CALIFORNIA IS A WELFARE COLONY OF MEXICO. THERE ARE MANY REASONS WHY LEGALS ARE FLEEING THE ONCE GOLDEN STATE
Given the lack of upward
mobility in California, such positions are not surprising. A population with
little hope of starting a business, owning a home, or making a decent income
naturally looks to government as its provider.
JOEL KOTKIN
In contrast,
California, with the nation’s largest Hispanic population, now includes eight
of the bottom 15 metros on the Hispanic Upward Mobility Index. The nation’s
largest Hispanic conurbation, Los Angeles, ranked 105th out of the 107 largest
U.S. metros.
AMERICA
IN MELTDOWN - STAGGERING INEQUALITY AS BIDEN PUSHES FOR
MASSIVE AMNESTY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
Deep-blue cities and
states are eager to declare their social-justice credentials. New York mayor Bill de Blasio has set up a commission designed to
uproot the city’s “institutional” racism, while California governor Gavin Newsom brags that his state is “the envy of
the world” and will not abandon its poor (BLOG EDITOR: MORE THAN 40% OF CA LIVES
BELOW THE POVERTY LINE. MORE THAN 40% OF THE STATE’S POPULATION ARE ILLEGALS). “Unlike the Washington
plutocracy,” he proclaims, “California isn’t satisfied serving a powerful few
on one side of the velvet rope. The California Dream is for all.”
Yet California, though
well known for its wealth, also has the nation’s highest poverty rate, adjusted for housing cost. If rhetoric were magic,
metropolitan areas like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago would
be ideal places for aspirational minority residents. But according to
statistics compiled by demographer Wendell Cox in a newly released report, these cities are far worse
for nonwhites in terms of income, housing affordability, and education. New
York and California also exhibit some of the highest levels of inequality in the United
States, with poor outcomes for blacks and Hispanics, who, population-growth
patterns suggest, are increasingly moving away from deep-blue metros to less
stridently progressive ones.
The current focus on
“systemic racism”—often devolving into symbolic actions like mandatory minority
representation on corporate boards, hiring quotas, and an educational focus on racial redress and resentment—is not likely to
improve conditions for most minorities. “If a man doesn’t have a job or an
income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of
happiness,” Martin Luther King said. “He merely exists.” That remains true. Our
lodestar should be upward mobility: improving how well people live, across the
board. When it comes to that criterion, blue states and cities are falling
short.
The Covid-19 pandemic has inflicted
disproportionate harm to the health of Latinos and African-Americans, who,
according to the CDC, have suffered rates of infections and deaths
higher than the overall population, which makes a focus on upward mobility even
more important. To measure progress, we have developed an Upward Mobility
Index, with “opportunity ratings” for the nation’s 107 largest metropolitan
areas—those with populations of 500,000 or more in 2018—by race and ethnicity.
We examined the factors that underpin upward mobility and entry into the middle
class. Then, we created a ranking by metro that combined these factors for the
three largest ethnic and racial minorities: African-Americans, Latinos, and
Asians.
The results confound
assertions that nominally progressive policies—affirmative action, programs for
racial redress, strict labor and environmental laws—help nonwhites. It turns
out that places with low housing costs, friendly business conditions, and
reasonable tax rates do much better than cities proclaiming their woke
credentials.
African-Americans do best
by these measurements in southern metros such as Atlanta, the traditional
capital of black America; McAllen, El Paso, and Austin, Texas; and Raleigh,
Virginia Beach/ Norfolk, and Richmond, Virginia. The Washington, D.C. metro
area, well known for its large, middle-class African-American suburbs, also
compares well. Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and (perhaps
surprisingly) Provo, Utah rank high for black success.
At the bottom of the
list, California dominates, with four of the worst ten locations, including Los
Angeles, which a half-century ago was widely seen as a mecca of sorts for blacks. Two of the state’s
most prominent political leaders of the late twentieth century—¬four-term Los
Angeles mayor Tom Bradley and long-time assembly speaker and San Francisco
mayor Willie Brown—came from poor Texas families, not Golden State metros.¬
Other cities traditionally attractive to African-Americans no longer serve as
leading places for black ambition, including Miami and New York.
Similar, though somewhat
varied, results can be seen for Latinos, now the nation’s largest minority, and
Asians, the fastest-growing. Latinos seem to be doing best outside the
Northeast Corridor and the West. Fayetteville (Arkansas/Missouri), for example,
ranks number 7; it’s an evolving economic hub paced by Walmart, JB Hunt, and
Tyson Foods. Latinos have found opportunities in metros tied to basic goods as
well as technological production (St. Louis); logistics and agribusiness
(Kansas City, Des Moines, and Omaha); energy (Pittsburgh and Oklahoma City);
and manufacturing (Grand Rapids and Akron).
In contrast,
California, with the nation’s largest Hispanic population, now includes eight
of the bottom 15 metros on the Hispanic Upward Mobility Index. The nation’s
largest Hispanic conurbation, Los Angeles, ranked 105th out of the 107 largest
U.S. metros. The remaining six worst performers, apart from Honolulu, are on
the much-deindustrialized east coast, including New York, Bridgeport-Stamford,
and Worcester.
Overall, Asians enjoy
incomes 43 percent higher than the U.S. average, and 29 percent higher than
white non-Hispanics, according to newly released American Community Survey 2019
data. But they, too, are finding better opportunities, in terms of housing and
income, in places previously not associated with earlier waves of Asian
immigrants, such as Atlanta, St. Louis, Kansas City, Fayetteville, and
Cincinnati. At the bottom of the
Asian Upward Mobility Index ratings, six are in California, home of the
nation’s largest Asian population, paced by Los Angeles at number 105. Honolulu, the nation’s
most Asian metro, does even worse, at 107.
