Letter: Farms, businesses should recruit welfare recipients

Thursday, Aug. 16, 2001 | 9:15 a.m.

Regarding President Bush's immigration policy:

The situation is out of control. "Underprivileged workers" illegally transmigrate the United States, feasting on a plethora of taxpayer-funded social services, free health benefits and complete pediatric care.

Meanwhile, our government would have no compunction to confiscate my family's home and property for the purpose of "redistributing" the financial proceeds from such a seizure in order to help fund and provide these services.

I suggest that a better policy would be for farms and businesses to recruit employees from the vast internal well of healthy welfare recipients and pay them a decent cost-of-living wage. True, we would all then have to pay another 25 cents for our hamburgers or pound of produce; but then again, we would lower our overall tax payments -- a pretty fair trade-off for our citizens.

For the record, my foreign-born wife, a highly qualified medical professional, has endured an exhausting, humiliating and expensive two years of bureaucratic requirements -- a period of time during which she wasn't allowed by our government to visit her family -- in order to legally comply with the application process to receive a privileged approval to reside in our country.

Warning: Unless we begin now to implement essential and prudent systematic internal changes, one huge bump is going to upset the whole economic cart in our country. What will we do for our "labor needs" then?

D. BRUCE WESTCOTT

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