To the Editor:

Re “The Great Immigration Panic” (editorial, June 3):

The anti-immigrant partisans in our country are willing to throw overboard all our rights in their single-minded effort to rid the nation of those who are living among us without residence permits. They are the descendants of the right-wingers of the McCarthy period and the Red Scare and the Palmer Raids after World War I.

Not least is their total disregard for the rights of American citizens. They want to require citizens to prove their citizenship—a total reversal of the “innocent unless proved guilty” requirement in criminal proceedings. They say it is different because this is a civil, not criminal, procedure, as if that makes the practice any less noxious.

Not only that, but American citizen children are threatened with loss of family and their right to grow up in their own country with their parents. This, too, may pass, but how many lives are being wrecked in the meanwhile?

Paul H. Silverstone
New York, June 3, 2008

Note from KBJ: I don’t know of anyone who’s anti-immigrant. I know of many who are anti-illegal-immigrant. It’s a pretty obvious difference, but the letter writer seems unable to grasp it.