Perhaps no issue influences upward mobility more
than housing prices. Since World War II, homeownership has defined middle- and
working-class aspirations. High home prices tend to keep minorities,
particularly blacks and Latinos, from achieving this critical component of the
middle-class dream. Without homes of their own, disadvantaged minorities will
face formidable challenges to boosting their wealth. Property remains key to
financial security: homes today account for roughly
two-thirds of the wealth of middle-income Americans.
Homeowners’ median net worth is more than 40 times that of renters, according
to the Census Bureau. At the same time, high rents make any
economic progress difficult for those with lower-wage jobs.
The impact of blue state
policies on housing costs is particularly harmful. The three least
affordable U.S. metros for blacks are San Jose, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Honolulu is fourth; others include San Diego, Denver, Seattle, and Portland. In
contrast, the South and Midwest are best for housing affordability. The
inability of African-Americans to buy homes in key markets puts them at a disadvantage
in accumulating wealth. Black families’ median household net wealth has
declined to just one-tenth that of white families, the widest disparity in at
least 40 years. The regulatory environment that contributes to this inequality
is rarely cited by those decrying systemic racism.
The differences between
regions are enormous. Black homeownership in larger metropolitan areas exceeds
50 percent in Birmingham and in the Washington, D.C. area. The top 12 metros
with black homeownership exceeding 50 percent are all in the South. In
contrast, only about one-third of African-Americans own homes in Los Angeles,
Boston, or New York. Among large metros, Atlanta and Oklahoma City rank highest
in housing affordability for blacks; for Hispanics, the leaders are Youngstown,
McAllen, Pittsburgh, and Toledo, where house prices are exceptionally low.
Pittsburgh, Akron, and St. Louis also rank well. The least affordable housing
markets for Hispanics, like those for blacks, include the four large California
metros, Honolulu, and Boston. Asians also follow this pattern, finding better
affordability in the South and Midwest, while homeownership is much lower in
traditional Asian hubs such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and
Honolulu.
What stands in the way of
black or Latino aspirations is not race discrimination but, in part, policies
that drive up housing costs, which account for 88 percent of the variation in
cost of living between areas. The median house price in San Jose has risen to
nearly 400 percent above the national average, according to the National
Association of Realtors. It is hard to imagine public policies more
disadvantageous to aspirational Americans of any ethnic or racial group.
African-Americans and Latinos have not shared much
in the renaissance of urban areas, often built around tech and finance but not
as promising in creating middle-skilled upwardly mobile jobs in other sectors.
“Real” median incomes (that is, adjusted for cost of living) for
African-Americans are highest in McAllen, El Paso, and Modesto. The lowest
African-American incomes are in Youngstown, Milwaukee, Spokane, Providence, and
Hartford. Among the larger metropolitan areas, such as Washington and Atlanta,
cost-adjusted black median incomes are more than $60,000, compared with just
$36,000 in San Francisco and $37,000 in Los Angeles.
Among Latinos, the
highest cost-adjusted incomes are in Virginia Beach, Baltimore, and Columbus.
The traditional melting pots, Los Angeles and New York, rank near the bottom 20
in Latino household income per capita. The median income for Latinos in
Virginia Beach-Norfolk is $69,000—compared with $43,000 in Los Angeles, $47,000
in San Francisco and $40,000 in New York. Asians enjoy the highest incomes, in
Raleigh, Jackson, and Fayetteville, at $115,000 or more. Los Angeles, with the
nation’s largest Asian population, ranks in the bottom ten, with a
cost-adjusted income of $60,000.
Politicians often claim
to speak for minorities, but people reveal what they want by “voting with their
feet.” Over the past two decades, the black household population has declined
in San Francisco, Oxnard, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. Growth has been modest
in Chicago, New York, San Jose, and Buffalo. In San Francisco proper (not its
metro area), the African-American population share has declined
from one in seven in 1970 to barely one in 20 today. Blacks are now so marginal
that one filmmaker even made a movie called The
Last Black Man In San Francisco.
African-American
populations are growing, though, in metros like Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Las
Vegas, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, which have seen an increase in black
households of 100 percent or more since 2000. In trends that began even before
Covid, small metros have added black households at high rates. For example, the
black population in both Boise and Fayetteville increased more than 200
percent, while in Provo, Portland (Maine), and Scranton, it grew by at least
150 percent.
Latinos, approximately
two-thirds of whom are foreign-born, and Asians, nearly 60 percent
foreign-born, are now settling in regions that were, until recently, immigrant
backwaters. Among Latinos, Scranton, near the fringe of the New York metro
area, leads by a huge margin; its Latino population was negligible in 2000.
Otherwise, the top metros for Latino growth are clustered overwhelmingly in the
South: Knoxville, Charleston, Fayetteville, and Cape Coral. Bigger metros with
large gains include Louisville, Charlotte, and Nashville.
In contrast, the lowest
Latino growth is taking place mostly in coastal metropolitan areas: Los
Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, New York, Oxnard, and Miami. Chicago and
Detroit also rank in the bottom ten. Asians, the fastest-growing minority, have
expanded into such unlikely places as Cape Coral (Florida), Madison,
Fayetteville, Scranton, Greensboro, and Indianapolis. In contrast, growth has
been muted in such traditional centers as Honolulu (which ranked last), Los
Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.
