This is the letter I sent to The Examiner on Ambrose’s article "Too many jobs go to illegal immigrants" of March 18. In the article, the calumnist (Yes, the calumnist) calls to scapegoat immigrants for the weakness of the labor market. Contributing to the knowledge of the human genome, Ambrose has also discovered the gene of poverty and guess what: Illegal immigrants have it. New milestone since Lou Dobbs discovered they were introducing leprosy.
I wanted to share this letter with you in case The Examiner does not publish it.
Dear Sirs:
To Jay:
There is nothing like scapegoating a minority of illegal immigrants, just 5% of the population, in times of economic anguish to feel good!
Your position is not impossible, but prohibitively expensive, as enforcing the Prohibition was. The work of Douglass Massey for the Cato Institute "Backfire at the Border" has shown how futile several operations at the border have been during 1980-2002, concluding that, without legalization, enforcement cannot stop illegal immigration. Changing the immigration bias in favor of education, though better, is still naïve. The PhDs of the world will not come to clean our toilettes. To be efficient, immigration numbers have to reflect the labor demand. Your position is also immoral because it advocates for a system of castes in which more than 90% of the resident visas are awarded based on family or country of origin. No tests, education level or commitment are considered. It is also racist because it is not a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants are non-white. No surprisingly you say those immigrants, guilty of having been born in the wrong family or country, "bring poverty" as if it were a disease or a genetic condition, and advocate depriving them of education and driver’s licenses, tools to escape poverty. You don’t seem to notice that you had said that they are "frequently exploited," what means that the taxable income of somebody else is increased due to their work, before attacking them for "the contribution they make in taxes". Actually, the right way to evaluate their impact is considering not the net taxes they pay but the effect of their presence on the net taxes paid by the whole population. At least the nativists of 1924 were more sincere about their motivations.
Reading you,
Alfredo M. Bravo de Rueda E.
Gaithersburg, Maryland