THE LA RAZA MEXICAN CRIME TIDAL WAVE
40% of Federal Criminal Cases in 2013 Were in Districts
on Mexican Border
LA RAZA MEX GANGS POUR OVER OUR BORDERS WITH CHILDREN
The Immigrant Gang Plague
Hispanic gang violence is spreading across the country, the sign of a new underclass in the making.
Summer 2004
Before immigration optimists issue another rosy prognosis for
America’s multicultural future, they might visit Belmont High School in Los
Angeles’s overwhelmingly Hispanic, gang-ridden Rampart district. “Upward and
onward” is not a phrase that comes to mind when speaking to the first- and
second-generation immigrant teens milling around the school this January.
“Most of the people I used to hang out with
when I first came to the school have dropped out,” observes Jackie, a vivacious
illegal alien from Guatemala. “Others got kicked out or got into drugs. Five
graduated, and four home girls got pregnant.”
Certainly, none of the older teens I met
outside Belmont was on track to graduate. Jackie herself flunked ninth grade
(“I used to ditch a lot,” she explains) and never caught up. She is now
pursuing a General Equivalency Diploma—a watered-down certificate for dropouts
or expelled students—in the school’s “adult” division. Vanessa, who sports a
tiny horseshoe protruding from her nostrils, is applying to the adult division,
too, having been kicked out of Belmont at age 18. “I didn’t come to school very
often,” says this American-born child of illegal aliens from El Salvador. Her
boyfriend, Albert, a dashing 19-year-old with long, slicked-back hair, got
expelled for truancy but has talked his way back into the regular high school.
“I have good manipulative skills,” he smiles. After a robbery conviction,
Albert was put on probation but broke every rule in the book: “Curfews, grades,
attendance, missed court days,” he boasts. “But they still let me off the
hook.”
These Belmont teens are no aberration.
Hispanic youths, whether recent arrivals or birthright American citizens, are
developing an underclass culture. (By “Hispanic” here, I mean the population
originating in Latin America—above all, in Mexico—as distinct from America’s
much smaller Puerto Rican and Dominican communities of Caribbean descent, which
have themselves long shown elevated crime and welfare rates.) Hispanic school
dropout rates and teen birthrates are now the highest in the nation. Gang crime
is exploding nationally—rising 50 percent from 1999 to 2002—driven by the march
of Hispanic immigration east and north across the country. Most worrisome,
underclass indicators like crime and single parenthood do not improve over
successive generations of Hispanics—they worsen.
Debate has recently heated up over whether
Mexican immigration—unique in its scale and in other important ways—will defeat
the American tradition of assimilation. The rise of underclass behavior among
the progeny of Mexicans and other Central Americans must be part of that
debate. There may be assimilation going on, but a significant portion of it is
assimilation downward to the worst elements of American life. To be sure, most
Hispanics are hardworking, law-abiding residents; they have reclaimed squalid
neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles and elsewhere. Among the dozens of
Hispanic youths I interviewed, several expressed gratitude for the United
States, a sentiment that would be hard to find among the ordinary run of
teenagers. But given the magnitude of present immigration levels, if only a
portion of those from south of the border goes bad, the costs to society will
be enormous.
The Soledad Enrichment Action Charter School in South Central
Los Angeles is at the vortex of L.A.’s gang culture. Next door to a
rose-colored, angel-bedecked church, the boxy school glowers behind barred
gates like those that surround prisons. Soledad’s students, about half blacks
and half Hispanics, have been kicked out of other schools. They have brought
violence with them. In early March, a gunman opened fire on 20 students
entering the school at 7:30 am, wounding two. Tensions were high again as school
let out one day this April. A boy had been sent home earlier for fighting; the
question now was, would he return to retaliate? The school’s probation officer
radioed the LAPD’s 77th Division to plead for some officers to keep watch,
without success. As the students, dressed in plain white T-shirts, filed out to
the sidewalk, two burly security guards and a gang counselor warily eyed the
street.