“One of the great
mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than
their results,” economist Milton Friedman said. Whatever their professed concerns for low-income
and ethnic minorities, progressive cities and their mayors fail to deliver
palpable progress. Initiatives like defunding the police, affirmative action,
and implementing guaranteed basic income have largely failed and in some cases
have made things worse.
In contrast, more
conservative areas have produced more opportunity and general well-being for
the minority population. Those who govern places like New York, Los Angeles,
and Chicago need to learn that solutions to America’s ethnic and racial
disparities will not be found in intensified resentment, civil unrest, or
further regulation that constrains the economy. Instead, broad-based economic
growth appears to be the prerequisite to greater opportunity. Places with the best tax climates and the best overall business climates fare best.
The pandemic, which has
seen many metros in the Heartland, the South, and
Intermountain West recover more quickly than those in locked-down New York, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, could either accelerate these trends or
provide a wake-up call. These blue cities must liberalize their land-use
regulations to reduce rents and make house prices affordable to average-income
families. And these cities certainly need a renewed focus on crime and
disorder, which threaten to drive a growing exodus.
Instead of addressing
“systemic racism,” these cities should instead embrace the Gospel admonition:
“Physician, heal thyself.” It starts by focusing not on rhetoric but on what
works—job creation, broad-based business growth, increased housing
affordability, and improving dysfunctional education systems.
For now, Americans are
finding their own solutions—often by moving away from locales that have stopped
addressing these issues. Our commitment should be to spread more advantageous
conditions to all metropolitan areas, not only to Boise and Nashville but also
to New York and Los Angeles, improving quality of life for working- and
middle-class Americans wherever they live.
EYE ON THE NEWS
CALIFORNIA
Rumblings of realignment
beneath a solid-blue surface
Politics
and law
California
remains deep blue, but the good news from this week’s elections is that it has
not yet achieved complete ballot-box unanimity. California voters appear to
have turned two or three house seats red, and statewide voters
rejected some of the most extreme progressive proposals governing contract
workers, affirmative action, expansion of rent control, and
raising property taxes on commercial properties.
Overall, to be sure,
California voters reaffirmed one-party rule, giving Joe Biden a two-to-one victory and maintaining the
Democratic veto-proof majority in both legislative houses. The dominant urban
centers, San Francisco and Los Angeles, went ever further into left field,
approving radical measures such as increasing wealth taxes and using public funds to fight racism. They also
overwhelmingly backed measures to raise commercial property taxes, expand rent
control, and reimpose affirmative action, though these efforts failed miserably
elsewhere in the state. San Francisco, where Biden won 85 percent of the vote,
also voted for a new tax on companies where CEOs make too much compared with
employees, and a measure to allow noncitizens to serve on public boards.
The good news for
Californians is that the rest of the state is not quite ready for socialist
rule by the public unions and their allies. “It’s not so
much light pouring through the window, as a small crack opening,” suggests Joel
Fox, editor of the widely read California political website Fox and Hounds
Daily. The opportunity for centrists and conservatives lies in what a Marxist
might describe as “heightening the contradictions” within the blue alliance.
Consider the battle over Proposition 22, funded by Uber and Lyft, to overturn
the state’s onerous AB5 law, which sought to force employers to treat contract
drivers as full-time employees. This mandate, as the tech firms understood,
would destroy their business model and their fortunes. Tech elites, who also worked tirelessly to defeat Donald Trump, spent an
estimated $200 million to push the measure against labor
opposition, and they seem to have won the day,
The conflict between the
tech elites and labor, though, is not restricted to ride-sharing firms. Taxes
remain a major battlefield. With the apparent defeat of Proposition 15,
legislators seem likely to consider new statewide measures to raise income-tax rates to as high as 16 percent. This
cannot be good news to the tech industry; not only its fabulously rich owners
but also many of their well-paid top employees would be affected.
The state’s business
regulations threaten even the most heralded, emblematic California companies.
Disney executive chairman Robert Iger has fought with the state’s progressives,
who generally favor extreme lockdowns, to keep his businesses open. Disneyland remains closed, resulting in 28,000
layoffs, even as the company’s parks in Florida and abroad are operating. The
state’s inflexibility led Iger to resign from Governor Newsom’s coronavirus
recovery taskforce.
Tesla’s Elon Musk has also dissented, having battled with
Alameda County officials about the opening of his plant. More importantly, he
seems to be shifting his investment focus, and perhaps even his headquarters, from California. He has already
announced big expansion plans for both Tesla and Space X in Texas.
The contradictions
between tech and entertainment oligarchs and the hard Left are likely to
intensify in the years ahead. The state has neglected the basics of business
competitiveness, particularly in creating the mid-skilled jobs crucial to a
healthy economy. University of California at Irvine’s Ken Murphy estimates
that, outside the Bay Area, 85 percent of all new jobs have paid below the area
median income of $66,000; 40 percent pay under $40,000 a year. Once a beacon
of opportunity, the Golden State suffers the nation’s highest
cost-adjusted poverty rate.
Governor Newsom’s
high-profile preening about lockdowns has made things worse, particularly for
tourism and hospitality. In September, California’s unemployment
rate stood at 11 percent, well above the national average of
7.9 percent and better than only four other states in the nation. Since the
March lockdown, California, with 12 percent of the nation’s population,
accounts for 16.4 percent of its unemployment.
