Just a little confused here about socialism

To the editor:

(re: “Leftist social programs haven’t worked, and won’t,” July 12)

Lou Deholczer is long on rhetoric and short on facts. He appears to be the right’s answer to Adam Stoler. But at least Stoler’s empty rhetoric does not go on for 19 paragraphs.

Deholczer neglects the facts because they contradict his points. Most immigrants work long hours for slave wages. Many, including those in construction, are skilled.

But even those who are considered unskilled, such as those who are working 12 hours a day for $40 picking tomatoes, do an essential physically demanding and difficult job. President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies serve to keep them too scared to complain.

There would be less immigration of the United States did not so often contribute to other countries’ instability. The Obama administration supported the 2009 coup in Honduras that resulted in a once stable democracy being ruled by terror. When Hondurans fled to the United States as a result, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “Send them back!”

That’s exactly what Trump is trying to do.

When immigrants are fleeing for their lives, they don’t have time to immigrate legally. Unfortunately, the United States has a poor bipartisan history on this. Two examples include a mostly good president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who would not let Jews fleeing the Nazis immigrate here in 1939. In the 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, those fleeing the Duvalier regime in Haiti were sent back by the United States.

Also, how enlightened were our country’s creators when the United States began with genocide against its natives, slavery, no rights for women, and only white male landowners allowed to vote?

Sexual and racial discrimination and oppression of working people created divisions that have been exploited by the two biggest political parties.

As for single-parent families, does Deholczer wish for the days when a wife was forced to stay with her husband, even if he beat the crap out of her? Also, conservative policies against birth control and sex education certainly increase, not decrease, unwanted pregnancies.

European socialists in the Scandinavian countries have the happiest citizens. Good salaries, complete health coverage, pension, free quality education, and more time off to enjoy the fruit of their labor sure beats what we have. Russia and China have never truly been socialist, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991.

In the 1990s, the Republican calling himself a Democrat, President Bill Clinton, signed a bill putting limits on how long one could stay on welfare. But the minimum wage was never raised to a living level. That’s why we now have the working homeless.

What conservatives actually wish for is to bring back the time before unions when workers slaved for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for little money until they died.

Richard Warren