Asked about gangs, the teens proudly reel
off their affiliations: SOK (Still Out Killing); HTO (Hispanics Taking Over);
JMC (Just Mobbing Crazy). A cocky American-born child of Salvadoran parents
says that most of his peers from the eighth grade are “locked up or dead.”
“Four are dead—three were shot, one was run over.” Were you just lucky? I ask.
“They were gangbanging more than me,” says the 17-year-old, who won’t give his
name. “I try to control myself, respect my parents.” That respect only goes so
far. Asked if he’s been in jail, he swaggers: “Yup, for GTA”—grand theft auto.
And he has no intention of leaving his gang: “They’re the homeys, part of the
family.”
Eighteen-year-old Eric, born here to an
illegal Mexican and Guatemalan, is one of the few students I talked to who
doesn’t gangbang, though he is on probation for second-degree robbery, his
second conviction. Half his friends from elementary school are involved in
crime, he says. Of course, gang problems in Los Angeles schools are hardly
confined to academies for delinquents like Soledad. Gang fights in some of
L.A.’s regular high schools draw such crowds that youthful pickpockets have a
field day working the spectators and participants. “People would steal your
pagers and cell phones,” reports one student who has bounced through several
schools.
David O’Connell, pastor of the church next door to Soledad,
has been fighting L.A.’s gang culture for over a decade. He rues the “ferocious
stuff” that is currently coming out of Central America, sounding weary and
pessimistic. But “what’s more frightening,” he says, “is the disengagement from
adults.” Hispanic children feel that they have to deal with problems
themselves, apart from their parents, according to O’Connell, and they “do so
in violent ways.” The adults, for their part, start to fear young people,
including their own children.
The pull to a culture of violence among
Hispanic children begins earlier and earlier, O’Connell says. Researchers and
youth workers across the country confirm his observation. In Chicago, gangs
start recruiting kids at age nine, according to criminologists studying
policing and social trends in the Windy City. The Chicago Community Policing
Evaluation Consortium concluded that gangs have become fully integrated into
Hispanic youth culture; even children not in gangs emulate their attitudes,
dress, and self-presentation. The result is a community in thrall.
Non-affiliated children fear traveling into unknown neighborhoods and sometimes
drop out of school for lack of protection. Adults are just as scared. They may
know who has been spray-painting their garage, for example, but won’t tell the
police for fear that their car will be torched in retaliation. “It’s like we’re
in our own little jails that we can’t leave,” said a resident. “There isn’t an
uninfested place nearby.”
Washington, D.C., reports the same
“ever-younger” phenomenon. “Recruitment is starting early in middle school,”
says Lori Kaplan, head of D.C.’s Latin American Youth Center. With early
recruitment comes a high school dropout rate of 50 percent. “Gang culture is
gaining more recruits than our ability to get kids out,” Kaplan laments. “We
can get this kid out, but two or three will take his place.” In May, an
18-year-old member of the Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha gang used a machete to
chop off four left fingers and nearly sever the right hand of a 16-year-old
South Side Locos rival in the Washington suburbs.
Ernesto Vega, a 19-year-old Mexican illegal
who grew up in New York City, estimates that most 12- to 14-year-old Mexicans
and Mexican-Americans in New York are in gangs for protection. “If you’re
Mexican, you can’t go to parties by yourself,” he says. “People will ask, ‘Who
you down with? Que barrio?’ They be checkin’ you out. But if it’s 20 of
you, and 20 of them, then it’s OK.”
For some children, the choice is: get beat up once a week, or
get beat up once to enter the gang. Others join for the prestige and sense of
belonging. Mario Flores was one of them; he joined Santa Ana, California’s,
Westside Compadres. “When I was 13, I was like, ‘Wow.’ I wanted them to jump
me,” he says in the soft near-whisper of the cool. “They’re like, ‘You want to
get down?’ They got to jumping at you, they go to call you, ‘Trips from
Westside Comps’—you feel good.”
