The Golden State is the residence of more than 36 million people, a place where the strains of variety are becoming more strongly felt in many arenas of society. Here are a few recent items of note, indicating how rapidly a rich state can be brought down by unwise immigration and an irresponsible legislature with its brain located in Sacramexico.

• The education catastrophe is near Biblical: Probably the biggest jaw dropper in the last little while is the suggested cost for education reform in the state’s schools: $1.5 trillion. Per year.

Really.

California already spends nearly half its annual budget on education, a total of $66 billion in the current fiscal year, or about $11,000 per student in kindergarten through 12th grade.

Still, one estimate in the documents obtained by the AP says California might need to spend as much as $1.5 trillion a year to meet its performance goals, an amount equal to about half the annual federal budget.
[California school reform to cost billions more, studies say, San Francisco Chronicle 3/13/07]

• Los Angeles food workers need vaccinations: Here’s another immigration tax — the huge public health tab associated with vaccinating all food service employees in Los Angeles County for Hepatitis A ($200/treatment x 100,000 workers = $20,000,000).

Hepatitis A is caused by unclean food handling, particularly inadequate hand washing. The illness is “spread by feces-to-mouth contact.”

County officials may require food-service workers in thousands of eateries across Los Angeles to get vaccinated for hepatitis A after a series of outbreaks.

County supervisors voted unanimously on Tuesday to look into the costs and benefits of such a vaccination, which would be a massive undertaking involving more than 100,000 workers. The requirement could affect 25,000 eateries, 300 catering companies and 270 wholesale producers.

“We need to ensure that those who are involved in the handling of food are safe and healthy,” County Supervisor Mike Antonovich said. “The public is vulnerable.”
[All L.A. Food Workers May Need Vaccinations, ABCNews7 3/07/07]

• English is losing ground in the San Jose area: How can it be a good thing for fewer people to be able to understand one another? That’s not a community by any definition. Babel was a curse, not a celebration of diversity. In Santa Clara County, 36 percent of residents were born outside the United States.

As it grows as a global technology hub, Silicon Valley has become one of the most polyglot places in the United States. Santa Clara County is on the brink of a linguistic milestone: Within the next few years, more people will speak a foreign language at home than the number who speak English, recently released census data shows. Given the statistical uncertainty, that threshold may already have been crossed.

Santa Clara County has the largest population of Hindi speakers among all counties in the United States, the second-largest population of Vietnamese speakers, the third-largest population of Persian/Farsi speakers, and the fifth biggest number of Chinese speakers, a Mercury News analysis of 2005 census data shows. In percentage terms, the county ranks first in Vietnamese speakers, second in Hindi, third in Chinese and fourth in Persian/Farsi.

That’s the latest from diversity ground zero!

Even Dutch MSM has been reporting riots there.

There is much controversy around the actual cause/motivation of the riots.

Dutch media report that in the city of Utrecht riots have started after a police officer shot a man armed with a knife. This night is the second night of serious riots in the city. Cars are put on fire, shops are destroyed and a former police station went up in flames. On first glance one might think:

Paris style riots in The Netherlands?

But unlike the Paris riots, the rioters are not Muslims. The rioters are all native Dutch. Just like the Dutch man shot by the police. So what is going on? Dutch national media is very, very silent about the reasons for the shooting and seems to suggest that the riots are just the work of football hooligans.

But even the strongest political correct force cannot stop the Internet and the blogs from revealing the real story behind these riots. This is what I found out, by looking at the local media and the blogosphere:

The neighborhood of the police shooting is being terrorized by ‘youths (Warning newspeak for Muslim youth). Like everywhere in The Netherlands the police does not do much about it. People are attacked, robbed, etc. People keep calling the police but they don’t get protected. Rinie Mulder had called the police very often. So when last Sunday the ‘youths’ harassed a young pregnant woman (a daughter of a friend), he went after them. In the fight that ensued he took the knife of one of the ‘youths’. When a police officer arrived and Rinie showed him the knife, he was shot dead. … Was he siding with the ‘youths’? (After 3 days of riots the police now denies the rumor that the officer was a Muslim) The local media also reports that the local Dutch people they speak are quite desperate about the ‘situation’ in their neighborhooud. The burgomaster now even talks about doing something about the ‘situation’.

[Inverted Paris Style Riots in The Netherlands]

I wonder if that Pim Fortuyn’s successors will be doing better in the next elections?

The Netherlands already has tough immigration policies compared to other EU nations(all major parties adopted more restrictive immigration policies after Fortuyn’s rise). However, involvement in the EU limits just how tough–and effective-those policies can be(The EU requires member states accept workers from other EU member states-so once someone gets admitted to France or Spain, they can work in the Netherlands).

