What a shame. Adelita (“I am undocumented,“ Sept. 5) has been living in this country 33 years and could never figure out how to apply for citizenship. For at least 20 of those years, she was legally an adult. During those years, politicians in Washington, D.C., kicked the illegal immigrant crisis back and forth but did nothing to stem the inflow or find out who needed to be sent out or how to normalize those who were here.
I, too, am an immigrant. I was born in Scotland. My mother, born in Detroit, was in the Army. My father had escaped from war-torn Poland.
Due to immigration laws at the time, I was not an automatic U.S. citizen. I didn’t know that until I was 18, when I enlisted in the Air Force and was denied a security clearance. I had to file naturalization papers based on my father’s becoming a citizen in 1955. When he wanted to sponsor his sister, who also fled Poland, he had to promise that she would not become a ward of the state. He was responsible for her welfare as a resident and eventually a citizen of this country.
My father was the proudest citizen of this country I ever knew. He marveled at our free election process and stayed up all night until the last vote was counted. He knew first-hand the cruelty of communism, Nazism, and fascism. He was a Reagan Republican and warned what government control of health care could bring.
I, too, am proud that my citizenship did not come easy. I hope Adelita can find that path to be a legal citizen and wave the flag of our country and celebrate all that it means.
This is not President Donald Trump waging war on immigration. This is an effort to enforce laws on our books that have been ignored for decades.
Jan Lipski
Vandenberg Village
This article appears in Sep 12-19, 2019.