Thread: UT-OPINION: Immigrant scapegoats

Immigrant scapegoats

The Salt Lake Tribune
Public Forum Letter
Updated: 05/28/2009 07:33:50 AM MDT

This corrects and responds to "We must enforce Utah's new immigration law" (Opinion, May 13), by Rep. Chris Herrod, R-Provo:

Congress sets immigration quotas; federal agencies enforce immigration laws; resources to conduct meaningful background checks are controlled by the Utah Legislature. Undocumented immigrants control none of these processes.

The number of jobs taken from citizens by undocumented immigrants is unknown. For example, U.S. citizens reportedly took the jobs opened up by the Swift plant raid; not so in Postville, Iowa.

There have not been six amnesties since 1986. Lawsuits from the 1986 amnesty were settled in 2000; Herrod counts that as a separate amnesty. Central Americans who fled war-torn homelands and Haitians received an amnesty limited to only them. The other three "amnesties" weren't amnesties. Congress allowed some who qualified under existing law (e.g., family members) to complete their final immigration step here instead of in their home country.

The Heritage Foundation's debatable estimate of the cost of amnesty ignores the cost of not granting one. Illegal immigration's worst victims are the frequently scapegoated immigrants themselves.

Blaming undocumented immigrants for problems they haven't caused encourages some to treat them disrespectfully.

Mike Suarez

Moab

http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_12468064

well he sure skewed that to illegals advantage...so illegal family members is not counted as an amnesty, with idiots like this kind of common sense it is no wonder our states are in so much trouble.