I spent my first 35 years living in California. The cold but beautiful part. I've lived in San Antonio (the patron saint of lost articles) for over ten years now, so I am more than well-qualified to cast analysis, or aspersions, in just about any direction.

In the first place, wages are low in San Antonio, but so is the cost of living. It is still possible to own a home and twenty minute commute to work! Praise your favorite anthropomorphization of the truth! But the quality of life, while higher than Mexico, is not as healthy and healthful as my home state. After ten years here and never so much as having hayfever or a sneeze, increasingly I have noticed both during the Spring.

As an IT worker, I was out of work for a good three years due in no small part to the importation of cheap labor from Bangalore and all places south of the border. What economic boom were we referencing, exactly? I am employed, once again, thank goodness, but in a position of significantly less "security", salary and standing. However, I am grateful I have anything at this point. I have not only my recent personal experiences but also the experiences of friends who grew up in Mexico to buttress my conclusion that much of what is in Mexico is creeping northward and precious little is heading south.

So rather than globalization representing a gigantic free-for-all of abundance where the standard of living rises for the middle class everywhere, we can expect that, just as in Mexico, the middle class will disappear leaving only the jaded and inbred rich to further disrupt and destroy the spec of cosmic dust we presently call, "home."

San Antonio, if one looks more closer than did your reporter, does represent the future of the American worker: selling french fries and hustling cable TV over the phone because not everyone with a college education gets to be an astronaut or an oil magnate. Discrimination is still very much here with all the po' folks living on the south and west sides of town, and the rich white minority occupying the exclusive homes ever-farther north of town while the disenfranchised blacks occupy the dwindling infrastructure of the east side.

The tale is not one of race or ethnicity, but of rich and poor. Always has been, always will be. If were living as my ex-wife in an over-priced 600,000 dollar home in central California, I would sell the damn thing and buy ten of the same kind of home here in Texas. The animosity Texans hold towards most things Californian resembles something more than an economic or political war, but a Civil War. Based in Houston, the objective has long been to shake every nickel out of California and put it in Texas. Not everyone has to be a victim of warfare.

As the dollar slides those who mortgaged themselves in paradise will wake up with nothing in the middle of a blazing hell. And, as I've discoverd, people in hell don't drink ice water...they drink iced tea. Sweet or unsweet.

First of all, I'm thrilled that there's a piece about my hometown. But when you mention the lack of skilled workers, you never investigate WHY those workers aren't present in San Antonio: we leave. I love it there, and I wish I could go back and find work for me, but I'm a graduate student in a scientific field. I'm not really wanted there. I've even tried to temp when I go back for Christmases, but the temp officers tell me up front that there's little work for someone with my skills, and that most of the temps they fill are for manual labor positions. I did some time working for minimum wage at a fast food restaurant when I was in high school, but there's no promise of anything much better than that for me there. Austin sucks many of the young and/or educated people right out of San Antonio. They have a huge university and some high tech industry. I'm glad to hear SA is booming for someone, but I don't think that someone will ever be me.

As someone who grew up in San Antonio, I can tell you that it is low wage central. There is no boom there....not for the working class. And the illegals absolutely put a drain on the health care system. An undocumented illegal shows up at the hospital and needs $30,000 surgery. They get it, and the 'system' foots the bill. They walk away owing NOTHING, since they claim to be 'indigent'. Meanwhile, many of the nurses (those who can't afford health insurance) would be billed for the same operation if THEY needed it and forced to pay; When they can't they will be harassed by collectors, sued, etc. What a deal!

And this one makes sense. If San Antonio falls (and it will, if things continue as the dividers would like them to), the bulk of undocumented workers, being nomadic by nature, will go to the next host and suck it dry as well. Meanwhile, those who foster sympathy for illegal presence in this country as the expense of taxpayers (and how can anyone back up the oft-repeated contention that "most" illegal immigrants "pay their taxes", etc.? May we look at their returns? Do they keep them with their drivers' licenses?) continue to foment the notion among these lost souls that they are ENTITLED to be here, to enjoy services we ALL pay for, to swamp our emergency rooms as their alternative to a primary care physician, and all the while they are being reminded that in 1846 the Yanqi came and STOLE this part of Mexico. Well I have an idea! Why not simply cede back to Mexico all this land, the property, the good, the bad and the ugly of the south west, and simply relocate all legitimate citizens to other parts of the country, cease to collect any taxes, give it ALL back, and let MEXICO manage it the way they manage what they have left, which is considerable and clearly beyond their ability or desire to manage in any way at all. People flee Mexico for the US because Mexico SUCKS! The US is a land of opportunity, and as one apologist in the article stated, "It's all about opportunity", which I would suggest makes them opportunists, the way a mosquito opportunistically sucks the blood of one host after another, without permission and to no advantage to the hosts. Once returned to Mexico, the south west would see a drop in property values unheard of since the mesozoic. And rightly so.

San Antonio is a beautiful, diverse city. Ah, diversity! I love it. It suggests DIVISION! While I grew up in what would be described as a "diverse" area in Washington, DC and later its nearby suburbs, the beauty of that diversity was its constant center: being an American citizen. If we simply give that incredible status to anyone who shows up here then it will lost all meaning - if it hasn't already. The Idiot in the Oval Office is in love with the idea of cheap labor and is insulated from you and me by money and privilige and, of course, having been born in the United States.

Illegal aliens are in a bind. So are legal ones, and naturalized ones, because when the backlash from the little binge of left-wing lunacy wears off and the hangover sets in, there will be hell to pay, and just as all middle eastern-looking people (including Sikhs from India, remember?) were targets post 9/11, all the "brown" people who are here on the up and up are going to get the same sort of treatment that the "swarthy" people in our midst got after the Pentagon was struck and the WTC went down. Demanding what one is NOT entitled to, especially during a difficult period in a nation's history, is a sure way to bring down the heat on everyone who even

LOOKS like he (or, of course, SHE)could possibly be One of Them. And nothing will have been accomplished except two steps backward. But a bunch of left-wing lunatics will feel good for a while, just as a bunch of Right Wing lunatics have been feeling good since 9/11.

Everybody's got a problem. Why not try and solve some of them instead of doing that tired old 60's "demand" thing?