major force for replacing traditional patriotic assimilation with the gospel of multiculturalism. Fonte’s Hudson Institute report with Althea Nagai on our broken patriotic assimilation system singles out MPI as perhaps the most influential opponent of immigrant assimilation, at least as this country has long understood that term. The “assimilation” provisions of Schumer-Rubio ought to be called “multiculturalism” provisions instead.

The assimilation argument against Schumer-Rubio holds that we can’t keep funneling government money into a system based on multiculturalism and leftist political agitation. Until we halt government backing for the diversity industry and rework the institutional support structure for immigrant integration (Fonte and Nagai have suggestions for how to do that), more public-private money will do nothing but subsidize the multiculturalist blather that killed off our assimilation system in the first place.

So don’t believe the hype. Schumer-Rubio doesn’t “fix” our assimilation problem. It is our assimilation problem.

Letter author:
Steve Lundeberg
Letter publisher:
democratherald.com
Date of letter:
Friday, May 3, 2013
Letter body:

Predictably, it didn’t take long for the backlash against Oregon Senate Bill 833 to begin.

That’s the measure allowing illegal immigrants to obtain a form of driver’s license. The House passed it Tuesday, and Gov. John Kitzhaber signed it into law.

The next day, the newsroom emailbox received a heated missive from a group called Oregonians for Immigration Reform. OFIR, the press release said, plans to file a referendum on SB 833 that would put the measure before a statewide vote.

The bill, OFIR says, “seeks to put Oregon government back into the business of legitimizing the presence of illegal aliens in Oregon, which also flies in the face of their sworn oath of office.

“... Following the successful collection of 58,142 signatures every Oregon voter will be given the opportunity to reject SB 833, a bill ramrodded through the Oregon Legislature in less than a month so that Governor Kitzhaber could celebrate with hundreds of illegal aliens occupying the Oregon Capitol this May Day. Oregonians deserve better from their elected officials.”

More on that last point in a minute. But first, take note of another emailbox item, one that arrived May 2. It was from Basic Rights Oregon, a group dedicated to equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, and it noted how BRO had gone to Salem in support of the aforementioned rally sponsored by Causa, an immigrant rights organization.

“The driver’s cards will improve traffic safety and reduce the number of uninsured motorists on Oregon's roads,” Basic Rights Oregon’s press release said, and that prediction would seem to be a well-reasoned one.

That’s why SB 833 is a good idea. The main thing it does, contrary to those who fixate on the notion that it provides a reward for breaking the law, is strive to make all Oregonians’ lives both safer and less costly.

Illegal immigrants are here, and they’re driving. The Oregon Legislature can’t do anything about that. So doesn’t it make sense to at least take steps to have them be proficient, on the state’s radar in the form of licensure — and fees — and insured?

Much like in-state tuition for children of immigrants (which we now have) or like one of Basic Rights Oregon’s main areas of emphasis — working toward the legalization of gay marriage — how does that actually hurt anyone, take anything away from what anybody else already has?

Do we need a coherent, intelligent federal policy on immigration in general and immigration involving Mexican nationals in particular? Absolutely. That’s obviously the broader issue here.

But until we have such a policy, all Oregon can do is deal with things the way they are now. SB 833 is a common sense attempt at that.

And that sort of clear thinking is what Oregonians deserve from their lawmakers.
 

Letter author:
Wayne Mayo
Letter publisher:
Spotlight
Date of letter:
Friday, May 3, 2013
Letter body:

State Rep. Dennis Richardson asked about giving provisional driver’s licenses to illegal aliens (Oregon SB833).

I replied:

“When I was collecting signatures (local measure 5-191) in 2007 a woman said she married an illegal and had a child. He went back to his country, went through the paperwork and entered the country legally. She didn’t see why it should be so hard. But he did it.

I told her now that he was here legally, his green card was huge! Now it’s clear he certainly wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize his hard-fought legal status. I’d welcome them living next door. He did the right thing.

This provisional driver’s license requires a year in the state. During that year wait they will be driving illegally; here illegally; unable to understand our laws; illegally. Don’t foster this occupation.

Illegals need to go home, get in line and come back legally like he did.

Anything easy, which is what you’re considering, is degrading and takes away from the route her husband took.

