Letters : INS Raids on Illegal Aliens

It is disturbing to read these recurring stories of casual brutality and stupidity by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service as it pursues illegal Mexican immigrants in our midst. You and your reporters are to be congratulated for bringing them to public attention. The most recent incident is the arrest of that 13-year-old boy on his way to school.

While Reagan’s Border Patrol roams the countryside doing their duty, I think that we should consider that it is very possible that yet, in this century, America will be begging Mexico to send its nationals north, to be our mercenaries, in war and industry.

And it also very possible that war, natural disaster, flood, famine, drought, may send millions of Americans fleeing South to be wetbacks crossing that border into Mexico, seeking sanctuary, safety, survival.

These things have happened before in history and are realities in other parts of the world today.

Don’t you think that Mexico will remember the brutishness of (INS Commissioner) Harold Ezell and the Ramboism of Reagan? What will be the Mexican response if the tables are turned in some future year?

For millions of Mexicans, U.S. and Mexican citizens, of Alta or Baja California, current actions show that Mexicans have no stature and just don’t count. They can be hassled at will by U.S. authorities. This is divisive and unsettling.

In another two years, Reagan will be out of office and Ezell will probably be returning to the Wienerschnitzel from whence he came. But Mexico and the border will still be there and it is important that men of good will try to find a better way of handling things than is now the policy.

PATRICK F. FLYNN

Yorba Linda