Illegal immigration is easy to criticize. I will be the first to agree that CA should bill Washington for all services, be it healthcare, education, etc, provided to illegal immigrants and their children.
However, if you get fixated on illegals, you will miss another important point – for each illegal immigrant you have one foreign-born legal immigrant from a Spanish-speaking country, and two Spanish-speaking people born this side of the border. They look like illegals, they talk like illegals, but they are as American as apple pie and there’s no legal justification to withhold any benefits from them. In fact, illegal immigrants are less likely to have children than bona fide transplants. Your article estimates 1 million children of illegals in CA K-12 system. Total hispanic enrollment in K-12 is over 3 million. Two thirds of these 3 million enter the system without sufficient knowledge of spoken English.
The correct definition of the problem is that a considerable part of population of California is low-income, uninsured, and uneducated. This problem is not solved by deporting all illegals.
