A teacher learns about prison customs and terminology from his fifth-grade Hispanic students. Diversity at its finest, not to mention a portent of the nation’s future!

Every Friday my class reads a newspaper. The light went on one day in my dull mini-cranium about two minutes into the lesson. The kids knew lots of words I didn’t know, such as: sally port, non-contact visit and CO. We were reading an article about prison. Did I mention that my students are fifth-graders? That means they are 9 and 10 years old, mostly Latinos. All of them are sweet like chocolate, cute to the max, and wise to the bone … about certain things.

“What’s a sally port?” I asked.

“Oh, teacher,” replied Carla. “That’s the wire cage room thing you have to go in to get into the prison.”

Another kid chimed in his Michoacan accent. “But there are two of them.”

“Two of what?” I asked, completely clueless.

Carla answered, “Them wire cage room things. You have to go through two of them.” She stared at me with huge, deep black eyes.

[Sally Port, Potty Patrol, and Extraction, By Paul Karrer, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, June 1, 2008]

An informal survey, “Heads down on desk, no looking” style, showed that eleven of his 28 fifth-graders had visited incarcerated relatives.

Is there no end to immigration as a source of social pathology? the Washington Post tries its hand at a medical sob story, but the brutal facts detract from any heart-tuggy aspect.

Though Hispanics make up about 14 percent of the U.S. population, they represented 22 percent of new HIV and AIDS diagnoses tallied by federal officials in 2006. According to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, [Fact Sheet: Latinos and HIV/AIDS] Hispanics in the District have the highest rate of new AIDS cases in the country.

So far, the toll of AIDS in the nation’s largest and fastest-growing minority population has mostly been overshadowed by the epidemic among African Americans and gay white men. Yet in major U.S. cities, as many as 1 in 4 gay Hispanic men has HIV, a rate on par with sub-Saharan Africa. [AIDS Among Latinos on Rise, By Ceci Connolly, July 23, 2008]

We learn that gay foreigners come to America in search of a better life. (Mexicans are  violently homophobic.) But they get AIDS because they are oppressed, according to the liberal script of the Post, so we should feel sorry for them.

Growing up gay in Mexico, the 35-year old felt the pain of his family’s shame. He fled north of the border, as many do, in search of a better life. There, he thought, he could live openly and thrive. [...]

“As immigrants, many times we lose our identity when we cross the border,” said De La O. He worries that harsh policies toward HIV-positive immigrants create “another underground in which people cannot access treatment but will not leave the country.”

Mauro Ruiz is one of them.

Now fluent in English and having advanced to shift supervisor at the restaurant where he works, he is hoping for the law to change. Until then, he keeps to the shadows of society.

“If I’m able to work, I can stay here,” he said. “But if not, I will have to go back to Mexico and I will die.”

Most of the “immigrants” profiled in this article are apparently illegal aliens, yet somehow they receive expensive AIDS drugs and treatment. But there is not a peep about the cost, just a lengthy sob story after the initial statistics are laid out. It’s really amazing the propaganda that passes for reporting these days.

In other public health news, Foreign-born TB cases need better control, US says.

While most TB cases come from recent arrivals, a significant number involve people who have lived in the United States for at least 20 years, the study authors said. Most of these likely resulted from latent infections acquired years earlier abroad, they wrote. Latent, non-contagious infections mean germs are present but the body is able to fight off symptoms. Latent infections can morph into active disease, causing contagious illness, at any time, particularly as people age and their immune systems weaken.

Latent infections are detected with skin tests and treated with nine months of antibiotics. Foreign-born U.S. residents aren’t routinely tested for latent TB. And with more than 37 million foreign-born people living in the United States, giving all of them skin tests “would be daunting to say the least,” Cain said.