Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as impoverished Americans wait
Want some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so
many homeless encampments hovering around?
Try the reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free
public housing by the U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated,
unskilled, and largely unemployable. Those
are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier.
Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold
awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.
Thus, the tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these
emerging shantytowns are in blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal
immigrants - Orange County, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is
there a connection? At a minimum, it's worth looking at.
The Trump administration's Department of Housing and Urban
Development is finally trying to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals
prepare to enter the U.S. this year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do
it yesterday.
The plan would scrap Clinton-era regulations that allowed illegal
immigrants to sign up for assistance without having to disclose their status.
Under the new Trump rules, not only would the leaseholder using public housing
have to be an eligible U.S. person, but the government would verify all
applicants through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE)
database, a federal system that’s used to weed illegal immigrants out of other
welfare programs.
Those already getting HUD assistance would have to go through a new verification,
though it would be over a period of time and wouldn’t all come at once.
“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our
citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “Because of
past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal aliens were able to live in free public
housing desperately needed by so many of our own citizens. As illegal aliens
attempt to swarm our borders, we’re sending the message that you can’t live off
of American welfare on the taxpayers’ dime.”
The Times notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and
some illegal immigrant families are getting full rides based on just one member
being born in the U.S. The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped
across the U.S. in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next
day, now, along with her entire family, gets that free ride on
government housing. Plus lots
of cheesy news coverage about how
heartwarming it all is. That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to
find back in Tegucigalpa.
Migrants would be almost fools not to take the offering.
The problem of course is that Americans who paid into these
programs, and the subset who find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact
being shut out.
The fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the
virtues of illegal immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice"
for them, but the hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are
stealing from others as they take this housing benefit under legal
technicalities. That's not a good thing under anyone's theological law.
But hypocrisy is comfortable ground for the entire open borders lobby as
they shamelessly celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the
impoverished of the U.S. out cold.
The Trump administration is trying to have this outrage fixed
by summer. But don't imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the
media sob stories, the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.
Los Angeles County Pays
Over a Billion in Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years
In 2015 and 2016, Los Angeles County paid
nearly $1.3 billion in welfare funds to illegal aliens and their families. That
figure amounts to 25 percent of the total spent on the county’s entire needy
population, according to Fox News.
The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other
state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in
California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants
reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with
children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.
The welfare benefits data acquired by Fox News comes from the Los
Angeles County Department of Public Social Services and shows welfare and food
stamp costs for the county’s entire population were $3.1 billion in 2015, $2.9
billion in 2016.
The data also shows that during the first five months of 2017, more than
60,000 families received a total of $181 million.
Over 58,000 families received a total of $602 million in benefits in
2015 and more than 64,000 families received a total of $675 million in 2016.
Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior
fellow who studies poverty and illegal immigration, told Fox the costs represent “the tip of
the iceberg.”
“They get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector said. It can
cost the government a total of $24,000 per year per family to pay for things
like education, police, fire, medical, and subsidized housing.
In February of 2019, the Los Angeles city council signed a resolution
making it a sanctuary city. The resolution did not provide any new legal
protections to their immigrants, but instead solidified existing policies.
In October 2017, former California governor
Jerry Brown signed SB 54 into law. This bill made
California, in Brown’s own words, a “sanctuary state.” The Justice
Department filed a lawsuit against the State of California over the law. A
federal judge dismissed that suit in July. SB 54 took effect on Jan.
1, 2018.
According to Center for
Immigration Studies, “The new law
does many things: It forbids all localities from cooperating with ICE detainer
notices, it bars any law enforcement officer from participating in the
popular 287(g) program, and it prevents state and local police
from inquiring about individuals’ immigration status.”
Some counties in California have protested its implementation and joined
the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the state.
California’s campaign to provide public services to illegal immigrants
did not end with the exit of Jerry Brown. His successor, Gavin Newsom, is
just as focused as Brown in funding programs for illegal residents at the
expense of California taxpayers.
California’s budget earmarks millions of dollars annually to the One
California program, which provides free legal assistance to all aliens,
including those facing deportation, and makes California’s public universities
easier for illegal-alien students to attend.
According to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal
Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2017 report, for the estimated 12.5 million illegal
immigrants living in the country, the resulting cost is a $116
billion burden on the national economy and taxpayers each year, after
deducting the $19 billion in taxes paid by some of those illegal immigrants.
