Our local paper, The Burlington, NC Times-News, has been openly supportive of illegal aliens. They slam the 287(g) program and Sheriff Terry Johnson every chance they get by slanted articles or small inferences in the way they report the facts. I don't respond to everything they publish, but this week I've once again had enough. A letter to the editor in yesterdays paper, July 23, 2009, got under my skin and I fired off my own letter to the editor. That's what we have to do. Please people, write your paper, your elected officials and oppose immigration reform. Don't stop. Just because the number of persons crossing the border are down right now (because our economy stinks) does not mean it will stay that way. Don't let them sneak by an immigration reform package.
Here's the letter that got me all fired up:
Immigration reform is now at the urgent stage
Thank you for the June 12 guest column by Janyth Fredrickson, "Making the leap to legal and right."
When we see or experience an injustice, we think "America won't let something like that happen again," yet as the author mentions immigrants are being dehumanized in our nation just as African Americans were during the Jim Crow Era (and often still are). Immigrants come to the "land of dreams" seeking a better life and offering the best of themselves; however, this nation is receiving them with a hostile environment. Our society mistreats immigrants: willingly profiting from their labor, yet abusing and exploiting them. This country is known for giving a hand to nations in need but is not doing anything to help the undocumented community within its borders. These communities need help to get out of the shadows and to be heard.
A comprehensive immigration reform has been needed for years and it is urgent now! We cannot wait for a higher wall or increased border security because that won't fix the problem. There is currently no way to achieve legal status for the approximately 12 million undocumented residents of the United States. We need a reform that will ensure family unity, a path to legalization, a reform that will address the future flow of immigrants and that will fix the backlog of cases. Immigrants contribute to the economic and cultural growth of this nation and only want a better future for their families just like any other American parent.
Our challenge is to ensure that our laws reflect our morals and the best of who we are.
Yazmin Garcia
Burlington, NC
Yazmin refers to a guest column in the Times-News on June 12, 2009 by Janyth Fredrickson. It actually appeared on the 13th, not the 12th. Fredrickson retired from Alamance Community College in 2008, where she was the college's executive vice president. I've included her letter below. It's just as bad as Yazmin's letter. I wonder how you get to be a guest columnist... they've never approached me! I guess that's because I'm an American for Americans and for this country (or at least what's left of it).
Here's the guest column from the June 13th, 2009 edition of the Burlington Times-News:
Immigration: Making the Leap to Legal and Right
By Janyth Fredrickson
Growing up in the 1950s, I remember the strange feeling of entering a restaurant with my parents that had a "whites only" sign in the front window. That same sign appeared at the dime store on the drinking fountain and the restroom doors.
Since my parents didn't talk about segregation at home, I had no idea how it impacted the lives of the few African-Americans living in my small Texas town. But years later, I met two women from there and learned that their challenges went far beyond exclusion from the local diner. Just to attend high school, they had to travel 70 miles each way to the nearest "blacks only" school while mine was in walking distance.
That was legal at the time, but it wasn't right.
I believe every generation responds to challenges in ways that society will later look back on and judge with a moral compass. One of our challenges today, of course, is immigration. We won't "solve" it any more than we "solve" education or national security. People have always moved for a variety of reasons, mostly economic, and always will. Rather, we seek to manage it wisely, and the way we do that tells a lot about who we are and what we value.
Of course we can't open our borders to everyone who wants to live here, but we can - and must - enact comprehensive immigration reform at the national level that addresses wrongs that exist today. While our maze of immigration regulations works for some, it prevents other worthy immigrants from ever gaining legal status. Instead, they face a grab-bag of local, state, and national ordinances that don't reflect the American values I cherish.
Here are a few examples of what some immigrants in Alamance County face.
Undocumented people can't get drivers licenses in North Carolina. So when a father goes to the grocery store to buy milk or eggs, he risks being stopped for a license check, apprehended, led away in handcuffs, found guilty of anything from driving without a license to security theft, jailed without bail somewhere in the nation for days or months, and deported without ever being allowed to return to his U.S. home. He has no rights to a lawyer unless his family can piece together many thousands of dollars for legal fees, an impossibly high barrier for most.
Undocumented immigrants are perfect victims for crimes. They aren't covered by workplace safety laws or minimum wage laws or child labor laws. If he is robbed, if she is raped or abused, the response after reporting the crime could be immediate arrest, imprisonment, and eventual deportation. Small wonder why some crimes go unreported.
But to me, the most compelling reason for comprehensive immigration reform is the children caught in the crossfire.
Consider 9-year-old Benjamin, an American citizen, who watched his dad taken from the house in handcuffs early one morning before school, not to return. His father was the lay minister of a small North Carolina church and had lived here for 20 years with a clean record. The youngster now sees law enforcement officers as bad men who take away parents. That isn't healthy for him or for our community.
