On Nov. 29, The Sun Journal ran an article about President Bush’s “plan to get tougher on illegal immigrants.” That statement is misleading. What he offered was a vague outline, not a “plan.”

As the saying goes, the devil’s in the details, and the president hasn’t provided any details. For instance, who’s going to process the applications for his guest worker program? The agency which will have to do it, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, is already millions of applications behind. It’ll be years, if ever, before the processing is done.

Also, who’s going to enforce the “plan” to see that people abide by the law? U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which enforces the immigration laws in the interior of the country, has about 2,300 hundred investigators for the whole country. By comparison, the New York Police Department numbers about 40,000.

Unless the president plans to hire a lot more ICE investigators, no one’s going to make sure that people play by the rules.

As the article notes, the president is trying to placate his conservative base, which has been demanding some action on the immigration mess. We’ll just have to wait and see if he’s serious about what he’s saying.

John H. Frecker, Baileyville