Our view: Tsongas needs sharper focus on district
Eagle-Tribune

Nov 21, 2007
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You don't have to go to Texas to learn about the problems posed by illegal immigration. You can do that right here in the Merrimack Valley.

Newly elected Congressman Niki Tsongas, D-Lowell, traveled this week with a group of Democratic representatives to El Paso, Texas, and Nogales, Ariz., to study the illegal immigration problem and the challenges facing Border Patrol agents. She would have done better by returning to her district's larger cities to meet with law enforcement officials in Lawrence, Lowell and Haverhill. They could tell her what tools they need in congressional legislation to get the illegal immigration problem here under control.

The immigration problems of the Southwest and the Northeast are vastly different.

In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, Mexicans and natives of Central America walk across a sparsely guarded border in search of jobs in the agricultural and service trades. Controlling the flow of illegal immigration requires a combination of fencing and manpower to cover a border stretching more than a thousand miles.

Here, illegal immigrants from the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean countries make their way into Puerto Rico or other U.S. territories, then board commercial flights for the Northeast. Controlling this illegal immigration requires tougher airport security and identity checks.

These illegal immigrants - there are an estimated 150,000 of them in Massachusetts - are not "doing the work Americans don't want to do." They're taking manufacturing jobs from Americans and legal immigrants. Unscrupulous factory owners, who themselves are breaking the law, hire illegals for a fraction of what they'd pay legal workers.

Some of those illegal immigrants who do not work take advantage of liberal welfare policies or engage in criminal activity. In the past 18 months in Lawrence, illegal immigrants have been arrested for drug crimes, shootings, auto insurance fraud and the production of fraudulent identification papers.

Bay State leaders cannot come up with consistent policies on handling illegal immigration. Reduced state college tuition for illegals was proposed, then wisely rejected. Former Gov. Mitt Romney authorized state police to arrest illegal immigrants. That policy was rescinded by Gov. Deval Patrick. The arrest of 350 illegal immigrants at the Michael Bianco Inc. leather goods factory in New Bedford turned into a fiasco, when attempts to deport them sparked what advocates dubbed a "humanitarian crisis."


One criticism we had of Tsongas during her campaign was that she seemed more interested in a national spotlight than affairs here in the Merrimack Valley. Her trip to Texas to study illegal immigration reinforces that critique. As a freshman congressman, Tsongas should pay closer attention to her own district, than to matters halfway across the country.

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