Mexico announced last week that its unemployment rate, 3.6 percent, is one of the lowest in the industrialized world. Why is it so low? Mexico's bureau of statistics explains that it's because Mexico doesn't pay unemployment benefits and because of worker migration.
From 2000 to 2004, 2.4 million Mexicans immigrated into the United States, 85 percent illegally.
Countries can change if they want to. China -- yes, the former Red China of Chairman Mao -- now loves capitalism and is growing at 9 percent per year. India is growing at 7 percent per year.
Our leaders in Washington and in Sacramento need to start talking turkey with the Mexicans. They have got to fix their country. The other side of the co-dependent equation, we Americans in general, and we Californians in particular, have to fix ourselves also.
We need to consider that our welfare state subsidizes and encourages illegal immigration and distorts social behavior in the fact that any illegal woman giving birth here produces a welfare-qualifying U.S. citizen. Fertility rates among Mexican immigrant women are 40 percent higher than among women in Mexico.
Free schools, free emergency health care, subsidized housing, government-mandated Spanish. We are creating a large and growing unassimilated and dysfunctional subculture within our borders for which we and the victims will pay an ever-increasing price. Check out the welfare-subsidized Muslim immigrant subculture in Europe for a hint of where this leads.
Guestworker programs? Maybe. But only if the welfare loopholes are closed.