Jon Buss’s recent xenophobic screed was so full of falsehoods and bile that it would make Goebbels blush (“Make blue states put their money where their mouths are for immigration,” published April 24). I’m assuming that anyone who wishes suffering on his home state simply to spite the Democrats is beyond help. I thought I would correct a few of his points on the off chance that anyone takes his nonsense at face value.
Jon makes the claim that anyone who crosses the border is immediately offered a smorgasbord of free services. Nothing could be further from the truth. A federal judge recently ordered Customs and Border Patrol to provide basic services for children living in government-run camps along the border after CBP went to court and argued that they weren’t obligated to provide food, shelter, toilets or basic medical care. NYC will shelter childless adult migrants for 30 days. Chicago will shelter all migrants for 60 days.
Jon gets on a real high horse about the liberal aversion to calling every migrant “illegal”. Asylum seekers are typically permitted to remain in the country while their asylum claim is being considered and are therefore not “illegal”. Jon uses the term “wordsmithing” to describe something most people would call “the law”. He also seems to be unaware that asylum exists in other countries. If Trump returns to power and becomes a dictator as he himself has promised, “leftist Hollywood idiots” and anyone else who feared persecution would be free to seek asylum in Canada.
Jon seems to believe that immigrants are more criminally inclined. There are 6.2 million people on the Homeland Security “non-detained docket”, a list of people who are allowed to remain in the U.S. while their immigration case is being considered or who have had their deportation deferred. The percentage of people on that list with criminal convictions or pending charges is ten percent. In the general population that number is thirty percent.
After spinning tales of extravagant handouts, liberal “wordsmithing” and immigrants coming to murder your loved ones, Jon invokes the terrifying specters of terrorists and Chinese people in order to scare readers into siding with him. While there has been an increase of people on the terrorism watch list coming through the border, the number is tiny compared to the total number of migrants. Border officers found that out of the two million migrants who crossed the border in 2022-2023, 169 had names matching those on the watch list. Many of these individuals were affiliated with the Colombian group FARC and not an Islamic terrorism cell. The hijackers who perpetrated our worst terrorist attack arrived in the US on student, business and tourist visas rather than crossing the Sonoran Desert. The man who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing was born in New York.
Conservatives frequently remind everyone that “feelings are not facts”. Jon’s hostile feelings do not change the basic facts of immigration.
Paul Butler
Enumclaw