Wayne Mayo

Sacpoose

 

Letter author:
Richard F. LaMountain
Letter publisher:
PortlandTribune
Date of letter:
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Letter body:

My View: Legislature's approval requires opposition voices to be heard loud and clear

In the Oregon Legislature, few bills have been moved with greater alacrity than Senate Bill 833, which grants four-year driver’s licenses to undocumented residents.

Only three weeks ago, the Senate Business and Transportation Committee held the Legislature’s first public hearing on the bill. Last week, with little debate, it passed the Senate; on Tuesday, the House voted to approve it. Within days, Governor John Kitzhaber is expected to sign the bill into law.

Why the rush? Most likely, to make illegal immigrants’ licenses a fait accompli before public opposition has had time to jell.

SB 833 will make life immeasurably easier for Oregon’s job-holding illegal immigrants. By doing so, it almost certainly will attract more illegal residents here, to compete with unemployed Oregonians for the state’s still-scarce jobs.

Skeptical? Consider the impact of a license on your own life — the quick and convenient travel it allows, in your own car, at the time of your choice, to wherever you wish to go. Without a license, you would rely on fixed-schedule public transportation, rides from friends or your own two feet to get you from place to place.

So, too, for illegal immigrants. And the most important places that licenses will enable them to go is their jobsites. For many, especially those who work in out-of-the-way locales, licenses will be the difference between holding a job or not.

According to estimates from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, some 120,000 illegal immigrants are employed in Oregon — many in the fields of food service, construction and building maintenance/groundskeeping. Indeed, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, illegal residents recently have composed, respectively, 12 percent, 17 percent and 19 percent of these fields’ work forces.

In illegal immigrants’ absence, many of these jobs would be filled by Oregonians, of whom nearly 168,000 were unemployed in March. But with access to driver’s licenses, a privilege illegal immigrants enjoy in only four other states, it will better enable them to keep these jobs and would be a powerful incentive for tens of thousands more to come here as well. This, in turn, will enable unscrupulous employers to perpetuate business models that rely heavily on cheap labor and do wrong to their jobless countrymen.

What will more illegal immigrants mean for the state’s taxpayers?

A bigger hit to the wallet, for one, since job-holding illegal residents do not contribute a proportionally fair share of taxes to fund the operation of Oregon’s governments.

“An estimated half of all illegal aliens work in the underground economy for cash,” writes FAIR’s Jack Martin, “and do not, therefore, have any payroll taxes withheld.”

Countless others who are “working with fake or stolen identity documents,” Martin asserts, “are largely in low-wage jobs” with no or minimal tax liabilities.

The result: as per FAIR’s comprehensive 2012 study, Oregon’s illegal immigrants pay only $77 million a year in state and local taxes. But they and their children consume more than $1 billion a year in state and local services.

The more illegal residents that SB 833 attracts here, the more that disparity will grow, and the more money that will be extracted from Oregonians to subsidize their presence.

In approving SB 833, lawmakers abdicated their moral and fiduciary responsibility to their countrymen. At this late stage of the process, what can Oregonians do?

First: Despite Kitzhaber’s stated intent to sign the bill, Oregonians should contact him at oregon.gov/gov/Pages/ShareYourOpinion.aspx, and tell him they oppose driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants.

Second: Oregonians should visit the Legislature’s website at leg.state.or.us, review the names of lawmakers who voted for the bill, and remember those names in the 2014 elections.

Our elected leaders’ first and foremost responsibility is to Americans. SB 833 violates that responsibility. Oregonians should say so, loudly and clearly.

  Richard F. LaMountain of Cedar Mill is vice president of Oregonians for Immigration Reform.  

Letter author:
Victor Davis Hanson
Letter publisher:
The Bulletin News
Date of letter:
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Letter body:

Deportation has become a near-taboo word. Yet the recent Boston bombings inevitably rekindle old questions about the way the U.S. admits, or at times deports, foreign nationals.

Despite the Obama administration's politically driven and cyclical claims of deporting either a lot more or a lot fewer non-citizens, no one knows how many are really being sent home — for a variety of reasons.

