July 18 re-launch on Matt.org site

Attention, Readers! Re-think Immigration is moving to its new home tomorrow, Wednesday, July 18. Click here to go to the new website. It is functionally identical to this one except that all past comments will stay archived at this website. Comments to new posts should be posted at the new site and will require a quick, painless sign-up process so that everyone has their own unique username.

Monday, June 25, 2007

Students walk from Mexico to go to school in Arizona every day

The Los Angeles Times published an interesting news-feature today on students who walk from Mexico to Arizona every day to attend public schools there. Nicholas Riccardi writes:
Children who are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants but live in Mexico cross every morning to get a better education for free in Arizona, breaking the law that requires them to live within the boundaries of the district. To many of their parents, who have ties in both countries, not living in the district is the educational equivalent of jaywalking.

"I pay taxes. I work over here," said a 31-year-old corrections officer who would not give his name as he walked his son from Mexico to elementary school in San Luis. "What's the difference?"

There are no hard statistics on the number of children who break the residency requirement, but some people opposed to U.S. immigration policy have seized on the issue as another example of how they say migrants exploit the U.S. They contend that most school districts do not enforce the law because they risk losing state funding, which is based on the number of enrolled students.

"The whole thing's outrageous. We're not the school district for northern Mexico," said state Rep. Russell K. Pearce.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is outrageous. Shows you how little regard many Mexicans and Mexican Americans have for the rule of law. Any laws or rules they don't like they believe to be unimportant.

Anonymous said...

n the interest of fostering good discussion, I'd like to ask if you might have any ideas as to why they are crossing the border in the first place, and what that may say about what you called Mex and Mex-Ams "little regard..for rule of law"?

Anonymous said...

We native-born law-abiding tax-paying American citizens are just cows to be milked after all. Kind of like a natural resource to them, like copper, tin or oil. All for the "usage" of the illegals.

Anonymous said...

Let's face it - Mexico is a dirty, disgusting, endemically corrupt JOKE of a nation. BUILD THE WALL - BUILD IT NOW!

Anonymous said...

Oh, and the USA is not corrupt? There are not dirty, disgusting parts of the USA?

Don't generalize. There are good and bad parts to Mexico's government and landscape. Same in this country.

Blanket statements don't help anybody.