Lawyer Misses Point of Goals of Proposition 187

Immigration lawyer Ron Tasoff (Valley Commentary, March 5) completely misses the point of Proposition 187 and its attempt to prevent illegal immigrants from wrongfully consuming public services, including public education. Tasoff, along with others who campaigned against 187 last fall, claims that the measure will create a “permanent underclass” by denying large numbers of Los Angeles residents the right to attend public school.

This analysis misses the mark. The whole point of Proposition 187 is that illegal immigrants should follow the law. The United States has the most generous legal immigration policy in the world--we admit some 800,000 legal immigrants and refugees a year (fully a third of whom come to California, even though our state comprises but an eighth of the nation’s population), more than the entire rest of the West combined.

What illegal immigrants have done is cut in line and refuse to wait their turn. This penalizes not only the hard-working taxpayers of California who are forced to subsidize large families who have no business being here (thus encouraging more of them to come), but also makes fools of the law-abiding immigrants who have followed the rules.

This is not a complicated issue, despite the attempts of opponents to cloud the issue. Illegal immigrants have no right to be here. They should go home and play by the same rules as everyone else. Tasoff’s error is his unspoken assumption that illegals will be permitted to stay. He also errs in assuming that so-called “citizen children” (children born here of illegals) should automatically qualify the entire family to stay. That is not a choice to which the taxpayers should be put; rather, the choice should be that the family goes home notwithstanding where their child was born.

Finally, the “equal protection” argument that illegals are constitutionally entitled to the same rights as law-abiding legal residents is poorly reasoned. By that standard, we are responsible for everyone on the planet. The doctrinaire liberal Supreme Court justice who enunciated this notion, William Brennan, has left the court.

RICHARD SYBERT

Woodland Hills