There are not any accurate statistics on how many people are living in the United States illegally. And how does one define deportation? If someone from Latin America is detained by authorities an hour after illegally crossing the border, does he count as “apprehended" or “deported"?

“Deportation" is now politically incorrect, sort of like the T-word — “terrorism" — that the administration also seeks to avoid. The current government emphasis is on increasing legal immigration and granting amnesties, but by no means is Washington as interested in clarifying deportation.

Why was the Tsarnaev family granted asylum into the United States — and why were some of them not later deported? Officially, the Tsarnaevs came here as refugees. As ethnic Chechens and former residents of Kyrgyzstan, they sought “asylum" here from anti-Muslim persecution — given that Russia had waged a brutal war in Chechnya against Islamic militants.

Yes, the environment of Islamic Russia was and can be deadly. But if the Tsarnaevs were supposedly in danger in their native country, why did the father, Anzor, after a few years choose to return to Dagestan, Russia, where he now apparently lives in relative safety? Why did one of the alleged Boston bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, return to his native land for six months last year — given that escape from such an unsafe place was the very reason that the United States granted his family asylum in the first place?

That is not an irrelevant question. Recently, some supposedly persecuted Somalis were generously granted asylum to immigrate to Minnesota communities, only to later fly back to Somalia to wage jihad. Were they true refugees fleeing persecution against Muslims, or extremists looking for a breather in the United States?

What, exactly, justifies deportation of immigrants of any status? Failure to find work and to become self-supporting? Apparently not. The Tsarnaev family reportedly had been on public assistance. This is not an isolated or unusual concern. President Obama's own aunt, Zeituni Onyango, not only broke immigration law by overstaying her tourist visa but also compounded that violation by illegally receiving state assistance as a resident of public housing. Only after Obama was elected president was his aunt finally granted political asylum on the grounds that she would be unsafe in her native Kenya.

Should those residing here illegally at least avoid arrest and follow the rules of their adopted country? Apparently not — given that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a skilled boxer, was charged in 2009 with domestic violence against his girlfriend. His mother, Zubeidat, also back in Russia now, was reportedly arrested last year on charges of shoplifting some $1,600 in goods from a Boston store.

Again, these are not irrelevant questions. President Obama's own uncle, Onyango Obama, is at present illegally residing in the United States. In 2011, he was cited for drunk driving after nearly slamming into a police car.

Would embracing radical ideological movements that have waged war on the United States be a cause for deportation? Apparently not. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was interviewed by the FBI in 2010, based on information from a foreign intelligence agency that he might pose a threat as a radical Islamist. The FBI knew from Tsarnaev's Web postings about his not-so-private sympathies with radical Islam.

Americans are a generous people who take in more immigrants than any other nation in the world. So the sticking point in the current debate over “immigration reform" is not necessarily the granting of residency per se — given that most Americans are willing to consider a pathway to citizenship for even those who initially broke immigration law but have since not been arrested, have avoided public assistance, and have tried to learn the language and customs of their newly adopted country.

The problem is what to do with those who have not done all that.

Unless the government can assure the public that it is now enforcing immigration laws already on the books, that foreign nationals must at least avoid arrest and public assistance, and that it is disinclined to grant asylum to “refugees" from war-torn Islamic regions and then allow them periodically to go back and forth from their supposedly hostile homelands, there will be little support for the current immigration bill.

In short, the Tsarnaev brothers have offered us a proverbial teachable moment about what have become near-suicidal immigration policies.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Letter author:
Cynthia Kendoll
Letter publisher:
StatesmanJournal.com
Date of letter:
Monday, April 22, 2013
Letter body:

Oregon is at risk of demise. What was once a beautiful state full of promise and potential, has become a magnet for foreign nationals who want the option to pick and choose which laws to obey and which to ignore.

When our lawmakers and those who benefit from their presence, plot and scheme behind closed doors to advance the agenda of people in our country illegally, then our state is doomed. Law abiding, tax-paying citizens will take a back seat to rallying mobs of illegal aliens demanding their rights.

I am a lifelong Oregonian and I fear for the future of my state. The culture of corruption that is ruining our neighbors to the south is now making its way to the steps of our Capitol. The rule of law is what defines a civil society. Oregon is moving away from that and moving toward failure. What a shame.

Cynthia Kendoll
 

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