MAILBAG:Employers need punishment for hiring illegals

I am a member of Newport Beach’s Coastal/Bay Citizens Advisory committee.

Hooray for Judge Gray! He rightly proposes a comprehensive three-step plan (“Immigration system is ineffective,” July 22) that would truly reform immigration in our country.

First, the federal government (which is constitutionally responsible for our national borders anyway) would pay for governmental costs of illegal immigration. Second, we institute a sensible and enforceable temporary worker system to help satisfy our labor needs. Third, we enforce strict sanctions against employers who break the law by hiring workers who are here illegally.

Such a plan makes so much sense I wonder why we never hear it from our elected leaders. Our Costa Mesa troika of Bever, Leece and Mansoor trumpet how their plan to put an immigration official in the jail is working so well because hundreds of persons who are here illegally have been held for deportation.

But have you ever heard any of these council members say anything about how the employers of all these arrested persons have also been arrested?

To coin a phrase: “What part of illegal don’t they understand?”

So long as these three officials take no steps to enforce existing law against employers, their railing against illegal immigration remains nothing more than political opportunism.

STEVEN J. DZIDA