Flores (or “Trips”) is a depressing
specimen of gang culture: uneducated and barely articulate. He’s sitting on the
other side of a Plexiglas window in the Santa Ana Central Jail, talking to me
over a phone. In and out of jail with dazzling regularity over the last three
years, he most recently left prison on April 14; on April 21, he was arrested
again on a rape charge. Born in Portland, Oregon, but raised in Mexico, Flores
went to live with cousins in San Bernardino, California, at age 13 and has been
traveling the Southern California gang circuit—Riverside County, Santa Ana,
East L.A.—ever since. Now 20, he is slender and finely chiseled. Gang hand
gestures accompany his speech like hieroglyphics. “When I saw gang members,” he
says, pointing first to his eyes, then outward, “they’re like, ‘Are you down
with my shit?’ ‘I’m down!’ ” I ask if he speaks English or Spanish with his
gang. “You speak Chicano,” he says. “ ‘Hey, homey!’ You mostly talk English,
you’ve got some good words. But the way you talk, you don’t talk good. You
don’t talk like other people.”
Flores expresses the fierce attachment to
territory that is the sine qua non of gang identity. “I was like, ‘I love my
neighborhood. If you don’t love my neighborhood, I’m going to fuck you up.’ ”
Charles Beck, captain of the LAPD’s Rampart Division, marvels at this emotion.
“They all come from identical neighborhoods, identical families, and go to
identical schools, and yet they hate each other with a passion.” The
territorial instincts can only be compared to the Balkans, says Corporal Kevin
Ruiz, a Santa Ana gang investigator. “There’s people who all they do is patrol
gang boundaries. They’re like me, in a way: I’m looking for bad guys; they look
for rivals.”
“Trips” showed his love for Santa Ana’s
Westside Compadres by doing “missions”—robbing bars, stealing wallets and cell
phones, selling drugs—to raise money for the gang. “If a big homey told me to
fuck someone up, I had to,” he explains. The gang reciprocated by giving him a
place to stay—when he was bringing in cash. Otherwise he lived in cars or on
the street, sometimes in a hotel.
The chance that Flores will ever become a
productive member of society is slight. Routinely kicked out of high school for
fighting, he lacks rudimentary skills. Like many prisoners, he claims to be
reading the Bible and thanking Jesus, but such prison conversions rarely last.
His personal life is troubled: “My lady, she mad at me”—not surprisingly, given
his most recent rape charge—and Flores is not certain she will be waiting for
him when he gets out of jail. Most likely, Flores will continue contributing to
the Hispanicization of prisons in California: in 1970, Hispanics were 12
percent of the state’s population and 16 percent of new prison admits; by 1998,
they were 30 percent of the California population, and 42 percent of new
admits.
Even as it reaches down to ever-younger recruits, gang culture
is growing more lethal. In April, 16-year-old Valentino Arenas drove up to a
courthouse in Pomona, California, and shot to death a randomly chosen
California Highway Patrol officer, in the hope of gaining entry to Pomona’s
12th Street Gang. The assassination wouldn’t surprise Dennis Farrell, a Nassau
County, New York, homicide detective. “We’re amazed at the openness of
shootings,” he says. “When we do cases with Hispanic gangs, we often get full
statements of admission, almost like they don’t see what’s the big deal.”
The unwritten code that moderated gang
violence three or four decades ago has now fallen away. “When I grew up,” says
Santa Ana native and gang investigator Kevin Ruiz, “there were rules of
engagement: no shooting at churches or at home. Now, no one is immune.” One of
Ruiz’s colleagues on the Santa Ana police force, Mona Ruiz (no relation), spent
her adolescence in Santa Ana gangs; now she tries to get kids out. “Back then,”
she says, “if someone got jumped, you responded with fistfights, not guns. Guns
started in the 1980s.” Earlier gangbangers even showed a certain fastidiousness
of dress: “Guys used to iron their jeans for two hours,” Mona Ruiz recalls.
