I often get irritated about people's inability to speak properly. Even all these Presidential candidates mis-speak fairly frequently (they seem to have problems dealing with plurals, e.g., "there is millions....").
And I note in my infrequent travels that some of this non-sense in regional. I visited my sister in NorCal over the holidays. I couldn't believe what I seen. Now, I use the word "seen" because, apparently, in that area, the word "saw" is used exclusively to identify a carpenter's tool. Shocking!
As for our schools, that sister is a school teacher. Did you know that it's illegal to track how many illegal alien kids are in our school system? They track minorities, but cannot take that extra step. So there's no way to determine the impact/burden on the school system to accomodate kids here illegally. Besides the discipline problem (where something must be done - it's way out of control - you couldn't pay me enough to be a teacher), we have massive overcrowding, making it virtually impossible to provide the desired quality education. The combo problems of no enforcement of discipline and overcrowding (with kids also having to learn English - a further burden).......and we wonder why the drop out rate is so high and why kids somehow graduate but are illiterate and can't balance a check book.
Check our prison system. It's estimated that 25%+ of inmates are illegal aliens. Yet politicians don't understand why there's all this overcrowding, suggesting it's a social problem and that we simply need more prisons.
It may be fairly obvious that I've become a Lou Dobbs Independent. I picked up a form to change my party affiliation, and sure enough, it was in Spanish and English. Now, if you have to be a citizen to vote, and a condition of citizenship is learning English, why is the form in both languages? And why does California accomodate some 42 languages in its voting system? I just don't get it.
What really gets me, and something that's never brought up - even by Lou, is that we supposedly need illegal aliens to do farm labor. The obvious idea is to keep food prices low (and it's interesting that one thing never mentioned is that these people are basically being taken advantage of - how nice of us!). But here it is, thinking it through, IF these workers are formally "legalized", in the not so long run, what are they going to do? Organize! And then what will happen? Food prices will go up anyway! Same with every other sector we currently depend on illegals for, they'll see the benefit and will act similarly. So, IMO, all the talk is BS - nobody's thinking it through - beyond how many new voters they may gleen.
As for farm labor, we should just bite the bullet and pay more for legal workers, and innovate! How did America go from 80%+ engaged in farming in 1930 to 4%- enagged today, because of decreased demand for food? Innovation/mechanization (resulting in skilled worker demand).
Apologies for going off.....
SGE
