To the Editor:

In congratulating Mayor Liz Lempert for “standing firm on Princeton’s intent to remain a sanctuary city for immigrants” [Mailbox, Town Topics, July 29], a recent writer put the YWCA of Princeton in the same camp as that of a mayor whose policies flout federal laws of which illegal immigrants are in clear violation. And last week [“Mayor, Council, Others Respond to Letters Pro and Con on the ‘Sanctuary City’ Issue,” Mailbox, August 5], Mayor Liz reiterated her support for policies that contravene local participation in enforcement of federal law that calls for the registration and fingerprinting of all aliens here more than 30 days, not only, but also threaten anyone who knowingly (in lay terminology) gives aid, comfort, transportation, shelter, and/or sanctuary to an “illegal alien” (to be consistent with the language of the law). Moreover, the letter in question included signatures of numerous other local government officials who, by inference, share the mayor’s embrace of Princeton’s illegal immigrants.

To explain such an embrace, it is reasonable to hypothesize that tolerance of illegal immigration and its human embodiments has led to consequences conceptually analogous to those ensuing from tolerance of vice, described more than two centuries ago by Alexander Pope [in “An Essay on Man”] as follows: “Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,/As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;/Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,/We first endure, then pity, then embrace.” Having thus come to “embrace” the cause of illegal immigration and illegal immigrants, any effort to shake that embrace is encumbered by the force of [Everett] Dirksen’s Inequality: “The mind is no match with the heart for persuasion; constitutionality is no match for compassion.”

Princeton’s YWCA director, the mayor and city officials who co-signed her most recent letter, likely would agree with the admonition that laws or policies adopted with the best of intentions frequently only pave the way conceptually to Hades, but due to circumstances outlined above, it is probable that none of them (or their supporters) is able to perceive the consequences of their “aiding and abetting” illegal immigration in a negative way (likely true in whole or in part of their counterparts in more than 200 localities nationwide).

Citizens who have not yet succumbed to the effects of Pope’s Law and Dirksen’s Inequality, continue to hope for restoration of unselective law-and-order enforcement in localities such as Princeton. That hope is reinforced by House passage of “Enforce the Law for Sanctuary Cities Act (H.R. 3009)” designed to “block federal grants to U.S. states and cities that provide safe haven to illegal immigrants.”

As to whether such logical legislation will become law, quien sabe? But its passage in the House is, at least, a step in the right direction.

Ken Wilson

Lawrenceville