Of the 55 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S., some of the worst
job losses from February to August have occurred in the Bay Area and Los Angeles-Long
Beach. Things are particularly grim for the L.A. area, with its huge exposure
to losses in hospitality and other low-end service fields. Overall, Los Angeles
has lost 11 percent of its jobs, Murphy notes, significantly higher than the 8
percent drop nationally.
At the same time, one
sees clear signs that tech growth will be limited, as more companies expand
outside the state and some, like Palantir, the data-mining software company, relocate,
in its case to Denver. Some 40 percent of Bay Area tech workers say that they
would like to move to a less expensive region, which suggests locations outside
of California. In a recent survey, three-quarters of high-tech venture funders and
founders predicted the same for their workforces.
For many Democrats, the loss of jobs demands not a
change in state policies that chase away jobs but further expansion of
government, including the creation of a basic income for its vast numbers of underemployed
and underemployed. This is particularly critical for the Latino working class
that—in sharp contrast with Latinos in Texas—has remained attached to
Democrats, giving Trump barely half the percentage he won in the Lone Star State.
Rather than push for economic growth, young Latinos, such as millennials
elected this week to the city council in predominantly Hispanic Santa Ana, follow a progressive script about racial
justice, public spending, and rent control.
Given the lack of upward
mobility in California, such positions are not surprising. A population with
little hope of starting a business, owning a home, or making a decent income
naturally looks to government as its provider. Add to this the state’s extreme climate policies, which disproportionately
affect industries that employ blue-collar workers, and it’s a perfect storm for
continued progressive agitation.
If California remains
intellectually dominated by a leftist media and academic elite promoting class
warfare, it will be hard to create a more diverse, less dependent political
culture. Instead, we will see the continued flight of middle- and working-class
families out of state. They leave behind both an expanding underclass—a recent
UCLA report found that there were enough homeless students of grade-school age to fill five
Dodger Stadiums—and older, wealthier residents who came to California when the
going was good.
Some conservatives
rightly hail the rejection of the affirmative action referendum and of AB5 as
landmark victories that show a potential pushback to the state’s relentless
progressivism. “Californians are conservatives who think they’re Democrats,” suggests the
right-of-center California Policy Center. This hopeful sentiment has some
basis, but for now, it’s not likely that the state will abandon the high-tax
and heavy-regulation policies that impoverish its population. For example,
radical new proposals for slavery reparations—though California was admitted to the Union
as a free state—are likely to emerge soon. Worse yet, California’s political
reach seems to be expanding, despite its manifest failures, creating its own
system of ideological satellites. Arizona, for example, has raised its state income taxes
to among the nation’s highest, and states like Colorado and Nevada have shifted steadily
leftward.
Ultimately, the battle to
change policy direction—for the West generally, and maybe in the country as a
whole—has to be won in California. This can only be accomplished by convincing
young people and minorities that their future aspirations make them allies to
the shrinking white middle-class population. Until ethnic minorities, including
Asians—the state’s most rapidly growing and economically vigorous minority,
which widely opposed the affirmative action proposition—absorb the pro-business
and pro-growth ethic that built Californian prosperity, the state will at best
continue its sideways drift into malaise.
Similarly, the attempt to
drive Uber and Lyft out of business seems likely to alienate at least some of
tech honchos and their employees. In an era where tech jobs are more mobile,
and other regions are making appeals both to younger workers and high-paid
executives, the state faces a severe economic reckoning. But given the
progressive proclivities of the tech sector, any shift to a pragmatic center
might be gradual, at best.
More critical to change
may be an incipient rebellion against progressive policies by working-class
voters. Some pushback is evident even from the unions and
union-friendly politicians, as well as leading civil rights groups, representing working-class
districts. Early opposition to Newsom’s proclamation banning gas-powered cars
has come from the likes of Democrat Jim Cooper, who represents a largely working-class
district south of Sacramento. Copper recently noted that the greens, “from
their leaders to their funders, are nearly all white,” and their policies tend
to seek “environmental justice” in forms that create a “burden to lower-income,
working-class Californians.”
Even some of the
Democrat-aligned private-sector labor unions have become more hostile to Newsom’s “visionary” actions. The
oil and gas industry employs 152,000 people in California, and these workers,
two-thirds without college degrees, make $80,500 a year on average—far more
than the average for “green” jobs. “Can we immediately start talking about
jobs? We can hate on oil, but the truth is our refinery jobs are really good
middle-class jobs,” tweeted labor heroine Assemblywoman Lorena
Gonzalez, author of AB 5. “Jobs can’t be an afterthought to any climate change
legislation.”
These divisions and
contradictions suggest the path exists for a true restoration of California as
a beacon of entrepreneurship and opportunity. Election Day brought some
promising results, but a state that retains a veto-proof legislature, a
lockstep progressive governor preparing for a future trip to the White House,
powerful public unions, and a debilitated political opposition still faces a
long road back to sanity—and prosperity.
The Implications of Joe Biden's Amnesties
Millions — if not tens of millions — of new immigrants
By Andrew R. Arthur on November 2, 2020
Editor's
note: Read more on Trump vs. Biden: Amnesty
On October
22, I wrote a post comparing and
contrasting the positions of Donald Trump and Joe Biden on amnesty. That post
only detailed the proposals of each — it did not actually
discuss the implications of their respective plans. While Biden vows a
legislative amnesty for over 11 million aliens, in reality, the number of
foreign nationals who would enter and gain status — legal or otherwise — is
actually much, much larger if his plans come to fruition.
