Immigration Levels Should Be Cut

Re “Aid Gap for Immigrants,” editorial, June 17: No more stories on the tremendous needs of immigrants and why taxpayers must cough up more and more money for them. Citizens strongly agree on the need to slash immigration to more traditional levels, and we need to block the needy, dependent would-be immigrants from coming here in the first place. Those left-wingers who work at The Times and want more massive legal and illegal immigration have what I call a “brain gap.”

Larry Brown

Riverside

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Re “U.S. and Mexico Outline Plan for Border Safety,” June 16: While the U.S. and Mexico confer about “border safety,” an oxymoron given the hellish place to which the undocumented foot traffic has been redirected, the Bush administration is going ahead with plans to funnel migrants into ever-more-remote stretches of desert. No amount of search and rescue can offset that kind of border enforcement.

The upshot is that hundreds of migrants will keep on dying each year as a result of a strategy that was never meant to seal the border but just make it look under control. The prospects for this summer, let alone the next four years, are appalling. Most migrants will go on dying in ones, twos and threes.

Claudia E. Smith

Border Project Director

California Rural Legal

Assistance Foundation

Oceanside

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Your almost daily teary, hand-wringing articles about the plight of immigrants crossing the border are getting irritating. You seem to forget that these people are engaging in an illegal act abetted by the Mexican government. Southern California is already overpopulated; we don’t need more people, legal or illegal.

Carol Thompson

Anaheim Hills