“Then they wouldn’t sit down” to avoid marring the crease. All that changed
when heroin hit, she says.
The constant invasion of illegal aliens is
worsening gang violence as well. In Phoenix, Arizona, and surrounding Maricopa
County, illegal alien gangs, such as Brown Pride and Wetback Power, are growing
more volatile and dangerous, according to Tom Bearup, a former sheriff’s
department official and current candidate for sheriff. Even in prison, where
they clash with American Hispanics, they are creating a more vicious
environment.
Upward mobility to the suburbs doesn’t
necessarily break the allure of gang culture. An immigration agent reports that
in the middle-class suburbs of southwest Miami, second- and third-generation
Hispanic youths are perpetrating home invasions, robberies, battery, drug
sales, and rape. Kevin Ruiz knows students at the University of California,
Irvine who retain their gang connections. Prosecutors in formerly crime-free
Ventura County, California, sought an injunction this May against the Colonia
Chiques gang after homicides rocketed up; an affidavit supporting the injunction
details how Chiques members terrorize the local hospital whenever one of the
gang arrives with a gunshot wound. Federal law enforcement officials in
Virginia are tracking with alarm the spread of gang violence from Northern
Virginia west into the Shenandoah Valley and south toward Charlottesville, a
trend so disturbing that they secured federal funds this May to stanch the
mayhem. “This is beyond a regional problem. It is, in fact, a national
problem,” said FBI assistant director Michael Mason, head of the bureau’s
Washington field office.
Open-borders apologists dismiss the
Hispanic crime threat by observing that black crime rates are even higher.
True, but irrelevant: the black population is not growing, whereas Hispanic
immigration is reaching virtually every part of the country, sometimes
radically changing local demographics. With a felony arrest rate up to triple
that of whites, Hispanics can dramatically raise community crime levels.
Many cops and youth workers blame the increase in gang appeal
on the disintegration of the Hispanic family. The trends are worsening,
especially for U.S.-born Hispanics. In California, 67 percent of children of
U.S.-born Hispanic parents lived in an intact family in 1990; by 1999, that
number had dropped to 56 percent. The percentage of Hispanic children living
with a single mother in California rose from 18 percent in 1990 to 29 percent
in 1999. Nationally, single-parent households constituted 25 percent of all
Hispanic households with minor children in 1980; by 2000, the proportion had
jumped to 34 percent.
The trends in teen parenthood—the marker of
underclass behavior—will almost certainly affect the crime and gang rate.
Hispanics now outrank blacks for teen births; Mexican teens have higher
birthrates than Puerto Ricans, previously the most “ghettoized” Hispanic
subgroup in terms of welfare use and out-of-wedlock child-rearing. In 2002,
there were 83.4 births per 1,000 Hispanic females between ages 15 and 19,
compared with 66.6 among blacks, 28.5 among non-Hispanic whites, and 18.3 among
Asians. Perhaps these young Hispanic mothers are giving birth as wives?
Unlikely. In California, where Latina teens have the highest birthrate of teens
in any state, 79 percent of teen births to U.S.-born Latinas in 1999 were to unmarried
girls.
According to the many young Hispanics I
spoke to, more and more girls are getting pregnant. “This year was the worst
for pregnancies,” says Liliana, an American-born senior at Manual Arts High
School near downtown Los Angeles. “A lot of girls get abortions; some drop
out.” Are girls ashamed when they get pregnant? I wonder. “Not at all,” Liliana
responds. Among Hispanic teens, at least, if not among their parents, the
stigma of single parenthood has vanished. I asked Jackie, the Guatemalan GED student
at L.A.’s Belmont High, if her pregnant friends subsequently got married. She
guffawed. George, an 18-year-old of Salvadoran background who was kicked out of
Manual Arts six months ago for a vicious fight, estimates that most girls at
the school are having sex by age 16.
