Via Cafe Hayek comes this link to some basic facts about Latinos. I'd love to write more about the current immigration debate, but so far all it has inspired me to do is want to make a t-shirt with a picture of either the founding fathers or some pilgrims with the caption "The Original Illegal Immigrants".

Here are some of my choice facts from the article:

2 Many immigrants are not Latino. There could be more than 100,000 Nigerians living in and around Houston. There are thousands of illegal Irish immigrants in and around Boston. China, India, South Korea and Canada are among the leading countries sending people here. Many illegal immigrants are college students and workers who choose to overstay their visas.

5 Language is not genetic. The Pew Hispanic Center shows that by the third generation, 100 percent of Latinos speak English as their first and often only language. This is the precise assimilation pattern for every other foreign-language immigrant group in this country. P.S. If you're so opposed to non-English words, you may speak the names of only 13 American states and almost no cities in the Southwest.

I hope to help my future kids buck that last trend, although technically I guess they'd be second generation not third generation.

I'm not sure what to take away from two links I came across this morning. First, theres a piece on the Huffington Post linking Bolivia's water war to a failure of "Trickle-Down Economics." I had a hard time following Charlie Cray's thought processes along, as I could not find any distinct threads tying together the entire piece beyond "corporations and markets are inherently evil". Do privatization and free-markets only work for certain resources? I.e, it works for telecommunications but not water? I'm not convinced. My mostly uneducated guess is that market solutions were implemented hastily and that corruption played more of a role in these failures.

Which leads us to the second link, public citizen's Water for All campaign. Now, clearly water is a necessity for life and without it, well the chances of death are pretty certain. But does this elevate water into a "human right". By that logic isn't food a human right? Anyway the reasons given for opposing water privatization are:

Water privatization schemes throughout the world have a track record of skyrocketing prices, water quality problems, deteriorating service and a loss of local control.

In most cases like those though, isn't privatization really trading a government/public monopoly for a corporate monopoly? What is the track record of publically owned utilities compared to private utilities on prices, quality, and service? Are they inherently better or have different incentives? One article I did find, via google, comparing the two is from the Reason Foundation from 2003, Why Water Privatization Adds Up in response to another Public Citizen report.

In a rich irony, the researcher for Public Citizen who wrote that report and their other early attacks on privatization quit soon after and came out publicly to explain that his work had taught him that privatization works when done right an that critics have failed to show any problems with it beyond a few anecdotes.

But neither is privatization a White Knight that can ride in and rid a city council of all its water utility worries. It is not an easy, no brainer solution to all our water ills.

I'd recommend you read the full report, but I'll pull the main conclusion for you here:

The key is transparency and accountability, and the track record of privatization shows that accountability exists except in rare cases.

I followed through and created the t-shirt, you can get yourselft one at my zazzle store. This is the "Original Illegal Immigrants" t-shirt.