Posted on August 7, 2006

A Stunning View Of Immigration Craziness

Antelope Valley Press, August 5, 2006.

Editorial — ‘We’re in a state (Kentucky) where there’s nothing but Americans. The police control the streets. It’s clean, no gangs. California now resembles Mexico — everyone thinks like in Mexico. California’s broken.”

Who made those comments? Some right-wing talk show host back in Kentucky? Some redneck politician? You can just hear the Latino activists scrambling to the nearest microphone to decry what they would deem as these terrible, offensive, racist comments. Whoever made these comments will be darn lucky if he doesn’t lose his job by the time the politically correct crowd gets done with him.

But wait just a minute.

Do you know who made these comments? It was Alejandra Magdaleno, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who lived in Los Angeles for several years before abandoning the state for Lexington, Ky., eight years ago. She is quoted in a lengthy story in the Los Angeles Times. She went to Kentucky and found happiness, she said, because there were no Mexican immigrant workers there “bidding down the wages for the unskilled jobs.”

Magdaleno made the point that the cost of living was much lower, and that she left California for the same reasons she left Mexico — and she loves it. She learned English right away because she had to — almost no one speaks Spanish in Kentucky.

Also, she and her husband wanted better schools for their children, ages 15 and 9. “At the school (in Lexington), there are just people who speak English. It helped my children a lot.”

The kids said school was much harder in Lexington than in Los Angeles. The academics were well advanced compared to the level the kids were studying out west. The family was amazed to see girls from Mexican immigrant families who were in their mid-20s and still didn’t have children. The girls in Los Angeles, they said, were like the girls in Mexico who get pregnant at 14.

The comments — part of an overall story about Alejandra’s sister, who is also here illegally, has 10 kids and lives in Los Angeles with considerable help from government assistance — are amazing in their irony. When the illegal immigrants from Mexico are fleeing California because there’s too much illegal immigration out here, you know you’re in trouble.

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