Parsons Columns Touch Nerves
Once again, Dana Parsons has launched cheap shots at Barbara Coe, founder of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, and thus has revealed his ignorance of the immigration reform movement (“The Hypocrisy of Immigration ‘Reform,’ ” Jan. 24).
The basic problem is world overpopulation, now at 6 billion with another billion due by 2012. America’s population, now about 280 million, will reach 370 million by 2050, per the Census Bureau. The fertility rate of U.S.-born whites is below the replacement level. This means present and future growth is primarily from immigrants.
Most of the deterioration in our quality of life is from Third World poor seeking America’s way of life: the electricity shortage, freeway jams, school crowding/lower standards, minimum-wage poverty, environmental damage from suburban sprawl, etc. Barbara Coe would restrict immigration to educated, employable legals at the U.S. carrying capacity. That means 200,000 to 300,000 annually. We currently accept 1 million legally plus about 300,000 illegal aliens.
Coe is trying to save America as we have known it. Parsons admits he has never met her. His office cubicle is just a few miles from her office. She has more guts and devotion to our country than this small-time journalist will ever have.
ANDRE KERR
Laguna Woods
*
Dana Parsons’ Feb. 2 column unearthed deeply painful memories of my brother’s felony conviction and incarceration (“The Criminal’s Families Are Victims Too”).
At 17, he made the fatal decision to drive while intoxicated, resulting in the tragic death of a young woman. She was a precious daughter, a beloved sister. We, on the other hand, are the family of the criminal. There are no sympathy cards to open, no condolence calls to accept, nary a kind word to ease the suffering we endured.
I learned a lot of things during those dark years, like what it’s like to see your surname plastered all over the front page of your daily paper. I learned a prosecutor’s job isn’t so much about getting at the truth, as it is about winning his case, and the cruel, painful things he’ll say to do it. I learned why lawyers impress upon judges seemingly irrelevant information about their client’s height and weight. I learned incarceration’s worst punishment isn’t your loss of freedom but the endurance of constant threats, assaults and rapes. I learned what it’s like to sit in the jail’s visitor’s booth, sitting across from your loved one, talking to him on the phone as you look at him through dirty plexiglass, unable to hug him, to touch him, to wipe away his tears. But the most painful thing I learned is that sometimes parents feel their child would have been better dead than alive. Maybe my brother deserved everything he got, but I didn’t. This all happened nearly 20 years ago. And still I cry.
SHARON SCHRAMER
Laguna Niguel