Or the three young children whose dad pulled into a parking lot when his car overheated and was taken away in handcuffs after an officer stopped to see what was going on and questioned his documents. Without their father, the children - all American citizens - have begun to fall behind with schoolwork and experience hunger for the first time, since he was the family's sole support.
Or 16-year-old Ana, considered an "illegal alien" or "criminal" by some because she was brought to North Carolina without papers as a baby by parents hoping to give her a better life than she would have had in their dirt-poor village in Salvador. Soon she will graduate from a local high school - or not - and face a grim future. Legally, she cannot drive or work or have a social security card or get financial aid to continue her education, as her American friends are doing. Since this is the only home she knows, she will stay here and live in the shadows. If she is caught, she will be deported to a country she doesn't know.
I think of Ana and the dozens of other children brought to Alamance County as babies without proper documentation as "throw-away kids." I look into her face and don't know what to say. I want to shout, "This is not how America treats children." But it is how we're treating kids without proper papers.
It's legal but it isn't right.
Hopefully for the children, our representatives in Washington will act soon on comprehensive immigration reform. Until they do, it's our interactions with them and their parents that define what our values are, just as they did for my parents' generation during the time of segregation.
Janyth Fredrickson lives in Burlington.
And finally, here's my letter to the editor which I wrote last night:
This is in response to Yazmin Garcia's letter on Immigration Reform.
Stop with the hostile environment guilt trip. Americans welcome immigrants - LEGAL immigrants.
Illegal immigrants are criminals and SHOULD face a hostile environment. This is analogous to a group of thieves picketing banks because they lock their doors and the close the vault at night. In fact, the whole argument for making a path for criminals to become legal citizens is just ludicrous. It's the same as saying there are so many thieves robbing the bank that we may as well just let them have everything in the vault.
Yes it's heartbreaking to deport members of a family, but that's the price of breaking the law. If I decide to murder someone, I'll go to jail. Will the judge and jury overlook my crime and let me go free because I have a family - no. No one with any common sense would, yet we're asked to this very same thing because illegal immigrants and their supporters want family unity for criminals. There is a way for illegal immigrants to get legal status: return to your home country and apply for legal entry into this country.
Drawing a comparison between illegal immigrants and African Americans during the Jim Crow Era is flawed: a large portion of the ancestors of African Americans came to this country against their will chained to the ships that brought them. They didn't come to this "land of dreams" willingly, illegally, seeking a better life.
Illegal immigrants place a huge drain on our economy, not contribute to it. Our schools have been made to accommodate children who do not speak English, at the expense other classes and programs. Our medical system is strained treating people who are in this country illegally. Legitimate businesses have had to close, or are near closing because illegal immigrants operate businesses that do not pay taxes nor have to deal with the same rules and regulations a legal business does. Illegal immigrants get food stamps, welfare, and free medical care.
The urgency is that our laws need to be changed to protect American citizens, not illegal immigrants (criminals).
Fred Black
Burlington, NC
I GET SO TIRED of people like Yazmin Garcia and Janyth Fredrickson pulling out the sad children stories to support making criminals citizens. Yes, it is sad. But exactly whose fault is it and where does the blame lie? In all the examples Fredrickson gives, the fault and the blame is on the parents of the children, not with America, or with our laws.
Wait. There is fault and blame with Americans for this situation. The fault and blame lies with our elected officials who have allowed our country to be overrun with illegal immigrants - criminals. Miss Fredrickson, when you look into the sad eyes of a child of an illegal immigrant who is being deported, or whose mother or father was just escorted away in handcuffs, you should not be angry at the law enforcement officer, you should not be angry at Americans for the way you're saying we horribly treat these people, you should instead be angry at the limp wristed, liberal, anti-American politicians who let the situation get to this point.
Yazmin, Janyth, and others like them need to focus their anger and frustration at the criminal parents for coming into this country illegally and at the politicians who do nothing but make the situation worse. Not try to change our laws to allow criminals to become citizens.
Write, write, write, and then write again. Write your elected officials and newspapers. Tell them NO to immigration reform and YES to securing our nation again. Here's the link to find out the web sites and contact for your elected officials: www.USA.gov.
Tell them YES to stop making every baby born on American soil an American citizen - require that at least one of their parents be an American citizen before citizenship is granted. If both parents are American citizens, then yes, the child is automatically an American. If only one parent is a citizen, then that child should not be a citizen until 5 consecutive years of residency in USA. I'll bet that, along with our poor economy, will make illegal boarder crossing less appealing.
Here's the link to find out the web sites and contact for your elected officials: www.USA.gov.
Until next time,
Fred
P.S. Only in America do people want to make it legal to be illegal...
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Posted by Fred (aka Recoil) on July 24, 2009
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