There's a common saying that comes up any time mayhem is committed by illegal immigrants:

Import the third world, get the third world.

The examples that trigger this saying tend to be crimes that happen everywhere -- murder, robbery, rape, assault -- though the frequencies differ from country to country.

What is common to the third world though, is something more subtle, known as 'informality': the phenomeon of living without rule of law (or property rights).

In any country where you see big shack cities ringing a country's capital on its outskirts, you've got sizable evidence of what Peruvian economists Hernando de Soto identified as 'informality,' meaning, people lack title deed to their homes, cannot sell them, cannot take loans on them, cannot improve them, and don't have access to any true rule of law, though it's common that gangs set up informal rules, and enforce them through force. The strange thing is, the residents of these places are effectively treated like illegal aliens in their own countries, which if that's the case, makes it pretty easy to pull up stakes and live as an illegal alien in another country. After all, what's the difference?

De Soto described this in two brilliant books he wrote a couple decades ago: The Other Path and the Mystery of Capital. David Freddoso wrote an excellent piece about his thinking for Investor's Business Daily in 2015 here.

In the San Fernando Valley area ringing Los Angeles, which is loaded with illegal immigrants, there was an infuriating case of a sports coach who murdered a child in his care.

Illegal alien Mario Edgardo Garcia Aquino, a Salvadoran, was arrested for murdering Oscar Omar Hernandez, a 13-year-old from Honduras, very likely also an illegal immigrant here with his family. The Times reported that the coach invited the kid to help make soccer jerseys at his home in Palmdale and then commited a lewd act against him, which cops believe the child objected to. They found the boy's body in another county, and eventually the cops caught up to the coach.

The Los Angeles Times tried to write sympathetically about the impact of the crime on the community, describing it as thus:

For years, the bright green turf of Whitsett Fields Park has served as a joyous hub for Los Angeles youth soccer — particularly for thousands of immigrant families in the San Fernando Valley.

On most weekends, the sprawling North Hollywood complex echoes with the shouts of hundreds of boys and girls, as vendors hawk aguas frescas, balloons and candy along the sidelines.

But recently, immense grief and worry have settled over this close, Latin American community.

Just last week, a well-known coach and Salvadoran national was charged with murder in the killing of 13-year-old soccer player Oscar Omar Hernandez during a lewd or attempted lewd act and then dumping the boy’s body in a roadside ditch in Ventura County. The coach, Mario Edgardo Garcia Aquino, who has not yet entered a plea, has also been charged with sexually assaulting another teen and investigators say there are probably more victims who have yet to come forward.

The teen’s slaying has left many in the youth soccer community profoundly shaken. Some say their faith in a long-trusted institution has been broken, and they question why the coach wasn’t scrutinized more carefully before he was allowed to work so closely with children.

“We have never seen anything of this magnitude,” said José Torres, president of the Proyecto 2000 Soccer League in the San Fernando Valley.

I have great sympathy for them, whatever their immigration status, and if the accused is found guilty, I want him to get the absolute maximum sentence, plus imprisonment in the worst hole the authorities can find for him if they can't get him the death penalty. For an adult to murder a trusting child for pervert reasons is beyond the pale. That CECOT prison in El Salvador was built for people who commit such acts. If a jury finds him guilty, it sounds like the ideal place.

But I can't help but wonder how it could be that this could happen, too.

Sure, it's likely the left will blame America, but just the state of being illegally here made it a lot easier to have happened than it otherwise would have been.

To start, the immigrants emphasized to the Times that they are nice country people unusued to anything so horrible happening.

He and his mother arrived in Los Angeles from the small town of Marcala in Honduras three years ago while his father and the rest of his siblings had already established themselves in the Sun Valley neighborhood.

The boy’s older sister, Alejandra Hernandez, said she sometimes chided her brother for being so trusting, and told her brother that he didn’t always have to talk to people if they greeted him.

“He came from Honduras and we grew up there in the countryside, so we don’t have people like that there, people who are so bad, so crazy,” she said.