Mexican and Central American immigration to New York City is
of much more recent vintage than in California, but young Mexicans in New York
have quickly assimilated to underclass sexual behavior. Nineteen-year-old
Ernesto Vega reports that his oldest sister dropped out of school at 17 and got
pregnant the next year. “I heard her boyfriend came from Mexico to work, but he
wasn’t working. He was on the street.” Ernesto says. Then the boyfriend got
arrested, probably on drug charges. “He says he was arrested for doing nothing,
but they don’t arrest you for doing nothing.”
Ernesto knows three or four
Mexican-American girls with babies, including a 16-year-old with two daughters.
“Another just got pregnant this year,” he says. “She’s 15.” None is married.
None has a GED or will go to college. As for the fathers of their children?
“The boys be leaving the girls alone,” Vega says. “The boy goes away.”
Some Hispanic parents valiantly try to
impose old-fashioned consequences on teen pregnancies, but they are losing the
battle. Vega’s father, a building superintendent and hardware store clerk,
angrily told his pregnant daughter, according to Vega: “You gotta go live with
[the boyfriend]. I now want nothing to do with you!” The boyfriend offered to
take the girl into the apartment he was sharing with a female acquaintance, but
she wanted her own place. Eventually, she persuaded her father to take her
back, but only on the condition that she work. She now sells Yankee
paraphernalia on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.
Traditional and contemporary family values
continued to clash throughout the pregnancy. Although the boyfriend vanished
until the birth, he showed up at Vega’s house with his whole family when the
girl returned from the hospital with her newborn. “He took his three sisters
and his mother; one sister took the nephews.” Vega recalls. The boyfriend’s
demand: you have to decide where to live. The girl told him to take a hike. The
family delegation, Vega judges, already adapting to American individualist
norms, was inappropriate. “The problem was not with the families,” he says,
“but between him and her.”
In one respect, Central American immigrants
break the mold of traditional American underclass behavior: they work. Even so,
Mexican welfare receipt is twice as high as that of natives, in large part
because Mexican-American incomes are so low, and remain low over successive
generations. Disturbingly, welfare use actually rises between the second and
third generation—to 31 percent of all third-generation Mexican-American
households. Illegal Hispanics make liberal use of welfare, too, by putting
their American-born children on public assistance: in Orange County,
California, nearly twice as many Hispanic welfare cases are for children of
illegal aliens as for legal families.
More troublingly, some Hispanics combine
work with gangbanging. Gang detectives in Long Island’s Suffolk County know
when members of the violent Salvadoran MS-13 gang get off work from their
lawn-maintenance or pizzeria jobs, and can follow them to their gang meetings.
Mexican gang members in rural Pennsylvania, which saw two gang homicides in
late April, also often work in landscaping and construction.
On the final component of underclass behavior—school
failure—Hispanics are in a class by themselves. No other group drops out in
greater numbers. In Los Angeles, only 48 percent of Hispanic ninth-graders
graduate, compared with a 56 percent citywide graduation rate and a 70 percent
nationwide rate. In 2000, nearly 30 percent of Hispanics between the ages of 16
and 24 were high school dropouts nationwide, compared with about 13 percent of
blacks and about 7 percent of whites.
The constant inflow of barely literate
recent Mexican arrivals unquestionably brings down Hispanic education levels.
But later American-born generations don’t brighten the picture much. While
Mexican-Americans make significant education gains between the first and second
generation, adding 3.5 years of schooling, progress stalls in the next
generation, economists Jeffrey Grogger and Stephen Trejo have found.
Third-generation Mexican-Americans remain three times as likely to drop out of
high school than whites and one and a half times as likely to drop out as
blacks. They complete college at one-third the rate of whites. Mexican-Americans
are assimilating not to the national schooling average, observed the Federal
Reserve Bank of Dallas this June, but to the dramatically lower “Hispanic
average.” In educational outcomes, concluded the bank, “Ethnicity matters.”