I doubt these riots are really about anything that has happened recently. Instead, I expect there have been problems brewing in the Netherlands for a long time.

I don’t think there’s much to the story about the US Attorneys being fired–it’s a political appointment, and Bush could legally fire all of them if he wanted. There are a bunch of other things to get mad at President Bush for. But here’s one of the complaints that were forwarded to the President about one of the prosecutors(Emphasis added):

Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, also asked a White House official to explain why prosecutors were pursuing charges against illegal immigrants only if they had been counted entering the country illegally eight or more times.‘Loyalty’ to Bush and Gonzales Was Factor in Prosecutors’ Firings, E-Mail Shows By David Johnston And Eric Lipton,New York Times, March 14, 2007

I have mixed feelings about the article Let a Thousand Arpaiovilles Bloom!. I think there are serious human rights and public health problems with the existence of a huge prison population in the US. I’m not suggesting that we ignore the issue of illegal immigration-but when we apply serious punishments, we need to ask ourselves how much deterrent is applied for each specific punishment we apply–and what kinds of side effects are produced.

Long ago, I read that Incan society had an interesting custom. In their society, the higher the social rank of an offender the more severe the punishment. Finland has something similar today–the traffic ticket of one high tech mogul there was 1$103,000 dollars, because no matter what your income, your fine is two weeks pay. We can and should apply similar policies to the immigration issue.

Just one or two public trials convicting the most extreme cases of treason–which might be appropriate for CEO’s that have risked key technologies by their immigration practices and donation. I have a lot interest in Howard Foster’s use of RICO in the immigration area–that practice could be expanded.

Ultimately we need new laws-and fundamentally new ideas about jurisprudence and government. Singapore strikes me as one of the more interesting of the less democratic regimes on the planet. In particular, they tend to pay their government officials quite well-and ban any other sources of income. Their punishments for entry level offenses can be quite severe-as the son of a US businessman found out when he was caned for vandalism–but their level of imprisonment is substantially less per capita than the US.

I don’t think we need an expanded prison system providing sadistic guards and gang members with expanded opportunities for expressing their base desires. We can reduce the need for overall levels of punishment by carefully selecting high level targets. If each employment of an illegal alien mean a fine equal to 10% of an employers net worth–and we developed techniques to “pierce the corporate veil” and go after major investors in illegal immigration, simple expropriation of high profile, wealthy individuals would have enormous deterrent effects here.

We need to start considering illegal immigration a form of financial fraud-and really looking seriously at the folks that profit the most from it-who often aren’t immigrants themselves. However, society is always going to have some punishment that is its most severe–extreme fraud that affects thousands of people deserves the same punishment as murder or treason. George Stigler once calculated that only a few hundred thousand dollars in additional wages were necessary to provide incentives for construction workers to risk each accidental death. If we properly assess the value of citizenship, calculated mass importation of illegal aliens, diluting fellow citizens citizenship rights, thus falls into a similar moral category as calculatingly killing hundreds of people. I suspect that only a few such higher level punishments would be necessary to make a huge point in this respect.

I am a radical. That means I believe in getting into the root of the problem. I fully expect poor people to follow what they think are the best economic opportunities available to them. Only modest changes in incentives are necessary to change their behavior. But if we allow what have status of legitimate businessmen to dangle valuable citizenship rights in front of them as incentives, we must expect high levels of illegal immigration of poor people even if there are substantial risks of punishment and death. Shipping every illegal alien home will do relatively little long-term if the wealthy pretenders to being “Americans” keep their ill-gotten financial gains-and accompanying social status. Even substantial application of the death penalty to illegal aliens themselves might not do much. In England, there was once a death penalty for picking pockets. The hangings were public–and frequented by pickpockets.

I would like to move towards having a much smaller prison system in the US-even if meant continuation of capital punishment and adoption of flogging for “gateway” offenses(like hiring of illegal aliens by a citizen). If the kind of incentives I propose were adopted, I don’t think we’d need Arpaiovilles, but could think instead of building camps that would help transition folks voluntarily deporting themselves in an orderly fashion. I would prefer workers that leave America do so to good jobs in their homelands, more money in their pockets than they hoped for coming to the US, some valuable skills-and a positive enough attitude towards American government and institutions they would be inspired to build something similar after returning to their homelands–and a solid understanding this generosity and responsibility is not weakness. We should do this even if it takes every penny Carlos Slim and Bill Gates have to accomplish this transition.