Submitted by John Spencer Yantiss, Sep 1, 2008 05:09

As Mr. Keating said in the first sentence of his comments, I can understand your frustration with our immigration laws, but from there you fall into the same trap as most Democrats and other liberals. You say, "But even if they were competing for jobs, since when is that un-American?" That is an invalid reference in your reasoning. The issue is not competition, or jobs, but how those people got here. To enter this country illegally is a crime. Apparently you do not wish to restrict immigration, just open wide the doors to any and all; that is the end result of your reasoning. You have no way of knowing whether one or more--perhaps even many--of those "rounded up" (even your terminology implies the same kind of tactics used by Nazis and "communists") are or were criminals in the countries of origin. Probably they were not, and are not criminals, but we have no way of knowing, because they are undocumented. That is the whole point of immigration being a systematic process, and not wholesale migration.

If you wish to deplore our immigration policies, fine, so do I, but we cannot allow illegal aliens to continue to enter the country, enter the workforce, enter the social network of services (a fact which you imply would not happen--as if it had not already done so), enter our already overwhelmed educational systems, etc., etc., etc. In reality, 595 is not even a drop in the bucket of the number of illegal aliens already in this country, indeed in the number of those who enter daily! Using locution such as, "What have we come to as a nation," you conjure visions of totalitarian states, dictatorships, repressive societies, and the like. This editorial could easily have been an extract from an Obama speech, or a Pelosi address to Congress.

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