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Just a tiny little comment. The notion that the illegals are kicking in a share for education has one little cultural caveat. Property tax rates are supposed to be a function of the average occupancy of dwellings. That's one of the reasons there are occupancy limits in residential codes. Since it's an average, small families are unfairly taxed while large families (living in approximately equal value dwellings) are unfairly rewarded. It's an argument for simply charging tuition.

But the Mexicans here have solved the problem. Just put 2 to 3 families in a house. For most of them, this situation is usually far better than what they came from -- one American tract home is a palace by any Mexican standard. Just yesterday another poster jokingly paraphrased a SoCal newspaper headline:"House in La Puente burns, 30 people homeless".

This means that whatever property tax they are paying through rent is badly diluted by the large number of illegal occupants. City zoning codes are not just about harassment for the sake of property values. They're about making sure that costs are not disproportionate.

Enforcement of occupancy codes is defeated by the usual mechanism: any enforcement of such codes against the saintly Mexican illegals is "racist" and "discriminatory" and "victimization of poor people".

So the saw that "we pay taxes too" is just that. Anyone who wants to look at the California budget deficit will quickly realize that illegal aliens and their children are net negative contributors. And just because they pay sales taxes when they buy food and property taxes when they pay rent should not bestow any rights. They made the choice to come into the country against our laws, not us. The fact that some portion of their lives is not contrary to law is not a legitimating factor. It's merely an artifact of living here, nothing more.

You make some very good points. If the local and state governments are not willing to enforce the laws, the people who elect their local and state representatives have the power to do something about that. If they choose not to do so -- then they may suffer the consequences. I suspect that eventually way more people than just the folks on this forum will get upset and react, but probably not before California has a complete "system crash".

I was going to post this very same thing. We were a aparty to this in Phoenix when we lived there. New homes being had easily now with all the incentives for low income folks to buy and they get at 200,000 home with 3000 sq ft and then add onto it to boot(I can think of two homes in our old neighborhood that "enclosed" the garage, built out using nearly all of their 1/3 acre lot, and then on top too(more of the second story). You would see about 20 kids waiting for the school bus on the side of our home--keep in mind this was a circle of homes about a 1/2 mile around--the bus picked up in 3 places on that circle. I drove around during this time many times and I counted about 75 children waiting for the bus in that 1/2 mile of homes! About 7 or 8 would come out of that one house I mentioned and it seemed as if there were 3 adult women there constantly running the home. We were paying the same in property tax and had 2 children--now who was paying more in to that lousy school do you think?(we would have homeschooled btw, not a chance in heck we would have used the schools there)

Right before we got out, a home close by us enclosed the garage and had the biggest low life immigrant types living in there. I counted about 6 guys waiting to go to work one morning in the front. These guys were living in the GARAGE that had an a/c attached to it and a seperate entrance--it was crazy! Sometimes they would wait on the side of our home(we were the corner home) and we'd find beer cans and all kinds of trash. Thankfully our side wall never got graffited(others did in the area), but we kept the wall from being too graffiti friendly by having shrubs and trees on that narrow strip of land. We counted our blessings we got out when we did. The neighborhood was going to pot fast.