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While most of the MSM is fixated with Israel’s efforts to deal with a bothersome border problem, the New York Times deserves credit for noticing a far bigger and more important border problem America has – increasing anarchy in Mexico.

Kidnappings in Mexico Send Shivers Across Border by Sam Dillon January 4 2009

reports that Mexican professional kidnappers have a new gig:

“The relatives of Mexicans in the United States have become a new profit center for Mexico’s crime industry,” said Rodolfo García Zamora, a professor at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas who studies migration trends. “Hundreds of families are emigrating out of fear of kidnap or extortion, and Mexicans in the U.S. are doing everything they can to avoid returning. Instead, they’re getting their relatives out.”… kidnappers were targeting people with relatives in the United States, because they knew these families have money,” said Santana Lujan, a local farmer…

…such crimes — and the attention they receive on Spanish-language television in the United States — appear to have frightened not only those who live here year-round. Most years at Christmastime, hundreds of men in cowboy hats who work north of the border return to Jerez, jamming the streets with pickup trucks and cars with California and Illinois license plates and reuniting with old friends and family in the town square. This holiday season, Jerez and surrounding towns have had few migrants return. And demographers based in Jalisco and Michoacán said in interviews that few migrants had returned to those states either.

So America suffers two ways because Mexico cannot police itself. Refugees flee to join relatives here. And the promising self-deportation of aliens because of the economic downturn falters.

A caucus of Mexican legislators who specialize in migration issues predicted in October that some three million Mexicans might return from the United States as a result of the recession. But the same group reported in a study released in late December that in fact fewer migrants seemed to have returned this holiday season than in previous years, in part because of what they delicately termed “the insecurity in Mexico.”

It is sad that Mexico has these problems, but it not America’s duty – or prerogative – to solve them. What is America’s duty is to protect its own people - and itself, from becoming an Hispanic slum.

America needs that Fence.

(Parenthetically, no wonder the NYT is failing. Contrast the amorphous headline above with the incisive one the Press Democrat, of Santa Rosa, put on the same story today:
Mexicans flee north as kidnappers target U.S. immigrants’ relatives)

Californians’ healthcare premiums will go up as a result of Sacramexico’s meddling on the side of foreigners.

Millions of Californians with limited English proficiency now have the right to an interpreter from their commercial health and dental plans - made possible by a first-in-the-nation law aimed at dismantling the language barriers that get in the way of good medicine.

The new regulation - implemented New Year’s Day after five years of hearings, delays and wrangling among insurance companies, regulators and consumer advocates - is widely hailed as a milestone in reducing mistakes because of miscommunication.

“This is really huge, especially in California where we’re getting more and more diverse,” said Martin Martinez,[Email him] policy director for the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network. “Even if you speak English well, it’s really hard to understand what your doctor is saying.” [It's the law: California patients can have an interpreter at their side, ByBobby Caina Calvan, Sacramento Bee, January 4, 2009]

Does that mean that we native English speakers can get a translator for an unintelligible foreign doctor?

As many as 7 million Californians - about half of them enrolled in health maintenance organizations, or HMOs - lack English fluency and could benefit from the new language service. [...]

Doctors’ orders will now have to be translated, at least orally, into Spanish, Mandarin, Hmong, Russian - any spoken language.

The scope and cost of the task - estimated by insurers to be about $25 million - make it the biggest regulation effort undertaken by the California Department of Managed Health Care, which oversees HMOs.

The law, Senate Bill 853, was signed in 2003 but shelved as part of a moratorium imposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger when he took office. It was finally dusted off, but insurers balked at the cost.

In none of the stories about the need for translators does anyone in the press or in the affected agencies ever suggest that “immigrants” should learn to speak English for their own health, success and well being.

Finally, the California Constitution states that English is the official language, but it hasn’t done a damn bit of good.

CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION

ARTICLE 3 STATE OF CALIFORNIA

SEC. 6. (a) Purpose.

English is the common language of the people of the United States of America and the State of California. This section is intended to preserve, protect and strengthen the English language, and not to supersede any of the rights guaranteed to the people by this Constitution.

(b) English as the Official Language of California. [...]

From the Wall Street Journal:

“Housing Push for Hispanics Spawns Wave of Foreclosures”

By SUSAN SCHMIDT and MAURICE TAMMAN

California Rep. Joe Baca has long pushed legislation he said would “open the doors to the American Dream” for first-time home buyers in his largely Hispanic district. For many of them, those doors have slammed shut, quickly and painfully.

Mortgage lenders flooded Mr. Baca’s San Bernardino, Calif., district with loans that often didn’t require down payments, solid credit ratings or documentation of employment. Now, many of the Hispanics who became homeowners find themselves mired in the national housing mess. Nearly 9,200 families in his district have lost their homes to foreclosure.

For years, immigrants to the U.S. have viewed buying a home as the ultimate benchmark of success. Between 2000 and 2007, as the Hispanic population increased, Hispanic homeownership grew even faster, increasing by 47%, to 6.1 million from 4.1 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Over that same period, homeownership nationally grew by 8%. In 2005 alone, mortgages to Hispanics jumped by 29%, with expensive nonprime mortgages soaring 169%, according to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council.

An examination of that borrowing spree by The Wall Street Journal reveals that it wasn’t simply the mortgage market at work. It was fueled by a campaign by low-income housing groups, Hispanic lawmakers, a congressional Hispanic housing initiative, mortgage lenders and brokers, who all were pushing to increase homeownership among Latinos.

What about President Bush and his 2002 White House Conference on Minority Homeownership, where he called for adding 5.5 million Hispanic and black homeowners via cutting back on barriers to the American Dream, such as down payments? (more…)