Illegal Immigrants

Chairman Jay Gowdy, House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security
Chairman Chuck Schumer, Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and Border Security
Sen. Jeff Sessions (AL)
Sen. Ted Cruz (TX)
Sen. Marco Rubio (FL)

Dear Rep. Gowdy and Senators Schumer, sessions, Cruz and Rubio,

 We are a nation of laws. That is, we have a system of making laws and enforcing them. If Congress does not make laws and the Justice Department does not enforce them, we would be a lawless society, wherein the people would operate in an unruly, disruptive, anarchic and disorderly manner. Our society would then be equivalent to those of most of central Africa and the Banana Republics. We already know the deficiencies of those operations.
 The Washington Times recently reported on a speech that Pres. Obama was giving in San Francisco. During the speech, members of the audience criticized Pres. Obama for not doing more to allow citizenship for some millions of illegal immigrants. In effect, the audience was asking the President to further ignore US immigration laws.
 I say further ignore US immigration laws,.because the President has already weakened the immigration law by two Executive Orders. The first granted work permits and authorization to remain in the U.S. without fear of deportation.to young illegal immigrants who were brought to the country as children. The second was to allow illegal immigrant relatives of U.S. troops and veterans to apply for “parole in place,” which would also exempt them from being removed from the country.
 The incongruity of the situation is that the San Francisco audience is asking for more law breakage from a President who has already unilaterally changed the law. In effect, the President has broken an additional law by use of an Executive Order to change an existing law.
 This is not to say that the existence of a few million illegal immigrants in the US is unimportant or that it is a simple matter to correct the situation, which has been allowed to develop because the Justice Department did not do its job of stopping illegal immigrant entry.
 However as indicated previously, we are a country of laws based primarily on English law, which operates on the principle that a lawbreaker must be punished. It appears to be only a recent conversion in US society that a lawbreaker should be given some benefit. This is now evident in living conditions of many prisons being that of country clubs, giving special health treatment to drug addicts, and now the possibility of amnesty for illegal immigrants, with its associated benefits of food stamps, special tuition rates in universities, etc.
 I appeal to you in the handling of immigration problems to revert to the basic concepts of English law; namely, some punishment must be involved. Merely sending illegal immigrants back to their home countries is not what I call punishment. Undesirables should be sent back. Many others can be allowed to remain under penalized conditions, such as periods of unpaid social work in local governments which might include both office work and manual labor.