LETTERS: Iran talk, criminalization, fear-evoking leadership

Drop the tough talk about Iran

Stop it, President Donald Trump, from telling me how bad Iran is.

Instead, get along with Iran, drop the sanctions and work together for peace in the Near East and Middle East.

Such daily hate from the president, now Iran. Tomorrow… ?

Eugene “Gene” Novogrodsky, Brownsville

 

The public cost of criminalization

The Monitor editorial for July 22 got it right: The criminalization of immigration (with detention costing $134 per day for adults and $319 per person per day for families) is going to hit American taxpayers hard. As the courts struggle to deal with a caseload of 800,000 and growing, mass incarceration of immigrant families will continue for years while refugees await their day in court.

Prolonged incarceration will cause untold harm to innocent refuge families. And it will cost us dearly.

On the other hand, as The Monitor points out, alternative means of supervision (by social advocacy groups or tracking via ankle bracelets) produce a very satisfactory compliance with court dates. Cost of these programs? It’s $4.50 per day.

Anyone can see that $4.50 per day is more affordable than $134 to $319 per day. Less obvious is another advantage of humane alternatives to incarceration, i.e. that they help to stem the flow of taxpayer dollars to a metastasizing-prisons-for-profit industry, which is undermining the social fabric of our republic.

Possibly, thanks to intelligent statements such as this Monitor editorial, the public may begin to think about the public cost of our current national obsession with criminalization and mass incarceration.

Terry Church, McAllen

 

Today’s leadership evokes fears of past atrocities

Nazi concentration camps started with simply rounding up people like animals and incarcerating them, and keeping them hungry and cold until the government decided to exterminate them. It was a simple 1-2-3 action done by human beings in charge of government, so that it is my view that Americans who are in government, and who are racist and have a sense of white superiority, may one day decide to exterminate Latino immigrants as easy as 1-2-3.

Trump and many of the government officials in our government have a sense of white superiority, and their words and body language tells me how full of hate they are toward the Latino and black and Muslim population, and I happen to be a 70-year-old Latino man who can identify a racist as easy as 1-2-3 since I got to experience racist hatred toward me for simply not being Anglo and for speaking Spanish.

I now speak Spanish more then ever even to white Anglos, but I am always willing to translate to English if they do not understand.

Jaime Gonzalez, McAllen