BLOG: MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF
ILLEGALS IN THE U.S. AT ABOUT 40 MILLION. WHEN THESE PEOPLE ARE HANDED AMNESTY,
THEY ARE LEGALLY ENTITLED TO BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY EFFECTIVELY
LEAVING MEXICO DESERTED.
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than 22 million
non-citizens now live in the United States.
EYE ON THE NEWS
July 23, 2020
City of Homelessness
Philadelphia’s transients ride out the pandemic on the city’s public trains.July 23, 2020
Covid-19
The Social Order
Cities
The sight of a homeless person walking from car to car in a Philadelphia subway once turned heads. Not anymore: in recent years, there’s perhaps a quick glance at the vagrant, and then it’s back to the business at hand, which usually involves intense focus on a phone.
Philadelphia’s train vagabonds are a varied, distressing lot—from the small, older woman who twitches uncontrollably on the Market Street El to the younger homeless who pass through trains, carrying signs and announcing that they haven’t eaten since yesterday. “Anything will help, a sandwich, a quarter,” they plead. Commuters sometimes hear Dickensian monologues about starving children holed up in hotels or pregnant wives sitting under underpasses, waiting for those sandwiches.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, it wasn’t uncommon to see stoned or homeless people sleeping on Philadelphia’s typically crowded subway trains. Earlier this year, these sleepers took up a significant number of commuter seats. In January, during the annual No Pants Subway Ride campaign, when riders drop their pants and give them to the homeless, sleepers made up at least 5 percent to 10 percent of each transit car—especially on early Sunday mornings.
Covid-19 significantly reduced ridership across SEPTA, the Philadelphia region’s public transportation system. In April, following the closure of stations and lockdown restrictions, ridership dropped by 79 percent; regional rail ridership plummeted by 96 percent. The usually busy rail lines appeared to serve only essential workers and homeless people riding to nearby drug markets. That same month, concerned about virus transmission, SEPTA banned the homeless from Upper Darby’s 69th Street Terminal, where they had been tacitly permitted to camp out.
After SEPTA enforced new Covid-19 rules and placed barrier decals to ensure social distancing, fewer homeless people were seen sleeping on trains, though many still ride the rails for hours in a semi-hypnotic, drugged state. Even in a pandemic, the trains serve as a kind of temporary home.
SEPTA ridership has started coming back with Philadelphia’s phased reopening—but the transit system’s homeless problem will inevitably return, too. According to Liz Hersh, director of Philadelphia’s Office of Homeless Services, city streets are home to about 850 unsheltered people. “They go somewhere,” she said. “They’re in the transit stations, underpasses, so it doesn’t surprise me that they ride trains or buses. When we don’t provide adequate places for people to live, then that happens.” Though SEPTA is cracking down on panhandling on trains—prohibited, yet still common—the problem of homeless sleepers is another matter. “With people just sitting and sleeping on the trains, how do you decide who’s who and what level of enforcement is justified?” Hersh asked.
Before the Covid-19 crisis, Hersh’s office and SEPTA had succeeded in moving many of the homeless from Suburban Station, Market Street East, and Jefferson Station—all major hubs for suburban commuters. “In 2016,” Hersh said, “there were 350 people in Suburban Station, but that is not the case now. The numbers are way down.” The problem now, she says, has become localized. “There are a few hot spots that we’re still working on. We’re not where we want to be, but we’re making progress.”
The city now lets shelters admit the homeless requiring only good behavior—not sobriety or even the presentation of a valid ID. This reform, no doubt, has resulted in fewer people living on the streets. The creation of additional shelters—including in North Philadelphia’s Kensington, an infamous open-air drug market—has also helped. Last year, the Office of Homeless Services had a $91 million budget that made the new beds possible. In addition, city groups such as Project Home, Broad Street Ministry, Angels in Motion, Prevention Point, and Ambassadors of Hope have helped reduce the homeless numbers.
Yet if one rode the Market–Frankford El to Kensington’s roughest parts, he wouldn’t see much improvement. Ascending the steps to the platform, he’d have to wrangle through a horde of hawkers, methadone zombies, and assorted buyers and sellers—many wearing masks. The so-called Walmart of Heroin doesn’t even begin to describe this neighborhood, where people arriving from around the country, with huge knapsacks, can be seen walking along streets and highways. When they’re tired of walking, they head to the Market–Frankford line and board a car—setting up camp amid the barrier decals.
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