That's a little odd, given Honduras's famous crime rate. There are a lot of bad people in that country and in neighboring countries. All the same, she may be telling the truth. The pictures show Marcala as pretty sylvan. Criminals tend to live where the encircling shantytowns -- and the informal sectors -- are. They seem to have come from a remote village of 15,000 not far from the Salvadoran border.

And so they came here three years ago? That sounds like Biden's border surge, though the reporter didn't ask.

Score one for likely informality right there, informal immigration status. After that, everything surrounding them was unofficial, in the shadows, and they were forced to trust people who weren't trustworthy.

The report also says they lived in Sun Valley.

I've been to Sun Valley; I got lost there when I headed to North Hollywood for an event a few years ago.

It was memorable.

It was a bleak place where every sign and billboard was in Spanish, and everything advertised was all about being an illegal alien. It probably has more illegal immigrants than American citizens. Every billboard sign and shopfront was geared toward servicing illegals -- from lawyers to urgings to claim government benefits to sending money home, in addition to storefronts catering to Central American and Mexican immigrants with goods from their homelands.

It was to say the least, informal-looking, with little evidence of anyone owning their own homes. Texas is said to house actual communities that are informal in this way. Obviously, so does Los Angeles. And they are run almost exactly like the shack cities of Tijuana or Caracas -- informally.

Then there was the soccer league itself. The story describes how the boy met the coach as part of his participation in an uncertified soccer league. While we have seen awful things from sports leagues, including the Olympics, the informality, again, enabled the accused soccer coach to move about without scrutiny that other coaches might draw. There had been complaints, but because he was in an unofficial soccer league, he managed to evade scrutiny.

“There are a lot of people in fear,” acknowledged Carballo, who said that Garcia Aquino’s team was not affiliated with Naciones Unidas.

“About eight years ago, he wanted to join my club, but he never wanted to submit to his fingerprints,” recalled Álvaro Chávez, director and president of the U.S. Soccer affiliated Spartans FC. After Garcia Aquino failed to submit to the requirements, Chávez barred him from his club.

Chávez believes that Garcia Aquino remained in independent leagues because he was unwilling to submit to the paperwork required by youth associations affiliated with U.S. Soccer.

Why wasn't there a U.S. Soccer league there that would have screened this predator out? (Goodness knows, they could have found some talent there.)

Informality seems to have pervaded the lives these people lived, though the accused killer, who seems to have been in this country for years, had also figured out how to utilize the formal system to his advantage in addition to the informal sector. Call him bicultural.

Why wasn't he repatriated years ago as an illegal alien? How'd he come to own a home? And did he vote? He certainly had his ties to the formal sector, despite being here illegally, which the poor victims, newly arrived, clearly did not have.

The victim's family did seem to be economic migrants. An ABC7 report said that the boy was excited to have just gotten his first visa, which would enable him to travel home to Honduras and see the rest of his family.

Why wouldn't he have had a visa earlier? If he were a legal immigrant, he would have.

It sounds as though he may have been a DACA kid, the twilight status of which allows homeland visits. That means he came from a family of economic migrants, rather than true asylum cases. A true asylum recipient would not want to travel back to the homeland he sought asylum from, and indeed would lose asylum status if he did.

Informal housing, informal legal status, informal soccer league -- and it doesn't take long for a predator to figure out how to take advantage of the weaknesses of informality, which has expanded much in the U.S. since Joe Biden's border surge, and then commit heinous crimes.

The entire world these people lived in opened the door to this terrible outcome. While I'm not going to blame the victims here, it shows how informality builds on informality until finally, a criminal gets into the picture and uses it to his own evil ends.  That was the world they lived in, and it's terrible that a child was the victim in the end. It's always the children, as we have seen, again and again, who pay the price -- sex-trafficked, forced into child labor, 'disappeared' or victims of criminals -- of this outrageous border surge.

Informality has tremendous costs.

Image: X screen shot