For years, Mexico has been pestering the United States government to open its borders to illegal Mexican laborers. What’s their own position on immigration? Why, they are tightening restrictions on the types of jobs that immigrants can hold. An immigrant in Mexicio, even legal naturalized citizens, cannot hold any sort of elected office. Congress, state legislatures, supreme court, governors – all are off-limits to non-native-born Mexicans. In fact, almost all official posts of any sort are off-limits to immigrants. Now, they are encouraging cities to ban immigrants from beoming police officers, firefighters, or judges.
Don’t be a schmuck. There are only two elected offices in the US for which naturalized citizens are ineligible. This country has had hundreds of immigrant governors, state legislators, senators, representatives, cabinet secretaries, and executive and judicial appointees at all levels of government. And even firefighters too.
Now, now – the complete restriction on any non-native holding public office (or being an officer in the military) in Mexico arises out of the very real experience in the 1860s of foreign crowned heads showing up with their armies and deciding that this would be their in-laws’ kingdom henceforth. It’s not like they came up with it the other day.
That said, encouraging the exclusion of non-native legal citizens from *all forms of public service * and from locality-level politics is just damn paranoid.
FIrst, let me say that I’ve spent a lot of time in Mexico and love it down there. As a visitor. Immigrants headed for the US from Central America or points further south pass through Mexico at much peril. They are often beaten, robbed or worse.
The reason the Mexican government favors liberalizing immigration by its citizens into the US is probaby because these immigrants send billions of dollars home to Mexico each year. Mexico treats its own people horribly… there is an ultra-rich upper class and the lower classes are similar to what you find in Calcutta, India. As long as this is true, it’s pretty understandable why so many Mexican families want to move north where they can find more opportunities - jobs, basic human rights, education for their children, better health care. I certainly can’t blame them.
Most Mexican people here in the US are incredibly hard working. I wonder how the 40% of US high school students who drop out of school can compete with them in the job market.
True story: my father is retired from General Motors. He tells me that when GM set up a plant in Mexico, the Mexican government made them lower the wages they were planning to pay to the workers. Yes, the government was actually concerned that the factory workers were going to make too much money!
I wonder why the Communists never took hold down there. If there’s one country that really needs some sort of people’s uprising, it’s Mexico.
10% drop out rate is based on some screwy data and statistics. It is true that graduation rates vary widely by ethnic groups, but I don’t think that should be ignored. I live in New Mexico.
Here are a couple of cites and you can find many more online if you search online. These articles below are very good, so you might go to the sites and read more.
As we have already seen, the national graduation rate for the class of 1998 was 71% (see Figure 3). For white students the graduation rate was 78%. For African-American students nationwide the graduation rate for the class of 1998 was 56%. For Latino students nationwide the graduation rate was 54%.11 http://www.asbj.com/evs/06/highschool.html
“In almost every state,” the report says, “those who are committed to student success are working in the absence of accurate data on high school graduation rates.”
To its credit, New Mexico is putting together data systems that will enable it to track students more closely from ninth grade on, the report says. So is North Carolina, which supposedly led the nation with a 2002-03 graduation rate of 97 percent. (The Education Trust – using a system that looked at the number of ninth-, 10th-, and 11th-graders promoted each year – put North Carolina’s 2000-01 rate at 64 percent and New Mexico’s at 61 percent.)
Various researchers have estimated the national graduation rate at anywhere between 66 and 71 percent, according to a 2005 report by the Educational Testing Service titled One-Third of a Nation: Rising Dropout Rates and Declining Opportunities. In July, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it will begin calculating an “Average Freshman Graduation Rate” for all states – a number that will more accurately reflect the true percentages of dropouts and graduates.