No one knows why this is so. Every parent I
spoke to said that she wanted her children to do well in school and go to
college. Yet the message is often not getting across. “Hispanic parents are the
kind of parents that leave it to others,” explains an unwed Salvadoran welfare mother
in Santa Ana. “We don’t get that involved.” A news director of a Southern
California Spanish radio station expresses frustration at the passivity toward
education and upward mobility he sees in his own family. “I tried to knock the
‘Spanglish’ accent out of my niece and get rid of that crap,” he says. “But the
mother was completely nihilistic about her child. It’s going to take direct
action from Americans to Americanize Hispanics.”
Perhaps the answer to the disconnect
between stated parental goals and educational outcomes lies in Hispanic
culture’s traditional suspicion of education. Santa Ana police officer Mona
Ruiz recounts a joke told by comedian George Lopez: “When a white person
graduates, people say, ‘You did good.’ When a Mexican graduates, people say,
‘You think you’re better than us.’ ” The lure of an immediate income often
proves more compelling than a four- to eight-year investment in
self-improvement. New Yorker Ernesto Vega says he knows “Mexicans with papers”
who drop out of high school. “They young. They say, ‘I’m going to start
working, I don’t need school.’ ” But Vega has no illusions about the
consequences: “Even with papers, you’re only making $300 a week as a delivery
boy in restaurants, because you don’t know anything else.”
Proponents of unregulated immigration simply ignore the
growing underclass problem among later generations of Hispanics, with its
attendant gang involvement and teen pregnancy. When pressed, open-borders
advocates dismiss worries about the Hispanic future with their favorite
comparison between Mexicans and Italians. Popularized by political analyst
Michael Barone in The New Americans, the analogy goes like this: a
century ago, Italian immigrants anticipated the Mexican influx, above all in
their disregard for education. They dropped out of school in high numbers—yet
they eventually prospered and joined the mainstream. Therefore, argue Barone
and others, Mexicans will, too.
But the analogy is flawed. To begin with,
the magnitude of Mexican immigration renders all historical comparisons
irrelevant, as Harvard historian Samuel Huntington argues in his latest book, Who
Are We?. In 2000, Mexicans constituted nearly 30 percent of the
foreign-born population in the U.S.; the next two largest groups were the
Chinese (5 percent) and Filipinos (4 percent). By contrast, at the turn of the
twentieth century, the largest immigrant group, Germans, made up only 15
percent of the foreign-born population. In 1910, Great Britain, Germany,
Ireland, and Italy, in that order, sent the most migrants to the U.S.; Italians
made up only 17 percent of the combined total. English-speakers made up over
half the new arrivals; there was no chance that Italian would become the
dominant language in any part of the country. By contrast, half of today’s
immigrants speak Spanish.
Equally important, the flow of newcomers
came to an abrupt halt after World War I and did not resume until 1965. This
long pause allowed the country ample opportunity to Americanize the
foreign-born and their children. Today, no end is in sight to the migration
from Mexico and its neighbors, which continually reinforces Mexican culture in
American Hispanic communities and seems likely to do so for decades into the
future.
Contemporary Hispanic immigration also differs from the
classic Ellis Island model in that the ease of cross-border travel and
communication allows Mexican and Central American immigrants to keep at least
one foot planted in their native land. Meanwhile, the Mexican government does
everything it can to bind Mexican migrants psychologically to the home country,
in order to safeguard the annual $12 billion flow of remittances. It encourages
dual nationality, and Mexicans in the U.S. can now run for office in Mexico. A
Yolo County, California, tomato farmer has already been elected mayor of Jerez.
Not surprisingly, Mexicans and other Central Americans have the lowest rates of
naturalization of all immigrants—less than 30 percent in 1990, compared with
two-thirds of qualified immigrants from major European sending countries, the
Philippines, and Hong Kong.
Even Mexico’s former foreign minister,
Jorge Castaneda, acknowledges the unprecedented character of Hispanic
immigration. “Mexican immigration,” he wrote recently, “does have distinctive
traits that do make [assimilation] difficult, if not impossible. This is . . .
a matter of history.” That “history” holds that the U.S. robbed Mexico of its
natural territory in the nineteenth century, as some Mexican immigrants never
seem to forget. “It’s kind of scary,” says Santa Ana gang intervention officer
Mona Ruiz. “I hear, ‘I was here first; this used to be Mexico. You stole it
from us.’ ” Mexican-American Ruiz is herself called a “traitor” for becoming
Americanized.
