To the editor:

I feel compelled to respond to Mr. Dyment’s Cinco de Mayo letter.

While ostensibly concerned with Mexican drug lords, he trashes immigrants from Mexico seeking economic opportunities in our country as “illegals” and criticizes President Obama for defending the Constitution and speaking out against an Arizona law that sets aside Fourth Amendment protections against “search and seizure” and blatantly allows racial profiling. Some corrections are in order.

First, people are not “illegal.” We are children of God, and my faith holds that we are to respect the dignity of all human beings. A person may lack, in the eyes of the state, proper documentation. Immigrants from Mexico without documentation work in our fields and slaughterhouses. They may be referred to as undocumented workers.

The Arizona law Mr. Dyment defends requires police to demand proof of citizenship or legal residence from any person considered, with cause, to be undocumented. The cause apparently is to be “breathing while brown.”

A consequence of this law, if enforced, is that any dark-skinned person within Arizona’s borders is advised to have proof of citizenship on their person. Perhaps Latinos should pin their birth or naturalization certificates to their clothing, as the Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David in Nazi Germany.

President Obama, who took an oath to defend the Constitution, and who has experienced personally the effects of racial profiling, is to be commended for speaking out against the unconstitutionality and immorality of the Arizona law. Instead, Mr. Dyment claims the president has “rallied all minorities against American citizens.”

I am confused; are we not a nation of immigrants? Is not each of us a minority?

I hope that despite what appears to be an attempt to distinguish between “minorities” and “citizens,” Mr. Dyment is not implying that some Americans are superior, perhaps, because of northern European ancestry.

Dick Hall

Coupevill