During the
October 22 presidential debate,
Biden stated that within his first 100 days, he would "send to the United
States Congress a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented
people." That promise came late in the debate, and casual observers may
have missed it.
As I noted in
my post, that promise is open-ended, because it is dependent on the
illegal-alien population in the United States at a given time. But what given
time?
Notably, the
former vice-president has not set a cut-off date by which those aliens would
have had to have been present in the United States to qualify (an element of
most amnesties). This is an extremely important component of the ultimate size
of the proposed amnesty.
Will the
cut-off date be the date that this legislation is sent to Capitol Hill? The
date that the bill is actually signed into law? Or will it be a date chosen
that is earlier or later than either of those two dates?
Biden
referenced DACA in the course of that statement, continuing: "And all
those so called Dreamers, those DACA kids, they're going to be legally
certified again, to be able to stay in this country, and put on a path to
citizenship." DACA resulted from a memorandum that was
issued by then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on June 15, 2012, and applied
only to aliens who had been present for five years as of that date (an example
of an amnesty cut-off).
So, will June
15, 2007, be the date? Doubtful, because in the latest version of
"Dreamer" legislation — the "American Dream and Promise
Act of 2019" (which passed the House and has not been
acted on in the Senate) — has a cut-off date that is four years prior to the
date of passage. In fact, there will be tremendous impetus to legalize (in
"one last amnesty", the sponsors will solemnly promise) all
aliens illegally present in the United States on the date of passage.
Why? Because
Biden's own campaign website rails
against the current president's interior enforcement efforts: "Targeting
people who have never been convicted of a serious criminal offense and who have
lived, worked, and contributed to our economy and our communities for decades
is the definition of counterproductive." In other words, Biden thinks that
Trump has deported too many people.
As I
explained in an October 12 post, that is a canard,
because interior enforcement under Trump has not been significantly different
(and in part is significantly less vigorous) than it was under
the Obama-Biden administration. But given the fact that the Biden campaign's
focus has not been on a lack of enforcement under the Trump administration,
there will be strong impetus to legalize all aliens (illegal entrants and non-immigrant
overstays) in the United States, regardless of how long they have been here.
Where,
exactly, that cut-off (if any) is set will depend on whether the Republicans
continue to control the Senate in the 117th Congress. Assuming Democratic
control of the Upper Chamber, that date would likely be as of date of
enactment, so long as there is not a huge surge of migrants entering illegally
in the interim (which could cool their ardor for a later date).
Of course, as
my colleague Todd Bensman has
reported, DHS's most recent Homeland Threat Assessment predicts
a massive wave of illegal migration in 2021. Whether that occurs (and whether
the media reports on the effects of such a crisis) would likely determine
whether the Biden administration attempts to turn down the magnet that a
massive amnesty would create.
Even
assuming, however, that there is a cut-off date, amnesties have
always created an incentive for more migrants to enter the United States
illegally, as new migrants enter illegally hoping that they will be able to
take advantage of the next amnesty. Want proof? My former
colleague Jim Edwards years ago explained, "the illegal population had
replenished itself in less than a decade" after the 1986 amnesty. They
came for a reason.
Of course,
any amnesty that is not accompanied by a reform of the legal immigration system
will have a "multiplier" effect on the number of foreign nationals
who ultimately remain in and enter the United States legally.
The way that
the current immigration laws are
structured, immigrants are able to petition for their spouses and children to
enter the United States, and once they become citizens,
those erstwhile immigrants are able to petition for their parents and siblings,
as well. My colleague Jessica Vaughan noted in a September 2017 Backgrounder that 61 percent of the
33 million immigrants admitted to the United States between 1981 and 2016 (20
million in total) were such "chain migration immigrants".
Nothing that
the former vice president has said or issued on the campaign trail suggests
that he has any intention of reforming that system (he actually says the
opposite), however, and in fact, there is no reason to believe that he would
not make immediate relatives abroad of an alien issued amnesty eligible for
entry, too.
In fact, his
campaign website states: "Each day, in every state in the country, millions
of immigrants granted a visa based on family ties make valuable contributions
to our country and economy." If he believes that was true in the past, why
wouldn't it be true in the future as well?
Of course,
that is just the de jure legislative amnesty that the former
vice president proposes. He has actually promoted a significant de
facto amnesty for foreign nationals currently abroad and almost all
aliens in the United States.
With respect
to foreign nationals, Biden has vowed to eliminate executive actions taken by
the current administration to limit the number of aliens who enter illegally
and claim credible fear (as 105,439 migrants did in FY 2019). This, coupled
with his promise to relax
the current standards for asylum, will provide stronger incentives for foreign
nationals to enter the United States in the future (and provide yet another
selling point for their prospective smugglers).
There is no
reason to believe that Biden will expand the detention of those migrants (his
campaign and supporters, in fact, want to decrease detention), and therefore an
untold number of foreign nationals would almost definitely enter the United
States illegally and be released into this country under a Biden
administration.
Once
released, there is no reason to believe that they will ever leave. Why do I say
that? Because, as I have noted, the former vice
president has stated that he will only remove aliens who have committed
felonies in the United States (not including DUI), and will fire any ICE
officer who transgresses this mandate.
Unless Biden
gives way on either the legislative amnesty, the de facto one,
or both, that will mean that millions — if not tens of millions — of aliens
will remain in and/or enter the United States illegally and stay forever.