While proponents of the “reconquista” of
“Alta California” (as Mexican nationalists call the lost territory) are a small
minority of Hispanic immigrants, a much larger proportion hold on to their
Hispanic identities. Few of the American-born students I spoke to in Southern
California identified themselves as “American.” Many said they were “Mexican,”
“Latino,” or “Mexican-American”—usages encouraged by the multicultural dogma in
the schools, a far cry from the Americanization efforts of classrooms a century
ago.
Michael Barone’s Italian-Mexican comparison also ignores the
differences between the U.S. economies of 1904 and 2004. While Italian dropouts
in 1904 could make their way into the middle class by working in the booming
manufacturing sector or plying their existing craftsman skills, that is far
more difficult today, given the decline of factory jobs and the rise of the
knowledge-based economy. As the limited education of Mexican-Americans
depresses their wages, their sense of being stuck in an economic backwater
breeds resentment. “The second generation becomes angry with America, as they
see their fathers faltering,” observes Cesar Barrios, an outreach worker for
the Tepeyac Association, a social services agency for Mexicans in New York
City. This resentment only increases the lure of underclass culture, with its
rebellious rejection of conventional norms, according to Barrios. For this
reason, he says, many young Mexicans “prefer to imitate blacks than white
people.”
The Spanish-language media, which reaches
two-thirds of all Hispanics, reinforces the sense of grievance. Stories about
America’s cruelties to immigrants and the country’s shocking failure to
legalize illegal aliens dominate news coverage. A billboard for Los Angeles’s
Spanish newspaper La Opinión conveys the usual tone: “Justice,” “Abuse,”
“Deportation,” and other hot-button topics blare out in massive lettering.
Chicago provides a cautionary tale about
high levels of Hispanic immigration combined with an ever more powerful
underclass ethic. During the 1990s, the Hispanic population in Chicago grew 38
percent, to 754,000, and became increasingly concentrated in the city’s
barrios. Education levels and fluency in English dropped lower and lower, while
serious crime, social disorder, and physical decay grew in direct proportion to
the number of Spanish-speaking Latinos. After a neighborhood became more than
60 percent Latino, physical decay—including graffiti, trash-filled vacant lots,
and abandoned cars—jumped disproportionately. By 2001, social pathology among
Spanish-speaking Latinos was higher than for any other racial or ethnic group.
There are many counterexamples that show a salutary effect of
Hispanic immigration. Santa Ana, California, at 76 percent Latino the most
heavily Spanish-speaking city of its size in the country, has cleaned up the
seedy bars from its downtown area and replaced them with palm trees and
benches, in large part thanks to a newly created business improvement district.
Many homes in Santa Ana’s wealthier Mexican neighborhoods sport exuberant roses
and bougainvillea in their front yards, and students I spoke to there wanted to
become lawyers, architects, and medical technicians. In predominantly Mexican
East Los Angeles, housing prices are soaring along with the rest of the
Southern California housing market: a 1928 two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow with
a lawn gone to seed was listed at $265,000 this April. And in increasingly
Hispanic South Central L.A., tiny bodegas selling milk, diapers, and piñatas
are replacing liquor stores.
Yet a seemingly innocuous block in Santa
Ana can host five to eight households dedicated to gangbanging or drug sales. A
front yard may be relatively trash-free; inside the house, a different matter
entirely, says Santa Ana cop Kevin Ruiz. “I’ve been to three houses just this
week where they made a mountain of trash in the backyard or changed their
baby’s diaper by throwing it over the couch. They don’t use the indoor
plumbing, while letting their dogs go to the bathroom on the carpet.” Ruiz
drives by the modest tract home where his Mexican father, who worked in Orange
County’s farming industry, raised him in the 1950s. A car with a shattered
windshield, a trailer, and minivan sit in the backyard, surrounded by piles of
junk and a mattress leaning on the garage door. “My mom taught us that even if
you’re poor, you should be neat,” he says, shaking his head. Fifty-year-old men
are still dressing like chollos (Chicano gangsters), Ruiz says, and
fathers are ordering barbers to shave their young sons bald in good gang
tradition.
