Immigration’s family affair

Re “Immigrants have families too,” Opinion, May 19

Bill Ong Hing’s points are well taken, but he seems to have forgotten that immigration to a foreign country is entirely voluntary. Your siblings and adult children are that important to you? Stay with them, don’t come here. He states that these family members who do come to the U.S. immediately go to work in jobs in which there will be shortages soon. If that is the case, they should apply for their own visas. Oh yeah, and those small businesses these kinship immigrants open? He forgot to mention that the only jobs they create are for the other family members in the migration chain, many of whom have arrived on tourist visas but never go home.

BARBARA DELORY

Rosemead

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Hing asserts that the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that family unity is the “foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” It says no such thing. The preamble declares that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” There is a world of difference between the family unity championed by Hing and the declaration’s “members of the human family.”

The declaration seems to seek protection for each individual. Hing is trying to lump people together into groups.

Hing is identified by The Times as a professor of law at a publicly financed school. One shudders to think that perhaps his students are being taught to misrepresent the law. It is better to have a weak argument than to strengthen it with a falsehood.

STEVEN T. FLOWERS

West Hollywood

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Hing has it exactly backward. There is no inherent right of reunification. We have every right, and indeed the responsibility, to choose immigrants on the basis of what they can do for us, not what we can do for them. The one thing that I have heard no one say in the immigration debate is this: Let’s have an environmental impact study done on the effect that 12 million (or 20 million or whatever the real number is) people will have on our country. Every industry, every government project, almost anything that happens now has to supply this report. Any new immigration reform bill being discussed needs to do this.

RICHARD BERGER

Los Angeles