I recently completed nine weeks of hospitality service at the Texas/Mexico border. I learned this.

Immigration “the right way”: Open our hearts. Pray for the suffering. Do what we can!

In the early 1900s, immigration was a paperless system. Buy a ticket and get on a boat. At Ellis Island, intake workers and doctors checked hearts and lungs and looked for signs of mental illness. Newcomers registered names of their family/party, and in a few hours, they were out on the streets.

Now, 100 years later, we’re all intermarried, and we’re all Americans.

This is what we should do today. Immigrants overwhelmingly positively affect our nation. Let them in. Let our country grow.

It costs us taxpayers an average of $45,000 per person for a year of detention.

Immigrants, refugees and asylum-­seekers want to work, and we have jobs. Crops are rotting in fields. Milk is being poured down the drain. Meat packing plants are being raided. Caretaking is not being done. Construction is lacking workers. Yet the “emergency manufacturers” would have us believe immigrants are trying to destroy our nation. Quite the contrary.

We all pay for the evils being done in the name of “immigration law.” Clothing cut up in front of refugees, medication thrown away, verbal and physical insults, and more.

Let’s turn this around. Welcome the immigrants. Renew our nation. Take the $9 billion-plus appropriated for the border to hire immigration workers and doctors to receive those seeking entry.

Do it “the right way.” Open our hearts. Pray for the suffering. Do what we can!

Mary K. Sykes

Uniontown

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