Immigration Legislation

Thank you for your excellent editorial. Although I believe that several of the bills introduced in the Legislature were ill-conceived, misguided and self-serving, your editorial performed two valuable and constructive purposes: You not only called attention to certain specific pieces of legislation that might be considered acceptable and that probably deserve to pass, you also called attention to important criteria which should be used in formulating and considering any such legislation for passage.

Rather than discuss the obvious deficiencies of some of the worst bills offered this year, I would just point out that these bills tend to be counterproductive, obfuscatory and inimical to responsible governance. They tend to be counterproductive because they run up administrative costs and impose heavy regulatory burdens without ever really achieving their intended objectives. They tend to be obfuscatory because they offer the illusion of having finally dealt with some difficult and complex problem, thereby diverting the public’s attention away from genuinely serious solutions which directly address the problem in a careful and responsible way. They tend to be inimical to responsible governance because when they fail to deal with the real problem, the public tends to become disillusioned with any attempt to come to grips with the problem and has neither the heart nor the will to do what should have been done in the first place.

GEORGE J. LUJAN

Los Angeles