MAILBAG:

I disagree with the statement made in the Mailbag section Nov. 19 (“Let’s hope Cook challenges Rohrabacher again”) stating that our representative to the House of Representative is an “empty suit.” Quite the contrary, I think Rohrabacher is the best of the 535 members of Congress.

For one thing he is highly supportive of the aerospace industry that is such a large part of his constituency but even more impressive, he is the biggest champion of the greatest threat to this country, even a greater threat than Islamo Fascism — illegal immigration.

Of all the states, California suffers the most from illegal immigration. Twenty-nine percent of all prison inmates in the nation are illegal immigrants. Each prisoner costs the state $43,287 per year or three quarters of a billion dollars annually (source: Jim Silva mailer). There is also the cost of lost income and social security taxes by working under the table, billions of dollars of untaxed wages being sent back to Mexico instead of being spent here in California where we can collect local and state sales tax, and treating illegal immigrants that show up in the emergency room of hospitals for which these hospitals are not reimbursed forcing many of them to close.

If all the lost money from illegal immigration went to the state, the California budget deficit crises would be solved, there would be more money for our schools and infrastructure and the bad economy would be in better shape.

Rohrabacher fought vigorously to stop the Amnesty Bill that Sens. Ted Kennedy and John McCain and even President Bush tried to pass, a bill that would have given legal status to the 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants, essentially allowing them to leap frog all the people waiting in line to enter the country legally.

In closing, I DO agree with the author’s statement that we have empty suits in Congress. But it isn’t Rohrabacher, rather it is our two representatives to the U.S. Senate.

Jim Beeler