A Brief History…

Mexican legislators are traveling to Phoenix this week to complain about illegal aliens; returning to Mexico. “How can they pass a law like this?” asked Mexican Rep. Leticia Amparano Gamez, who represents Nogales. The horror of it!

the legislators said Sonora – Arizona’s southern neighbor, made up of mostly small towns – cannot handle the demand for housing, jobs and schools it will face as illegal Mexican workers here return to their hometowns without jobs or money.

Where does it say that this is our problem ?

How big is the problem ?

“There is not one person living in Sonora who does not have a friend or relative working in Arizona,” she said in Spanish.

Rep. Francisco Garcia Gámez, a legislator from Cananea and that city’s former mayor, said the lack of mining jobs there has driven many Mexicans to Arizona to find work. He said they depend on jobs in Arizona to feed their families on both sides of the border.

That is what is going on. The Mexicans are coming here to work but their families are in Mexico. I actually don’t mind this if there is a way to let them work legally and avoid the burden on the community of extra services. We used to have such a program. It was called the Bracero Program. Why did it come to an end ? Because the American labor unions wanted to support Cesar Chavez and his Farm Workers Union.

The end of the Bracero program in 1964 was quickly followed by the formation of the United Farm Workers, and the subsequent transformation of American migrant labor under the activist leadership of Cesar Chavez, a prominent critic of the bracero program.

The rest is history. This is where the illegal immigration program began. Mexico has become more dependent on this program than the agricultural businesses that employ the workers. Expect more screaming from Mexico as attempts to close the borders increase.

The New York Times today has an amazing headline to this story.

Lack of Supervision Noted in Deaths of Home-Schooled

Read the story and see if there is any sign that these kids were home schooled. The animosity of the left wing to home schooling is just amazing. Here is the real beef the Times has:

Once against the law in all but five states, home schooling is now legal throughout the country and highly regulated in just six states, New York among them. About 1.1 million of the 50 million school age children were home schooled in 2003, the National Center for Education Statistics says.

What do you think the murder rate among home schoolers is ? Just think, 1.1 million kids escaping the clutches of the teachers unions. This statistic is probably what has them worried:

There was no significant difference between minority and white homeschooled students. For example, in grades K-12, both white and minority students scored, on the average, in the 87th percentile. In math, whites scored in the 82nd percentile while minorities scored in the 77th percentile. In the public schools, however, there is a sharp contrast. White public school eighth grade students, nationally scored the 58th percentile in math and the 57th percentile in reading. Black eighth grade students, on the other hand, scored on the average at the 24th percentile in math and the 28th percentile in reading. Hispanics scored at the 29th percentile in math and the 28th percentile in reading.

The entire article is an attack on home schooling while the actual case is clearly NOT about home schooling. It is about mental illness and the failure of school social workers, except one whose pleas were ignored, to care about truancy.

UPDATE: Reuters has now recanted on the offensive headline that this story originally carried.

Ace of Spades links to a story about the death of renegade CIA agent Philip Agee. He was a hero of the international left, second only to cop-killer Mumia abu Jamal.

I don’t think Agee was ever nominated for a Nobel Prize and now it’s too late.

They don’t give them posthumously.

Mickey Kaus has some doubts about the housing crisis. A drop of 6.6% in average prices after the run-up of the past five years doesn’t seem like much of a “crisis” to him, or to me. I remember 1993 when we had a real crisis in California. I bought my house in 1991 when prices were already soft. I had gotten divorced a few years before and swore I was through with expensive houses. There is an old saw among doctors I know that goes, “You don’t have to get married. All you have to do is find a woman you can learn to hate in ten years and buy her a house.” I bought a couple of those. Anyway, I was determined to stick with a smaller house and buy it as cheap as I could. I made low offers on a couple of houses. One was so low that the realtor refused to submit it to his client. I waited 72 hours (as specified in the offer) and bought another house from a seller who was willing to counter. I got the house for about 15% under the asking price. Two years later, the value had dropped by 25% on an appraisal. It eventually recovered and the house is now worth three times what I paid for it. The people in trouble are those who bought more than one house in order to “flip” them, or those who paid too much assuming that trees grow to the sky and prices never fall. I have little sympathy for any of them. The decline in prices in California is a fraction of the rise of the past few years. Houses are not selling in my neighborhood but that is probably a function of buyers anticipating price drops and sellers refusing to go along. I don’t know who is right but, aside from overpriced condos, nobody will lose money by waiting, at least in the California market. Of course, that doesn’t help left wing newspaper reporters who need a story to bash Bush.