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Originally Posted by nekokami
I hope no one is crazy enough to put those kids in her "care" again. But now I'm wondering whose kids they really are and how often their actual parents come by.
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yes, i hope that too, and i'm wondering the same thing, since these babies seem to spend a lot of time here. then again, there are other children in the building (far too many of them), and they make a lot of noise too, so maybe sometimes when i think it's one kid crying it's really a different one. hard to say.
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You've mentioned that the girl doesn't speak English and that you suspected she might be an illegal immigrant. Does she by any chance have any visible ethnicity, and does it match those of the babies? Not that it matters a lot, as I agree they're unlikely to be hers. I just wonder if this illegal baby-watching scheme is going to end up getting tied to a whole community of illegal immigrants or something. After all, why would anyone leave their kids in such poor care if they had a choice?
I don't know that much about immigration laws in France-- here in the US it can be prohibitively difficult to immigrate legally, so there are a lot of people here illegally, and they are generally paid a lot less than legal workers. It wouldn't be at all hard to imagine some of them leaving their kids with an unlicensed teenager while working. 
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i'm pretty sure all the different people involved in this farce are chinese. they're definitely asian, anyway, and we have a very large chinese community in paris and one of the two "chinatown" neighborhoods is very near here, so it seems likely. here too there is a lot of illegal immigration, and given they don't speak any french and seem not to have any papers (according to the police who wanted me to identify the children) it seems likely to me that they are not here legally.
i'm not sure whether that is the reason though, or if it's just a case of tightly-knit immigrant communities sticking together, or maybe just a different cultural attitude towards proper childcare. there is another chinese family in the building (here legally, and who speaks at least a little french). they have 2 older children : the boy is probably around 10 and his sister is maybe 6, i would guess. i found out today (from a neighbor who is friendly with the mother. i'm not, because i can't stand her children, so by extension i can't stand her) that since the parents work, they just leave the two of them alone all day. that explains a lot : those two kids are hellions, and frequently the object of my rotten tomato / water balloon through the window fantasies. before i was furious with the parents because they didn't keep their kids in check ; now i'm furious because they're not even home to do that.
i find the whole situation a bit hard to take, every detail of this is just wrong.