To the editor:

To win an election, Donald Trump needs to scare people into voting for him. He keeps telling us that America is a land in decline. People born abroad know better. Like Ronald Reagan, they see us as a “shining city on a hill.” They envy our freedom. They know we have the best economy in the world by far. The boldest of them are willing to risk everything to get here. It is true that lots of people want to enter America. Almost everything else Trump says about immigration is fictional. With his weird reference to Hannibal Lecter, he paints immigrants as zombies.

If they reach the United States, immigrants are highly motivated to get ahead and stay out of trouble. Though immigration may slightly suppress pay raises for low paying jobs, the AP reports that “immigrants … take generally undesirable, low-paying but essential jobs that most U.S.-born Americans won’t.”

Immigrants are upwardly mobile as the years go by. They outperform people born in America by many measures. They commit crimes at a lower rate. They and their children comprise a third of college students. According to MIT research, “Immigrants are 80% more likely to start a business than people born in the U.S. … they create more small firms, they create more medium-size firms, they create more large firms.” Of the Fortune 500 companies, about 45% were started by immigrants or their children. These firms include Google, Apple, Amazon, and SpaceX.

An AP article contemplated, “How has the economy managed to prosper … at a time when the Federal Reserve has aggressively raised interest rates to fight inflation — normally a recipe for a recession? … the answer appears to be immigrants … filling more jobs and spending more money has helped drive economic growth and create still-more job openings.”

Biden’s executive orders have reduced chaos at the border, but Congress needs to pass the border bill to fund border protection agencies even though Trump rejected the bill because he wanted to campaign against immigrants. It is not illegal for people to seek asylum, but we cannot allow people to break the law to get into America. We cannot reward people for disobeying the law, whether they are immigrants or Presidential candidates. We need to ensure that Donald Trump is not the first President with a felony conviction.

Sherwin Skar

Marshall