That wave of
new aliens will fall hardest on the most underprivileged American workers
(citizens, nationals, and legal immigrants already here). Those amnestied
immigrants will largely have modest levels of education (as my colleague Steven Camarota has
explained is true of the current undocumented population), and will probably
not have the skills to find high-paying jobs in the 21st century American
economy (if they did, they would likely not enter illegally to begin with).
As I
have noted previously,
the George W. Bush Center (which
promotes immigration and contends that it is a "net plus"), admits:
Immigration changes factor prices — it lowers the wages of
competing workers, while raising the return to capital and the wages of
complementary workers.
...
Research suggests that previous immigrants suffer more of the
adverse wage effects than do natives. Prior immigrants are more like current
immigrants.
Research also suggests any negative
wage effects are concentrated among low-skilled and not high-skilled workers.
Perhaps that is because high-skilled U.S.-born workers are complementary to
immigrants to a greater extent than native low-skilled workers, who hold jobs
that require less education and fewer language skills.
With respect
to those wage effects, the former vice president has
stated that he is concerned about such disadvantaged American workers, and
therefore supports a $15 minimum wage. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) in July 2019 found,
however, that a proposal to do just that by 2025 would reduce up to 3.7 million
workers over that period, and reduce real family income by $9 billion — changes
that "would mainly affect low-income families."
Again, the
vast majority of aliens who would benefit from Biden's amnesty proposals would
be such low-income families. This is certainly true in the short-term, but
likely would be true in the longer term as well, as potential workers would
never gain the skills that they need to advance.
It is beyond
cavil that politicians make promises on the campaign trail that they end up
paring back or fail to keep entirely (Mexico has not paid
for the barriers along the Southwest border, as then-candidate Trump vowed, for
example). There is likely to be a backlash against many of Biden's amnesty
proposals, which have gained little attention during his campaign. I would
question whether many Americans are actually in favor of having more criminals
in their communities, for example.
But there are
certainly political advantages to him and his party from his proposals, as
those newly legalized immigrants become citizens and likely to support the
party that made their status possible.
I leave it to
my more statistically apt colleagues to estimate the effects that these
amnesties will have on public benefits and municipal services. But, at least in
the short-term, there are likely to be adverse effects, as hospitals have to
expand their resources to care for a burgeoning population, and localities have
to increase their police, fire, garbage, and social services capacities.
And, inasmuch
as the former vice president vows to undo the
Trump administration "public charge rule",
the effect on public benefits (particularly SNAP, most forms
of Medicaid, and Section 8 housing assistance)
are likely to be significant, and long- (or at least longer-) lasting.
All of this is dependent on Biden's election, and the make-up
of the 117th Congress. As polls suggest that
Democrats are likely to sweep to victory in at least the White House and House
of Representatives (and quite possibly the Senate, as well), however, the table
is all but set for those amnesties to begin.
Liberal California Emigrants are Toxic
When
Arizona, a state that has historically leaned conservative, was won by Joe
Biden and now-senator Mark Kelly this week, very few were taken by surprise.
Extensive polling indicated Arizona was ripe for swinging liberal and in this
instance, at least, the polling was correct.
The
question is why? Why has a state that held two elected Republican senators as
recently as 2018 and which held a dependable stable of electoral votes for GOP
presidential candidates become a purple state on its way to becoming solidly
blue? Have Arizona residents suddenly awaked to the idea that liberal policies
and doctrines are more sensible than conservative ones? Hardly.
The
answer regarding Arizona’s swing lies in its neighbor to the west, California.
Since 2012, California has overwhelmingly sent more transplants to Arizona than
any other state. When surveyed, escaping Californians cite high taxes, high
crime rates, unaffordable housing, out-of-control homelessness, and high
unemployment rates as their top reasons for fleeing.
Who
is responsible for creating such an alarming living environment within the
state? California liberals. A November, 2020 report produced by the Mercatus
Center at George Mason University stated that California has 395,608 regulatory
restrictions. The sheer volume and scope of California regulations creates such
a compliance nightmare that they kill entire industries, send housing prices to
unattainable heights, and restrict even commonplace liberties for which
conservative leaning states are known.
Piled
onto California’s endless river of regulations are its nonsensical laws and
policies. Twenty major metropolitan cities or counties in California have
established laws, ordinances, regulations, or other practices that shield
illegal immigrants from prosecution after committing a crime. These counties
brazenly safeguard illegal immigrant criminals against deportation either
through noncompliance or by refusing to hand them over to federal agencies such
as ICE. With over $1.5 trillion in state and local government debt, California
effectively has little money to spare for conveniences such as criminal
incarceration. What do sanctuary cities and counties see as the
alternative to handing illegal immigrant criminals over for deportation?
Release them back into the general population, of course.
Consider
this: Between 2014 and 2017, the FBI reported that 49 states saw an average
increase in crime annually of around 3%. After implementing “humane”
alternatives to criminal prosecution, California crime increased more than 12%
per year over the same time period. With irrational sanctuary
policies that send a clear message of little to no consequence for offenses, is
it any wonder California’s crime rate is now spiraling out of control?
Arizona
is not the only beneficiary of the California exodus. The Colorado State
Demography Office has published an active flow map of people moving into the
state from 2010 on. Disturbingly, the state sending the most movers to Colorado
since then has consistently been California. As recently as 2004, Colorado had
the political trifecta of a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled
House and Senate. A short ten years later, all three had turned irrevocably
Democrat. The subsequent consequence? A drastic increase in state and local regulations,
a dramatic increase in violent crimes, a severe shortage of home
What
has coincided with Colorado’s decline? The mass inflow of Californians to the
state. Californians have brought with them all the very same liberal doctrines
and ideologies that forced their flight from California in the first place.
