Immigration Control, Impact

With regard to your Feb. 8 editorial on the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and your suggestion that we “would get more bang for the buck” by putting more emphasis on border manpower at points of entry, I respectfully disagree.

If one stops to consider why illegal immigration increases--it seems obvious to me, that it is to find work to get a job. I don’t believe we have the money to completely plug up our borders (even in Vietnam, an expensive electric fence didn’t do the trick). If you tighten up in Tijuana they’ll come in via Nogales--if you tighten up in Nogales, they’ll come in via Laredo.

The way to curtail this flow is to have a forgery-proof Social Security card. If we put a fraction of the budget to this purpose, the scandal-ridden INS could concentrate on naturalization.

SEYMOUR I. NEUMAN

Beverly Hills

* Re “Creating the Third World in America,” Column Left, Feb. 9:

Brysk blames the new Republican majority for turning the United States into a Third World country. I have to wonder where she has been these past several years. The “rising tide of immigration” has already turned portions of our formerly beautiful, safe state of California into a Third World country. And yes, we do now host epidemics of preventable Third World diseases, thanks to the flood of immigrants who have been allowed to enter this country without so much as a physical examination in order to detect any disease which may be present. Immigration in the past was, of course, “America’s strength and attractiveness,” when immigrants came to America with one desire: to work and raise their families on their own, and really desired to become Americans and to embrace the culture and language of America.

DONA JONES

Placentia

* I am reminded of an apparent liberal dilemma that remains unmentioned since the Prop. 187 debate. The unimpeded inflow of mostly illegal immigrant labor cannot help the American labor movement. While we must not equate American workers with Kansas Red Winter Wheat or pork bellies, labor acts much like a commodity: The more labor is available, the less it commands in wages. American left-liberalism is rooted in the worthy cause of the labor movement, but in this, too, the left has corrupted itself beyond recognition and respect.

One is left with the idea that the left wants as many poor, dependent people as possible to maintain a power base. If Brysk really does not want America to become Third World country, why does she want to let it immigrate here?

RICK WIGGINS

Pasadena