Things to ponder
From the windmill of my mind … This is not a late April Fool’s Day joke: State Rep. H. William “Bill” DeWeese showed up Friday morning for a taping of HSTV’s Channel 19 “Behind the Headlines” show, cohosted by yours truly. Accompanied by freshman state Rep. Timothy S. Mahoney, DeWeese talked about lessons learned from last year’s election and his newfound commitment to reform, including co-sponsorship of Mahoney’s sweeping open records legislation. Tune in Sunday at 7 p.m. to see the show.
I have a novel idea about illegal immigration. If politicians have no problem with illegal workers competing for jobs with U.S. citizens, saying we need that manpower, why don’t we make them remove their own job protection? You have to be a U.S. citizen to hold elected office, right? So no politician, at any level, ever has to worry about competing with an illegal immigrant for his or her position. I have a suspicion that if we removed the citizenship requirement for holding public office, you’d see a lot more federal officials interested in cracking down on illegals.
On a somewhat related matter, I remember back in the day, when the legalized abortion debate began, that many experts were concurrently wringing their hands over population growth, saying that if we didn’t do this or that to curb the number of people, we’d quickly run out of space and resources. Now comes an Associated Press story saying that immigration is fueling population growth in pretty much all of the growing metropolitan areas, which is a reportedly desirable economic thing. One example: the New York area added 1 million immigrants from 2000 to 2006; without them, the region would have lost 600,000 people. The overpopulation theory has thus proven pretty inaccurate over the past 30-plus years.
I’m going to write about this Sunday as well, but keep in mind that our cutoff for political letters to the editor is 30 days prior to an election. In this case, that means April 15 will be the last day we will run those. They’ll be published in the order that they’ve been received and confirmed.
Easter is upon us, and with it the promise and hope of a new season. Or least once we get past this unwelcome cold spell.
Paul Sunyak is editorial page editor of the Herald-Standard. Reach him at 724-439-7577 or psunyak@heraldstandard.com