Cost of Immigration to the U.S.

* Re “1992 Cost of Immigrants $18 Billion, Report Says,” Nov. 5: Following the same illogic of Donald Huddle of Rice University, Charles Keating and persons of his ilk, to name one example, should also be cited for the $200-billion savings-and-loan scandal bailout they cost U.S. taxpayers.

There are many legal residents of the U.S. who are costing this country way more than $18 billion per year through their vices of crime, drugs, violence, white-collar crime, fraud, extortion, price gouging, insider trading, and racketeering. What are you going to do--deport them?

YSIDRO J. LOPEZ

Monterey Park

* Although I don’t condone illegal immigration to the U.S., I don’t understand how so many people can be nearsighted about the issue, specifically how it relates to the economy. In a free market and open society there is no distinction between legal and illegal money: When consumer goods are bought or sales taxes are paid or labor is expended, economic action is done and its influence felt with no regard to the legal status of the participants.

I am somewhat biased on this issue. My great-grandfather, Santiago Rodriguez, moved from Chihuahua, Mexico, to the Austin, Tex., area, illegally, in the early 1890s. He did, though, get his citizenship prior to his death in 1926. Today his 1,000-plus descendants are all well-integrated into American society, just as the current illegal aliens will be 50 to 100 years from now.

DANIEL RODRIGUEZ

Newport Beach

* In response to Assemblyman Richard Polanco’s denouncing Pete Schabarum, Alan Nelson and Harold Ezell’s initiatives seeking to ban illegal immigrants from health care and schooling benefits (Nov. 12), I object to Polanco’s equating their proposals to Nazism and a “Gestapo approach.” The Jews in Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s were legal native citizens of Germany; many Jewish families lived there several hundred years.

Polanco should spend his efforts as a representative for Latinos getting the federal government to pay for whatever services illegal foreigners in all border states need, rather than expect the states to do so. California doesn’t have the money to properly educate and take care of the children of its legal citizens-taxpayers. We are running a deficit and have high unemployment. Supporting illegal immigrants should not be a state’s responsibility. Charity begins at home.

GRACE DEUTSCH

Corona del Mar