My family lived very near the border town of Laredo when I was growing up, Flacaltenn. We lived in a house we rented half of from a multiple-generation Mexican family. They were gentry, sided with the Texicans against Santa Ana and later, Pancho Villa. AT one time, that house was the only sign of human habitation in Bruni, Texas. Nobody really wanted to live in a desert where the cactus grow head-high and it hurts if your big brother pushes you into one. Honest. There were about 200 people grades 1-12 at the time, probably about 15 in my grade and half were Latinos. Most of them were like kids everywhere else. There was no racism there, and Dad saw to it that 3 black kids who lived 25 miles out in the sticks got to come to that school because they had nothing for them in Aguilares, which was a town that if you blinked when you passed through it, you missed the whole thing. I have no idea what it's like 58 years later. Haven't been back through there for a long many years. Oh, we had to leave, because the school board didn't like my Dad who was superintendent educating black kids. At least, they got the better part of a year of education under their belts while Dad was there. Dad sent us kids and mom back to Houston where I spent the last 6 weeks of the school year at Galena Park School in Houston. The next year, we went back to a little town ninety miles south of San Antonio. Our house was in back of the school campus, separated by a huge field. There were a few Latinos there, too. Great people, but mostly shy. They were hugely amazed when I screamed when a spider jumped onto my desk. I'd never lived in spider country before, so it was funny to them. The next day a kid showed up with a tarantula. aaaak!
WillMunny did you ever live near the border in a border state? I'm here to tell you, it's not a really rich area for people to live in. The water resources are not wonderful, and there are miles and miles of nothing but Cactus and Mesquite trees. At certain times of year, there are quail and javolina out there, but not a lot of game to speak of that's not pig meat or birds like the quail that have about 1/10 the meat of a chicken breast as I recollect. Some ranches had longhorns, others didn't. The kind of money it takes to run a school nowadays is not enough to educate 300 citizen children and 3,000 Latinos who cannot speak English and lived in homes where the family served meals every other day and nothing every other day. All that's different now except the costs. Schools are required by state now to treat everyone exactly the same, to feed hungry children, and to give them (noncitizen children) the same opportunities to learn as citizen's children. They can't afford a Spanish teacher who does nothing else. The regular teachers have to spend their summers training for many new avenues of learning--computers, and so much expensive stuff I don't see how they make it.
There are border issues here people who sit in a skyscraper typing out financial papers may never figure out.
You can't squeeze water out of a rock. Neither should you expect regular people trying to make a living from a hard land take care of Mexico's stubborn insistence on sending 10% of their population for us to feed, clothe, medicate, educate, and accept as brothers. So cuss me all you like, but I see things a little better than you on some things, and I give myself to charity every day making quilts for little babies who don't have a daddy to pay for its needs. My goal is 100 quilt tops a year, my production rate is 50-75 a year. This year I can't do as many because I'm an older American, and my ankles are all swollen up if I sit too long at the sewing machine. So I have to take 2 naps a day with my feet elevated 12" to keep the swelling down along with ghastly medicines.
We come here to resolve issues between states who don't know what we face in a border state. The Latinos I know are hard-working, productive folks. The ones they're sending across the borders today are too many drug pushers, killers, thieves, and cheating shysters you don't want to know. Look at the statistics pages some day on these issues. You'll see.
