The July 7 article, “Utah’s senators should vote no on Ron Mortensen” written by Utah state Sen. Curt Bramble, David Irvine and Paul Mero was a nasty piece of character assassination.
Ron Mortensen, Ph.D., is a retired career U.S. Foreign Service officer and former Society for Human Resource Management senior executive. He’s also a strong opponent of illegal immigration and has been nominated for the assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
First he was attacked because he disagrees with the LDS Church’s position on illegal immigration. So what? He’s being nominated for a government job, not for membership in the Quorums of the Seventy.
As Bramble, Irvine and Mero are sponsors and supporters, along with the Chamber of Commerce, of the deeply flawed Utah Compact document, of course they are going to object to anyone in a government position who opposes illegal immigration.
The Utah Compact does not make the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. In fact, this document encourages illegal immigration, the hiring of illegal workers, acceptance of illegal immigration and, most important, it encourages us to ignore our laws.
For decades it’s been against federal law for employers to hire illegal immigrants. When employers pay illegal workers under the table, they are not paying taxes, FICA, unemployment insurance or workman’s comp. That makes them tax cheaters.
Or when employers hire illegal workers and put them on the payroll, they are complicit in identity theft and stolen or fraudulent social security numbers. But, just look the other way.
And how many employers who hire illegal workers provide healthcare insurance for them? No need. The rest of us will pay for it.
According to a Yale-MIT study, Sept. 2018, there are probably 22 to 30 million illegal immigrants in our country. We've done a great job just looking the other way.
And last, if we are going to ignore our laws, then we don’t need any laws in the first place.
Susan Rounds, Midvale
