American jobs and foreign workers

Re “Bush Links Immigration

Crackdown, Worker Plan,” Nov. 29

A guest-worker program versus amnesty. Both reward illegal aliens for breaking the law. Both encourage more illegal immigration. Both keep lowering wages for American citizens. Both benefit business, while the taxpayer picks up the tab for healthcare, education, etc. Both are a joke.

Let’s enforce our present immigration laws. Let’s enforce employer sanctions. If illegal aliens can’t find a job, most will deport themselves.

TERRY MAXSON

West Covina

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What the president’s guest-worker plan seems to do is maintain, first and foremost, a supply of cheap labor for farms and businesses across the nation. Second, it seems to reward lawbreakers for outmaneuvering the Border Patrol to begin with. Third, it offers little or nothing to help communities that have to accept high rates of population growth because of immigration.

If 11 million people in this country were breaking some other law, they would have been dealt with long ago.

It is the supply of jobs here that remains the attraction for illegal immigrants, even though it is against the law here to hire an illegal immigrant.

As long as wages here remain several times those in Mexico and elsewhere, and as long as illegal workers can find jobs once they arrive here, they will come, no matter what is done at the nearly 2,000-mile-long border.

GARY PETERS

Professor of Geography and

Planning, Cal State Chico

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Am I the only one who finds our president saying that we need immigrants to take jobs that Americans won’t do offensive?

MIKE AMBROSE

Thousand Oaks