Zinn gets one wrong.

• Author: Bowser, Bob
• Position: Letter to the editor

In reference to Howard Zinn's article "No Human Being Is Illegal" (July issue), of course some people are illegal. We have twelve million illegals now.

It is a question of degree, not race. If you let too many people in, you get overcrowding, crime, an overburdening of social and medical services, emergency rooms shutting down, etc.

When I started a high school dropout outreach program for Orange County, California, in 1986, there were seven or eight gangs in Santa Ana. When I left sixteen years later, there were more than 200. In 1986, ten to fifteen "day workers" might have been waiting on certain corners. In 2002, it was more like fifty to sixty.

We need to assimilate the millions, mostly uneducated, we already have, before we think about letting everyone in who wants in. We need to lock the door for a while.

Bob Bowser

Flagstaff, Arizona

Howard Zinn approvingly quotes the slogan "No Human Being Is Illegal." He also says there should be "a recognition that immigrants deserve the same rights as everyone else."

But it goes against my sense of fairness that immigrants who enter the United States illegally should be...