It seems that Nancy Butler felt very obligated to call out what she deemed to be Mr. Buss’s non factual letter to the editor a few weeks ago (“Vast majority of illegal immigrants are beneficial to the U.S.”, published July 10). The part I find humorous is that Mrs. Butler didn’t seem to include very many facts in her opinion piece shredding what she said was Mr. Buss’s lack of understanding about our current immigration system.

It’s interesting that she finds it evil to have secure borders with proper vetting in place before allowing unknown individuals to enter our country. In a May 6th article in the New York Post Executive Editor Joe Kahn was quoted as saying in response to criticism that his paper had been insufficiently critical of Donald Trump that “It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have,” Kahn said, “At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second.”

Now it could be argued that different polls might place it in a different order but I think it’s fair to say it’s probably in the top three. That tells me that it is a concern to quite a few United States citizens. This is where those people would appreciate not being called out as repulsive, immoral, absurd, weak and downright evil. You see we think that securing our borders and keeping track of who enters our country (legally) is highly moral and responsible to those living here. According to the Center for Immigration, the foreign-born population grew by 5.1 million in the last two years. The largest two-year increase ever recorded. Given our current national debt, our overtaxed social services and our support for two wars I’m not sure if that’s a sustainable trajectory.

Mrs. Butler said “a policy is not worth enacting nor morally tolerable merely because it would reduce crime.” I feel like the families of Laken Riley, 22, Rachel Morin, 38, Jocelyn Nunganay, 12, Lisbeth Gutierrez-Salazar, 32, Juan Gutierrez-Salazar, 10 and Julian Cardona-Gutierrez, 7 — just to name a few — might feel differently.

This is also where we don’t want to be called racist or xenophobic because that seems to be what happens next. Obviously most immigrants coming into this country don’t commit violent crimes but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have and enforce immigration laws. This country is a beautiful example to the world of cultural inclusion. I believe we will continue to be that. Let’s do that responsibly.

And I think it’s worth noting that in my response to Mrs. Butler’s letter I did not call her names or disparage her character as she did to Mr. Buss.

Ailene Armstrong

Enumclaw