Statistics Misleading
The editorial “The Battle Over Title 42“ (April 21) misrepresents the statistics concerning the number of migrants at our southern border. The article accurately states that there were 1.7 million “encounters“ at the United-States-Mexican border last year, representing a 400% increase from the prior year.
Left unsaid, however, is that of those 1.7 million encounters, many represent the same person coming back to the border over and over again. In other words, if the same person came to the border four times and was turned back four times, that represented four encounters, not one.
It therefore suggests that once Title 42 is no longer enforced as it has been, and migrants are not turned away wholesale, they’ll be far fewer encounters at the border because individuals need only try to cross the border once, not multiple times.
Steven J. Barre, Huntingdon Valley
Keep Seder Plate as Is
Although Rabbi Barry Dov Lerner’s new additions to the seder plate are quite interesting (Passover: Renewed and New Meanings,” April 21, I find that the addition of anything that deviates from the Haggadah as written pulls Jews away from the very message that the story of the Exodus intends to convey — namely that “Ha Shem” did this miracle for us.
The Holocaust is now almost 80 years away from us, yet we don’t add a piece of striped pajamas or ash to our seder plate, and yet since the third century, Jews have been persecuted, maligned and murdered and yet we have not justified any new additions to our seder plates. Salt water on the Passover table represents the millions upon millions of tears that the Jewish people have shed for transgressions that have happened to them.
We just go on, rise even higher from our meager 2% of the United States’ inhabitants, and continue our ascent. Ha Shem did all of these miracles for us. Let us not give anything else precedence over that fact.
Ann Krauss, Havertown
