Problems of Illegal Immigrants and ‘Chaos at the Border’

Of course there’s chaos at the border; it could have been anticipated when senseless, illegal and punitive measures were imposed upon defenseless refugees, and when smart Quakers and others were determined to mitigate the damage, to care for these people, as people.

The legal restraints which the Reagan Administration violated in its punitive pursuit were monumental, even global, including the Refugee and Treaty Act of 1980, but the chink through which the helpers drove a wedge was very local.

They successfully asserted that every refugee has a legal right to apply for asylum, and then, under a court order, openly brought them through the fence and took them to the nearest INS office--which, of course, was swamped. So now there is nothing to prevent these helpers, none of whom is stupid, from taking busloads of these refugees, including their pitiful children, to Washington where there are thousands of INS workers with little else to do. A federal case?

This is not merely a border condition to be cured and dismissed by the rest of us, it is the last stage and end product of a most shameful chapter of the Reagan Administration, every bit as shameful in unleashed racial hatred as our treatment of the American Indians 100 years ago.

Thus the chaos at the border is a fair sample of our American chaos; the face of brotherhood is matched by, or is also, the face of hate.

DAVID ALAN MUNRO

Laguna Beach