Letters: Immigration reform’s complicated politics

Re “Foes of border bill focus on House,” July 14

I chuckle when I see advocates of curbing immigration attacked for not being truly conservative. We’re also attacked as just racists for not being truly liberal supporters of workers and the environment.

In reality, immigration cuts across political lines. Some fiscal conservatives want mass immigration for cheap labor. Some social liberals want mass immigration for diversity or to help poor and oppressed foreigners.

By contrast, some cultural conservatives want less immigration to preserve America from an unassimilable human wave. And some environmentalist liberals, like myself, want to stop obliterating resources that would be renewable with a sustainable population.

Immigration presents serious issues, none of which should be shoved aside by electoral politics or name-calling. Not everyone who worries about overpopulation embraces racism, and not everyone who likes immigration embraces fantasies that America can sustain an infinite number of people.

Caricatures cannot resolve the issues.

Kenneth Pasternack

Santa Barbara

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