Sue Mexico for Cost of Education?

* Re “High School District Mulls Suing Mexico,” May 28:

If Anaheim Union High School District trustee Harald Martin is so concerned about the costs of educating students and protecting the taxpayer, why doesn’t he start with something within his direct control?

That would be streamlining his district’s administrative bureaucracy, taking political leadership in fiscal management and seriously questioning the legitimacy of all expenditures.

The answer is that effectively changing the educational bureaucracy requires the highest degree of tact, patience, knowledge and sophistication.

If it is Martin’s desire to use “immigrant bashing” or similar tactics for his own political agenda, he seems out of touch with time (this is 1999, not 1994) and the growing and increasingly sophisticated voting Latino Orange County population.

VICTOR MENDEZ

Aliso Viejo

* Like Harald Martin, I think I’ll sue the U.S. government.

I’ll start out with a class-action lawsuit for denying key land and human rights provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that the U.S. violated when it forced, under a duress that the U.N. would balk at today, weak Mexican leadership into betraying their own people out of their land.

The U.S. would have to pay billions in today’s dollars for stolen land and human suffering. Or I and many of the other descendants, I am sure, would instead accept return of the Southwest territories.

Next, how about a lawsuit against the U.S. for forceful illegal deportation of Mexican American citizens during the 1930s that separated families much like the Serbs have recently done to ethnic Albanians in Kosovo?

Such action caused profound suffering that still reverberates through Mexican American families living in the U.S. today. I am sure they will accept recompense.

From there let’s go on to a class-action lawsuit against, for starters, the state of California, the state agricultural industry and the state garment industry, which, among other things, illegally lure Mexicans from their homes and families, pay them poverty-level wages and deny them sanitary living conditions.

I think that will do it for now.

REUBEN M. QUESADA

Santa Ana

* Harald Martin’s proposal to sue Mexico for the cost of educating children of illegal immigrants is the result of a myopic, simplistic view of reality.

The perpetuators of the constant influx of illegal immigrants are those who employ them. The employers are not the only ones who benefit from hard-working immigrants who are willing to do what no one else will do for substandard wages. We all benefit.

Immigrants cultivate, harvest and process our food, cook, clean, baby-sit, sew and garden for low wages, keeping the cost of goods and services lower than they would be if non-immigrants did those jobs. Taxes paid by these workers are also a significant contribution to the society that loves to scapegoat them.

You can’t have it both ways--exploit a people, collectively profit, then sue for retribution.

If California seriously wanted to end illegal immigration (and I don’t think we do), we would effectively prohibit the employment of illegal immigrants.

Even Martin states that his proposal is unfeasible; more important, the injustice of such an idea is shameful.

MARLYS HARPER

Irvine