My posts will not always deal with Islam per se, but issues that certainly do affect Muslims. One such issue is immigration from immigrant sending nations to immigrant receiving nations. I was reading an article in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, about this woman who is an immigrant, who came to this country illegally from Jalisco, the same state as my father.

She arrived in Los Angeles in 1984, after 22 years of living here, she does not speak English. Her husband, who has been here for 28 years, speaks little to no English at all too. She has a total of 10 biological children and three children from her husband’s previous relationships. They live in a one bedroom apartment in South Los Angeles; her older children do not speak English that well, their reading skills are confined to picture books which visually aid them in reading and comprehending the words.

Her oldest daughter dropped out of high school, married, and is now working in a factory that manufactures toys for Disneyland.

However, this woman has one set of triplets and one set of quadruplets. She used fertility drugs for the purposes of having a son, since her family consisted of daughters.

However, this woman Angela had a sister named Justina who learned English, owns a home in Kentucky with her husband, and she limited her family size to two sons. Both speak English fluently and have no plans of getting married and having children. Like many assimilated Mexican Americans, they will postpone child bearing and most likely engage in inter-ethnic marriages. By the third generation, half of all Latinos marry non-Latinos.

This story was one of the most e-mailed stories on the latimes.com website yesterday.

I was thinking, immigration is a huge and controversial topic in California. There is no middle ground, either you support punitive border enforcement and be called a racist or you support amnesty and compassionate approaches which forgive migrants of their crimes.

Let’s face it; immigration is a huge problem in the Muslim world. More than half of all refugees in the world are Muslims, coming from nations like Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia, and Iraq being the top four Muslim majority nationalities.

Spain is ground zero for illegal immigration in Europe, consisting of African Muslim migrants seeking better wages and work. Arizona is ground zero for a mostly Latino Catholic and rural migrant population seeking better wages and work. It is natural for man to seek out better economic opportunities, even if that means crossing an international border and engaging in work where one does not have the right to work and earn a wage. Employers benefit since wages will become depressed, but native workers will feel the impact; they will either be forced out of their jobs or quit because of decreased earnings and wages.

After college, having received a Bachelors of Art from UCLA, I considered vocational training in the culinary field. I attended the California School of Culinary Arts in Pasadena, CA. I enjoyed it, but people cheat in culinary school and I quickly realized that wages in cities like Los Angeles were depressed for culinary professionals because of the bulging cheap immigrant labor force and oftentimes restaurant owners would merely train a Latino the dishes and recipes specific for that establishment, even if they lacked the year of formal training in stocks, soups, vegetables, herbs, spices, proteins, sauces, and pairing wines with gourmet dishes.

I joined the military, since I was just depressed, and stressed about barely making it off of a full-time job at the Getty Center as a prep cook, in a kitchen, where a good portion of the employees did not have the legal right to work in the United States. The Getty has been at the center of controversy for stolen antiquities ripped from archaeological sites throughout the Italian peninsula, the museum agreed to return some of the disputed antiquities with guarantees of having access to loaned works of art. Now the Greeks are seeking a similar agreement with the Getty and other American museums who allegedly have stolen works of art hanging in their galleries.

But it would be a scandal if the Getty was employed in hiring kitchen help that was illegal.

So this brings me back to the topic of immigration and the case study of Angela (the woman with 13 children in a one bedroom apartment).

As a Latino, half Mexican ethnically, I was angry at reading about her story. I was angry because she was unemployed! She continued to have children despite NOT having the financial means to support them. She has lived in this country for two decades now, and still has not mastered basic conversational English for conducting daily matters. She is grateful for being a recipient of Medi-Cal, known as Medi-Care in every other state, health coverage available to low income families. Her children receive free school lunches and her husband collects a disability check in the amount of $700. He earns a wage of $1,600 which brings their total household monthly income to $2,300. Plus, I’m sure their teenage daughters work in either fast food or retail, handing over their earnings to supplement the household costs.

But I was angry, Mexicans have an excellent work ethic, but this work ethnic gets lost in translation when it comes to enrolling in school and getting ahead vocationally with job training and schooling.

I live in San Diego, situated at the busiest land border crossing in the world. I know many African immigrants and refugees. I have one Somali woman in my elementary Arabic class, a mother with daughters attending four year colleges, who speaks excellent English but is fully veiled in the khimar and long dresses.

I am sympathetic to the plight of Latino migrants in this country, but oftentimes, I wonder why they seem content with living a life of hard labor and never seem to try to better themselves through job training and English language skills. I get annoyed when Latino activists call me a self-hater and a “white boy” because of my light skin phenotype and lack of pigmentation.

America is not perfect, but there are opportunities, even for those who do not have the legal right to work in this country. Just from my experience, too many Latino migrants do not take advantage of the programs that are out there though.