Quote of note:

Fox was onto something, however botched his message. We are teaching our children to be very picky about work, with inflated notions of its worth. One day, our children just might get picked off by the global economy, beaten out by the children of immigrants. We might ironically discover that children who started at the bottom and grew up knowing that work was not an option actually had a head start in life.

Vicente Fox's half-truth

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  May 20, 2005

ON STATISTICS alone, it was ludicrous for President Vicente Fox of Mexico to say that Mexicans do the menial work in America ''that not even blacks want to do."

If Fox were to tool around our cities and rural regions he would discover that 26 percent of African-American men and 34 percent of African-American women worked at poverty-level wages in 2003, according to the ''State of Working America, 2004-2005," published by the progressive Economic Policy Institute.

That is not as stunning as the 36 percent of Latino men and the 46 percent of Latina women who work in poverty. But you can still find a whole lot of black women cleaning hotel toilets and black men digging ditches.

What would have been much more accurate would have been, ''There's no doubt that Mexican men and women do the work white men won't do." Only 15 percent of white men work at poverty wages (while 26 percent of white women do so).

But that is not the biggest point of the Fox flap. This notion that Mexicans do the work that Americans don't should bother us at several levels. One is that Americans -- all of us -- have to admit that with our overall wealth, especially when compared to nations like Mexico, we have an enigmatic sense of entitlement.