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LIVED TO SEE IT
Professional women’s baseball has been a long time coming (“Another league of their own,” July 30). I’m glad I can see it in my lifetime. It was a dream since I was 5 years old. Now I am a senior. I can’t play, but I can watch and cheer you all on!
Margo Wilcox
Via Facebook/illinoistimes.com
NEED EDUCATION
This is a good and needed article (“Immigrants benefit Illinois STEM fields and healthcare industry every day,” July 30). However, there needs to be more education about the current immigration system for the public to understand what is actually happening – it is not a straight pipeline to citizenship.
Something needs to be said to clarify how easy it is for an immigrant who is legally in this country to become “illegal” because of a missed deadline or a paperwork problem. And that there are many different designations of how an immigrant is in this country – it is not a clear-cut situation of “legal” versus “illegal.”
ICE is not making any distinctions about status. It is pulling in people who have all of the correct paperwork and are hardworking, tax-paying individuals. There is a great deal of documentation about ICE making sure that detainees can’t get to their court appointments, or even their lawyers or families.
I am not an immigrant, but have been studying the situation with ICE since it began as a human rights activist.
Cathy Mosley
Springfield
FALSE ARGUEMENT
Instead of selectively featuring immigrants who made positive contributions, as if activist propaganda was an argument, why not delve into the actual conflict, which is not about immigration as a stand-alone concept? It is about the results of legal versus illegal immigration.
With legal immigration, we can select immigrants that portray reasonable expectations of positive contributions to our society. Results should be – and for decades were – vastly positive. Illegal immigration floods our society with a mix of negative results that overrun our healthcare, schools and social services; blow up public expenses; crowd jails and court dockets; skew elections; and threaten national security. All of these can be avoided or reduced to minor incidents.
The great distraction: “Our immigration system is broken,” cannot be successfully answered by erasing our border and delivering everyone who crosses it uninvited to unprepared communities around the country.
Why not instead ask what is broken (if anything is) and then proceed to explore suggestions that enhance our society without amplifying the harmful negatives that unfettered waves of illegal immigrants guarantee.
John Levalley
Springfield
BROKEN SYSTEM
The online comments on this article are revealing how much people don’t understand. The U.S. has built an entire economy driven by undocumented peoples’ labor for decades. The problem isn’t the immigrants; it’s the broken immigration system the U.S. has had for so many years.
Terri Pitton Dickey
Via Facebook/illinoistimes.com
FINE LINE
Nearly half the individuals in the U.S. illegally entered the country legally with a visa: student, work, travel, etc. They became ‘illegal’ when their visa expired. Per the State Department, more than 33,000 people enter the U.S. on a visa each day.
Joe Coffey
Via Facebook/illinoistimes.com
This article appears in August 27-September 2, 2026.