Without prompting, Ruiz brings up the million-dollar
question: “I don’t see assimilation,” he says. “They want to hold on [to
Hispanic culture].” Ruiz thinks that
today’s Mexican immigrant is a “totally different kind of person” from the
past. Some come with a chip on their shoulder toward the United States, he
says, which they blame for the political and economic failure of their home
countries. Rather than aggressively seizing the opportunities available to
them, especially in education, they have learned to play the victim card, he thinks.
Ruiz advocates a much more aggressive approach. “We need to explain, ‘We’ll
help you assimilate up to a certain point, but then you have to take advantage
of what’s here.’ ”
Ruiz’s observations will strike anyone who
has hired eager Mexican and Central American workers as incredible. I pressed
him repeatedly, insisting that Americans see Mexican immigrants as cheerful and
hardworking, but he was adamant. “We’re creating an underclass,” he maintained.
Immigration optimists, ever ready to
trumpet the benefits of today’s immigration wave, have refused to acknowledge
its costs. Foremost among them are skyrocketing gang crime and an expanding
underclass. Until the country figures out how to reduce these costs,
maintaining the current open-borders regime is folly. We should enforce our
immigration laws and select immigrants on skills and likely upward mobility,
not success in sneaking across the border.
ACCORDING TO CA ATTORNEY GEN
KAMALA HARRIS, NEARLY HALF OF ALL
MURDERS IN CA ARE NOW BY MEXICAN
GANGS.
206 Most wanted criminals in Los Angeles. Out of 206
criminals--183 are hispanic---171 of those are wanted for Murder.
LA RAZA GANG
B ITCH MARIA “CHATA” LEON… A MEX MOMMA OPERATING HER OWN MASSIVE DRUG CARTEL IN LA
RAZA-OCCUPIED MEXIFORNIA
“In Mexico, a recent Zogby poll declared that
the vast majority of Mexican citizens hate Americans. [22.2] Mexico is a
country saturated with racism, yet in denial, having never endured the social
development of a Civil Rights movement like in the US--Blacks are harshly
treated while foreign Whites are often seen as the enemy. [22.3] In fact,
racism as workplace discrimination can be seen across the US anywhere the
illegal alien Latino works--the vast majority of the workforce is usually
strictly Latino, excluding Blacks, Whites, Asians, and others.”
AMERICAN’S FIGHTING
OBAMA’S FORCED LA RAZA OCCUPATION:
Patriots in Murrieta,
CA Fight Obama’s Alien Invasion
The Justice Department’s National Gang Intelligence Center
(NGIC) claims that Latino street gangs like the MS-13 are responsible for the
majority of violent crimes in the U.S. and are the primary distributors of most
illicit drugs.
JUDICIAL WATCH
Mexican criminals swarm America’s open and undefended
borders
KNIFING AND
STABBING!
LA RAZA GANG
INFESTED LOS ANGELES, A DUMPSTER WELFARE COLONY OF MEXICO’S…
REP. XAVIER
BECERRA and the LA RAZA-OCCUPIED Mexican dumpster of LOS ANGELES
HOW LA RAZA FASCIST REP. XAVIER BECERRA HELPED MEXICO TURN
LOS ANGELES INTO LA RAZA’S BIGGEST WELFARE OFFICE.. they also get all the jobs
in L.A. and are VOTING FOR MORE!
“WE WILL
TAKE CONTROL OF OUR COUNTRY (U.S.) BY VOTE IF POSSIBLE AND VIOLENCE IF
NECESSARY!”
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