LETTER: Blurring legal and illegal

Las Vegas Mayor Shelley Berkley, in your Friday article about Las Vegas having to deny it is a sanctuary city, spoke of her empathy for anyone who comes to the United States, noting that her grandparents had escaped the Holocaust by migrating to America. But the article is about illegal immigration, not about people who legally came here.

Ms. Berkley referred to people “suffering in their home country and desperate to get out.” Certainly that would describe people fleeing the Holocaust, who would have been at least as desperate as anyone today. Yet astonishingly, she just lumped her relatives and mine in with lawbreakers who entered the country very differently, whether she wants to notice that or not.

My relatives, and those of most Americans, came to this country legally. I don’t appreciate the constant blurring of the lines between legal and illegal. I know for a fact legal immigrants don’t appreciate it, and I tend to doubt the mayor’s grandparents would appreciate it either.