Sticking Points in Immigration Controversy

* What a skewed insight the quotation from group literature in the Times story (“O.C. Group Helps Fuel Anti-Immigration Furor,” Aug. 30) about the California Coalition for Immigration Reform gives on our problems today. It ran:

“Facts and figures repeatedly prove that illegal aliens, first committing a criminal act by violating our borders and then bringing their values and culture into our midst are major contributors to our mounting financial burdens and moral and social degradation.”

With a little hindsight, one can picture a different world if Queen Liliuokalani could have taken this unclassy stance before the illegal seizure of the Hawaiian islands by American opportunists 100 years ago. Many native Hawaiians today seeking to regain sovereignty of their lands wish she had. Native Americans might well have turned back the ships of Christopher Columbus, forbidding them to come ashore with such a proclamation.

One wonders--how did Gov. Pete Wilson’s and Barbara Coe’s forebears manage to violate the borders of this country and smuggle in the seeds of their foreign values and cultures to the moral and social degradation of this land?

Why weren’t they shipped back to where they came from on the next boat? Do we need descendants from alien ancestors in our midst, preaching the sort of rhetoric Adolf Hitler used to justify his racial cleansing?

MEL KERNAHAN

Laguna Hills

* Re your front page article “O.C. Group Helps Fuel Anti-Immigrant Furor”: You just don’t seem to understand that there is a difference between “immigrant” and “ illegal immigrant.”

Most people I know are not against those who abided by the system and are here legally. It’s the ones that flood across the border and impact our life both physically and economically.

You state that all they want is to work and I understand that. But, as stated in your newspaper earlier this week, unemployment is on the increase. Californians are losing jobs daily. We don’t have enough jobs for our own much less for those that shouldn’t be here in the first place!

More importantly, this country is based on laws. Those here illegally have broken the law.

If we condone those people being here, we condone breaking the law. Which other laws shall we just ignore?

TOM TRELOAR

Brea