Does this dissuade liberal Californians from shaping Colorado into the very
image of California? Not in the least.
If
there is any hope for Arizona, it is that they might learn from the resulting
ruin of Colorado, however unlikely.
In
the 2020 election, Texas was startlingly considered in play for liberals. Since
2015, which state has contributed the most emigrants into Texas? Not
surprisingly, the state of California. The hope for liberals is that they can
turn Texas into the next purple soon-to-be blue state. The coveted prize is
Texas’ electoral votes. Even more insidious, if liberals are able to capture
Texas as they have done in Colorado and Arizona, they will force the state to
join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. They will then achieve their
ultimate goal of a Democrat president reigning over the United States for
endless generations until the point our country experiences the same collapse
as other great civilizations throughout world history.
The
obvious question is this: How can Texas avoid the same fate as states such as
Colorado and Arizona? Simple. By being proactive.
It
is much easier for liberals to enact new legislation than to argue for the
removal of existing laws. With this in mind, Texas should take advantage of
their current Republican-controlled Senate, House, and governor’s office by
making haste and passing laws that would limit the future incursion of liberal
meddling. Texas can presently enact laws that prohibit sanctuary cities,
require voter approval to remove the state’s mandated balanced budget, require
that any new regulation must necessitate the removal of an existing one, and
compel voter approval of each new local or state tax including non-user fees.
While such laws may only serve to stem the liberal takeover of the state, they
would be roadblocks making it much more difficult for ideological infiltration
in areas that affect inhabitant’s liberties and quality of life.
It
would be absurd to suppose Californians have malintent. Rather, they are simply
following the course with which they are most familiar while being blissfully
ignorant of the negative unintended consequences their political ideology
brings. To suggest that any act of suppression, aggression, or intimidation
towards Californians moving into red states is acceptable would simply be
un-American and subject to the same type of hypocrisy liberals practice. If
conservatives stoop to their level, we have lost the battle and, perhaps, the
war.
However,
by taking aggressive legislative action in states that have not yet succumbed
to liberal infiltration, Conservatives will effectively be planting our flag in
a defiant refusal to hand over our institutions and our liberty.
State and Local Politicians Move to Grant
Coronavirus Relief to Illegal Aliens
By Matthew Tragesser
ImmigrationReform.com
https://www.immigrationreform.com/2020/04/08/illegal-alien-benefits-states-immigrationreform-com/
Study:
More than 7-in-10 California Immigrant
Welfare
More than 7-in-10
households headed by immigrants in the state of California are on
taxpayer-funded welfare, a new
study reveals.
The
latest Census Bureau data analyzed by
the Center for Immigration
Studies (CIS) finds that about 72 percent of households
headed by noncitizens and immigrants use one or more forms of taxpayer-funded
welfare programs in California — the number one immigrant-receiving state in
the U.S.
Meanwhile,
only about 35 percent of households headed by native-born Americans use welfare
in California.
All
four states with the largest foreign-born populations, including California,
have extremely high use of welfare by immigrant households. In Texas, for
example, nearly 70 percent of households headed by immigrants use
taxpayer-funded welfare. Meanwhile, only about 35 percent of native-born
households in Texas are on welfare.
In
New York and Florida, a majority of households headed by immigrants and
noncitizens are on welfare. Overall, about 63 percent of immigrant households
use welfare while only 35 percent of native-born households use welfare.
President
Trump’s administration is looking to soon implement a policy that protects
American taxpayers’ dollars from
funding the mass importation of welfare-dependent foreign nationals by
enforcing a “public charge” rule whereby legal immigrants would be less likely
to secure a permanent residency in the U.S. if they have used any forms of
welfare in the past, including using Obamacare, food stamps, and public
housing.
The
immigration controls would be a boon for American taxpayers in the form of
an annual $57.4
billion tax cut — the amount taxpayers spend
every year on paying for the welfare, crime, and schooling costs of the
country’s mass importation of 1.5 million new, mostly low-skilled legal
immigrants.
As Breitbart
News reported, the
majority of the more than 1.5 million foreign nationals entering the country
every year use about 57
percent more food stamps than the average native-born American
household. Overall, immigrant households consume 33 percent more cash
welfare than American citizen households and 44 percent more in Medicaid
dollars. This straining of public services by a booming 44
million foreign-born population translates to the average
immigrant household costing American taxpayers $6,234 in
federal welfare.
John
Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
A DACA amnesty would put
more citizen children of illegal aliens — known as “anchor babies” — on federal
welfare, as Breitbart News reported, while American
taxpayers would be left potentially with
a $26 billion bill.
Additionally,
about one-in-five DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on
food stamps, while at least one-in-seven would go on
Medicaid. JOHN BINDER
THE NEW PRIVILEGED CLASS: Illegals!
This is why you work From Jan - May paying taxes to the government
....with the rest of the calendar year is money for you and your family.
Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children.
He takes a job for $5.00 or 6.00/hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he
pays no income tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax
Return, with his fake Social Security number, he gets an "earned income
credit" of up to $3,200..... free.
He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent.
He qualifies for food stamps.
He qualifies for free (no deductible, no co-pay) health care.
His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school.
He requires bilingual teachers and books.
He qualifies for relief from high energy bills.
If they are or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for
SSI.
Once qualified for SSI they can qualify for Medicare. All of this
is at (our) taxpayer's expense.
He doesn't worry about car insurance, life insurance, or
homeowners insurance.
Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed
material.
He and his family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00/hour
in benefits.
Working Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00/hour left after
Paying their bills and his.
The American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and
trash clean-up.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/08/californias-privileged-class-mexican.html
Cheap labor? YEAH RIGHT! Wake up people!
JOE LEGAL v LA RAZA JOSE
ILLEGAL
Here’s
how it breaks down; will make you want to be an illegal!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/joe-american-legal-vs-la-raza-jose.html
THE
TAX-FREE MEXICAN UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY IS ESTIMATED TO BE
IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION YEARLY!
Staggering expensive "cheap" Mexican labor did
not build this once great nation! Look what it has done to Mexico. It's all
about keeping wages depressed and passing along the true cost of the invasion,
their welfare, and crime tidal wave costs to the backs of the American people!
AMERICA:
YOU’RE BETTER OFF BEING AN ILLEGAL!!!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/06/in-america-it-is-better-to-be-illegal.html
This
annual income for an impoverished American family is $10,000 less than the more
than $34,500 in federal funds which are spent on each unaccompanied minor
border crosser.
A study by Tom
Wong of the University of California at San Diego discovered that more than 25
percent of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens in the program have anchor babies. That
totals about 200,000 anchor babies who are the children of DACA-enrolled
illegal aliens. This does not include the anchor babies of DACA-qualified
illegal aliens. JOHN BINDER
“The Democrats had abandoned their working-class base to chase
what they pretended was a racial group when what they were actually chasing was
the momentum of unlimited migration”. DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONT PAGE
MAGAZINE
As Breitbart News has reported, U.S. households
headed by foreign-born residents use nearly twice the welfare of households
headed by native-born Americans.
Simultaneously,
illegal immigration next year is on track to soar to the
highest level in a decade, with a potential 600,000 border crossers expected.
“More
than 750 million people want to migrate to another country permanently,
according to Gallup research published Monday, as 150 world leaders sign up to
the controversial UN global compact which critics say makes migration a human
right.” VIRGINIA HALE
For example, a DACA amnesty would cost American taxpayers about
$26 billion, more than the border wall, and that
does not include the money taxpayers would have to fork up to subsidize the
legal immigrant relatives of DACA illegal aliens.
Exclusive–Steve Camarota:
Every Illegal Alien Costs Americans $70K Over Their Lifetime
Every
illegal alien, over the course of their lifetime, costs American taxpayers
about $70,000, Center for Immigration Studies Director of Research Steve
Camarota says.
During
an interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart
News Daily, Camarota said his
research has revealed the enormous financial burden that illegal
immigration has on America’s working and middle class taxpayers in terms of
public services, depressed wages, and welfare.
“In
a person’s lifetime, I’ve estimated that an illegal border crosser might cost
taxpayers … maybe over $70,000 a year as a net cost,” Camarota said. “And that
excludes the cost of their U.S.-born children, which gets pretty big when you
add that in.”
LISTEN:
“Once
[an illegal alien] has a child, they can receive cash welfare on behalf of
their U.S.-born children,” Camarota explained. “Once they have a child, they
can live in public housing. Once they have a child, they can receive food
stamps on behalf of that child. That’s how that works.”
Camarota
said the education levels of illegal aliens, border crossers, and legal
immigrants are largely to blame for the high level of welfare usage by the
f0reign-born population in the U.S., noting that new arrivals tend to compete
for jobs against America’s poor and working class communities.
In
past waves of mass immigration, Camarota said, the U.S. did not have an
expansive welfare system. Today’s ever-growing welfare system, coupled with
mass illegal and legal immigration levels, is “extremely problematic,”
according to Camarota, for American taxpayers.
The
RAISE Act — reintroduced
in the Senate by Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR), David Perdue (R-GA), and
Josh Hawley (R-MO) — would cut legal immigration levels in half and convert the
immigration system to favor well-educated foreign nationals, thus relieving American
workers and taxpayers of the nearly five-decade-long wave of booming
immigration. Currently, mass legal immigration redistributes
the wealth of working and middle class Americans to the country’s top
earners.
“Virtually
none of that existed in 1900 during the last great wave of immigration, when we
also took in a number of poor people. We didn’t have a well-developed welfare
state,” Camarota continued:
We’re
not going to stop [the welfare state] tomorrow. So in that context,
bringing in less educated people who are poor is extremely problematic for
public coffers, for taxpayers in a way that it wasn’t in 1900 because the roads
weren’t even paved between the cities in 1900. It’s just a totally
different world. And that’s the point of the RAISE Act is to sort of
bring in line immigration policy with the reality say of a large government …
and a welfare state. [Emphasis added]
The
immigrants are not all coming to get welfare and they don’t immediately sign
up, but over time, an enormous fraction sign their children up.
It’s likely the case that of the U.S.-born children of illegal
immigrants, more than half are signed up for Medicaid — which is our
most expensive program. [Emphasis added]
As Breitbart News has
reported, U.S. households headed by
foreign-born residents use nearly twice the welfare of households headed by
native-born Americans.
Every
year the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million foreign nationals, with the
vast majority deriving from chain migration. In 2017, the foreign-born
population reached
a record high of 44.5 million. By 2023, the Center for Immigration
Studies estimates that the legal and illegal immigrant population of the U.S.
will make up nearly 15 percent of the entire U.S. population.
Breitbart News
Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to
9:00 a.m. Eastern.
John Binder is a
reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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.
According to a report in
the Washington Times:
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
BY MASOOMA HAQ
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.
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