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Because their poverty rates are so high, Mexican immigrants have substantially increased the overall size of the poor population in the United States. While Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born children under age 18 account for 4.2 percent of the nation’s total population, they account for 3.3 million or 10.2 percent of the nation’s total poor population.

It would be kind of fun to pick the survey apart. Here it says that they account for 10.2 percent of the total poor population. Makes me wonder why we aren't worrying about the other 90%. Maybe we should be looking within our borders instead of outside of our borders.

I know many of the Mexicans that come up have about a 4th grade education - school is often not available down there and I believe it isn't free. Most kids have to work to support their families in Mexico and a lot of them work once they get up here. I'm sure a substandard education is a big component of the high poverty rate.

I just ordered that Mexifornia book - been wanting to get it for a while. I don't begrudge people coming up at all. I sure wouldn't sit on my butt and watch my family starve.

I know a lot of illegals and their life is exceptionally hard. I ask them why they don't go back home - they say it is much worse back in Mexico.

As a taxpayer I sure as heck resent paying for their medical services and educational services, but I resent paying for all the other people as well. My kids are in private school because the public school system is so bad. I pay cash for my medical services because my HMO is so lousy. The big problem is that we are turning into a Socialistic country.

I don't know who conducted the survey. The home page didn't have much information. Hard to tell if there was an agenda going. If it is true, then some real work need to be done at the legislative level. They are the bad guys - not the illegals.

One of my favourite rants is that there are some services that should be provided equally to all, but in LA County, these services are provided so poorly that we'd might as well forget the whole thing.

The best example is police, which is absolutely abysmal around here, and yet I'm paying taxes higher than virtually anywhere in the US. (I don't say we because I know you're in Ventura County someplace, but I'm sure you get the idea). Bel Air, which is part of the City of LA, is almost run by the Bel Air Patrol, acting as a proxy for the "real" police.

It's probably good to have "free" education, since otherwise we'll wind up being just like Mexico, but it sure would be nice if it actually taught people something. Otherwise, we'll become like Mexico in a few years :-(.

We pay huge gas taxes and get tattered roads in return. There are states with actual "weather", which creates far worse conditions for roads, with far better roads than us. Why?

I don't think it's illegals, since in my experience living in California, illegals have only been a major issue for the last ten years or so. I've lived here longer than that, and we have never had good police, good roads, or good schools.

There are two things I hate about the anti-illegal movement:

They make it look like Republicans are bigots, while in reality bigotry crosses party lines.
They give the schools, our health care establishment, our police and so on built in excuses. "Oh, things would be fine if we didn't have those illegals out there," they cry. And the anti-illegal crowd laps that all up and spits it out at us.

The problem is that it's not true. Our society has sicknesses in it that in the most pathological cases prevent government from working. And we stand around trying to find someone, anyone, to blame but ourselves.

But we're the only people who can even try to fix it.