Letters to the editor Feb. 5

Where's backlash

to rising gas prices?

A few years ago when gasoline prices were climbing higher and higher, the media and public were calling for George Bush's head. Now, once again, prices are going up almost every day - four, five cents at a time, and there's talk gasoline may cost us $5 a gallon by next year.

But where's all the outrage this time? I don't hear or see anyone questioning why this president isn't doing anything about it or even addressing the problem. One can only wonder why.

Marilyn Sturgis

Carson City

Illegal immigrants

deplete U.S. wealth

Dr. Paslov's Jan. 29 commentary suggests leaving U.S. borders open to the world to welcome all comers whether legal or illegal and provide them a vibrant public education so they can enjoy the American dream, notwithstanding it becomes a nightmare for legal citizens saddled with the cost.

In past centuries, most immigrants were legally sponsored by friends, relatives, and industries taking financial responsibility for them. They provided the workforce for America's industrial revolution. Detroit and other cities attracted Polish, Greek, Chinese, Irish and Italian communities and absorbed the nation's indigent minorities, as pockets of American poverty gradually diminished. Workers added to U.S. wealth and national welfare. Most likely, Dr. Paslov's Ukrainian father and Irish mother immigrated that way. Mine did.

Today millions of Middle Easterner Asian and Latino immigrants overrun our country legally and illegally at the same time as federal policy exports tens of millions of jobs of previously employed citizens to the Third World. Immigrants compete with existing citizens for diminishing jobs and aggravate unemployment rolls. They inflate the drug trade. They absorb national wealth instead of adding to it.

The path to the American dream was never, and is not, free. The social costs to pay for the world's tired, poor and huddled masses today are borrowed from China. Paslov doesn't pay for it - yet. But Paslov's dream for immigrants is fast becoming a true nightmare for today's and future children and grandchildren.

Jack Van Dien

Minden