For those of you who sometimes tell me you aren’t sure what to say in your letters to the editor…

Outstanding letter to the editor from my pal Dave Gorak

Letter to the editor published in Chicago’s Daily Herald

Your Jan. 3 story, “Immigration reform needed to avert violence, speaker says,” is indeed disturbing, but not for the reason one would suspect. What’s so troubling about this piece is that Rachel Heuman was permitted to go unchallenged to paint as racist and anti-immigrant everyone, including me, who supports strict enforcement of our immigration laws and opposes amnesty for illegal aliens. By no stretch of the imagination can you accept the Shenandoah, Pa., crime she referred to as evidence to support her outrageous statements.

Her rhetoric is very common among the many fringe groups that attempt to demonize and silence opposition to their own agendas. Was Barbara Jordan, the first black woman from the Deep South to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and who later chaired President Clinton’s immigration reform commission, a “racist” when she said illegals must be deported if our immigration policy is to have any credibility? Was she using “distorted facts” when she advocated for protecting the most vulnerable Americans from a flood of foreign workers?

It’s also ironic that Heuman, who says she participated in the United Farm Workers’ (UFW) grape and lettuce boycotts of the 1970s, would be advocating for illegal aliens when the UFW’s founder Cesar Chavez condemned illegal immigration because it undermined his struggle to improve the lives of agricultural workers here legally.

In his 1979 testimony before a U.S. Senate subcommittee, Chavez said: “. . . when the farm workers strike and their strike is successful, the employers go to Mexico and have unlimited, unrestricted use of illegal alien strikebreakers to break the strike. And, for over 30 years, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has looked the other way and assisted in the strikebreaking. I do not remember one single instance in 30 years where the Immigration Service has removed strikebreakers. … The employers use professional smugglers to recruit and transport human contraband across the Mexican border for the specific act of strikebreaking.”

Shame on Ms. Heuman for using fear and falsehoods when the facts – and common sense – are what’s needed to end our federally manufactured immigration crisis.

Dave Gorak

Executive Director

Midwest Coalition to Reduce Immigration

LaValle, Wis.
HERE