Immigration Aid Changes

* The editors of The Times seem horrified that Congress is considering proposals that will require people who sponsor immigrants to actually honor their commitments (“Stop Attacking Easy Targets,” April 14). It is an idea that The Times considers “ridiculous” and “grossly unfair.”

But wait a minute. Isn’t the purpose of our immigration laws to prevent people from other countries coming here and becoming a financial burden? Isn’t the sponsorship of a relative a contract that the American people have every right to expect will be honored? Isn’t the fact that the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) rolls have been quadrupled over the last decade by elderly parents whose immigrant children promised to care for them, “ridiculous” and “grossly unfair” to the American taxpayer?

Instead of urging the California congressional delegation to seek more (borrowed) federal money to compensate the state for immigration-related costs, you ought to be asking why we continue to have an immigration policy that has become a financial burden at all levels of government. The question is not which level of government should be paying for welfare for immigrants, but rather why any level of government should pay for people who have sponsors and who promised that they would not become public charges.

California needs less immigration, not more federal welfare money.

IRA MEHLMAN

California Media Director

Federation for American Immigration

Reform, Los Angeles

* The Clinton Administration’s plans to fund its so-called welfare reform program (April 12) by cutting benefits to legal immigrants is like robbing the poor to take care of the poor. The Administration proposes to fund the program by prolonging the period of time before disabled and elderly immigrants can get help from the SSI program. SSI provides monthly benefits of up to $446 for indigent individuals and $669 for couples who are blind, disabled or elderly and ineligible for Social Security.

Why not go where the money is? Why not get it from those who can spare it without suffering? I mean the Pentagon, which is loaded, and by restoring the 1980 level of income taxes on the rich and the corporations. Our nation has lost an average of $88 billion a year since the drastic cuts in tax rates on the wealthy and the corporations during the Reagan years.

SOL LONDE

Northridge

* Re “The Welcome Mat Is Threadbare,” Commentary, April 13:

Yeh Ling-Ling’s astonishing opinion piece illustrates the level of ignorance and naked racism that propels anti-immigrant forces to push a few yuppie immigrants to rail broadly against immigrant Asians and Latinos. Yeh tries to create a rational case against immigrants, but succeeds only in laying bare an agenda rooted in scapegoating. Yeh should look to U.S.-based multinational corporations that export manufacturing jobs as the real culprits for national decline. High-tech immigrants bring with them their education, which doesn’t cost the American taxpayer a dime. Also, many of them are temporary, and she doesn’t recognize the fact that historically immigrants also reverse-immigrate, like the Italians who came over at the turn of the century to return to Italy decades later.

Contrary to popular accounts, low-tech jobs are not in decline, but are booming. For the most part, “low-skilled” immigrants do not compete with “poor minority workers” (code for African Americans) because African American workers have fought too long and too hard to accept the awful working wages and conditions imposed on immigrants in certain industries. Employers leverage immigration status and language to justify paying their workers as low as possible. This is only possible when U.S. labor laws are not being enforced by the U.S. government.

If we could take a moment to stop bashing immigrants and start re-examining the way our economy really works and the way corporations, anti-immigrant organizations, and domestic policy interact to create problems, we will go a long way from the phony conclusions and accusations against immigrants. Yeh should take the fight to the real enemies of our quality health care, our environment and our jobs, and leave honest working people alone.

MICHAEL SALAZAR

Los Angeles

* Yeh’s comments are the most sensible, practical and intelligent I have seen in a long time on the future of immigration in this country. It’s about time someone isn’t using “human rights” as a basis for our immigration policy. Let’s begin to think about what is good for ourselves, for a change, and not what is good for everybody else that happens to want to come to the United States! It’s a shame that the idiots that we call our Congress can’t see this simple fact!

JACK M. SMALL

Whittier