November 30, 2007 [LINK / comment]
If you lived in a country where most cops and judges are on the take, you'd probably get fed up with being cheated all the time and leave at your first opportunity. Sadly, that's the situation in much of Latin America and the Third World in general. Jim Patrick, a member of the Shenandoah County Board of Supervisors, made this point to bring attention to one of the basic reasons why people from Mexico and further south are so desperate to come to the United States. He includes a chart that compares corruption in various regions around the world, based on data from Transparency International. Patrick raised this point at a forum on immigration in Harrisonburg which I attended back in June, and moderator Chris Graham brusquely ruled it out of order.