Dear Editor: Reader Mary Geraghty (Feb. 10) writes: “His (Trump’s) vitriol towards these unfortunates violates one of this nation’s greatest values to welcome the poor and the hungry . . .”
Times have changed drastically since those words were written. May I point out that the United States welcomes more legal immigrants annually that any other nation on earth.
May I also say that we are a nation of laws and our immigration laws have not, unfortunately, been correctly enforced for decades now. As result we have anywhere from 14 to 20 million illegal immigrants now living here, many receiving free education, healthcare, housing, etc., etc. They are also allowed to openly protest for more benefits and to demand citizenship and the right to vote (California now allows them to have drivers’ licenses and the right to vote in local elections).
I would defy anyone to name one other nation on this planet where such insanity is permitted.
And remember it was President Obama (not Trump) who first designated the six Mideast nations whose citizens should not be allowed to enter the U.S.
With millions of Americans on welfare and food stamps, any immigrant should be able to contribute to our economy, not join those already requiring assistance. If demanding compliance with laws of the land makes me a racist or poor Catholic then things have really changed in this nation, and not for the better.
JOE LEAHY
Breezy Point
Dear Editor: In what seems to be a pursuit of easy grace, Mary Geraghty uses Scriptural references about welcoming the stranger to support her insistence that we conflate illegal and legal immigration and welcome both equally.
In the event that she didn’t mean to include criminals in her welcome-the-stranger challenge, she and others, who trumpet the welcoming mantra, might discover an identical policy to that of her despised Donald Trump once the self-gratifying assumptions are abandoned. This, of course, would also require discarding jaw-dropping fantasies about there being some sort of “extreme vetting” in immigration practices, an impossible feat to perform on those whose entry is not even monitored and coming from countries with governments so corrupt they don’t even have controls of emigration other than what bribery allows. Their governments were well described by the president as corrupt, although not with the coarseness our unprincipled, corrupt, culturally tyrannical, and morally decadent news media attributed to him.
Vetting can be such a comically inept process. Our own government has had its immigration bureaucrats caught in episodes of sloppily rubberstamping visa extensions to the same deceased terrorists who executed the 9/11 attacks years after our national tragedy.
Obviously Christians have direct, personal, and self-sacrificing obligations towards all the world’s downtrodden that require we actually get off the couch, but Scripture should never be used to distort the thousands of distinct realities involved in individual cases of human migration.
PAUL KREIG
Bayside