THE CORE OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY: DEM VOTING ILLEGALS COME FIRST!
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.
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. MONICA SHOWALTER
“The influx of low wage workers from all across the world will drive down incomes, drive down wages, deplete the middle class, bankrupt Social Security, bankrupt Medicare, bankrupt Medicaid, bankrupt federal entitlements, overcrowd schools, and overcrowd every hospital in the middle of a pandemic,” White House aide Stephen Miller told reporters on October 28.
Just before Christmas last year, Jill Biden figuratively stepped over the huddled masses of homeless on the streets of America, and headed across the border for a high-profile campaign photo-op. Her destination was a camp for migrants who had entered the US illegally and were awaiting adjudication of their cases in Mexico.
PAULETTE VARGHESE ALTMAIER
The Tired and Poor Are Already Here
Just before Christmas last year, Jill Biden figuratively stepped over the huddled masses of homeless on the streets of America, and headed across the border for a high-profile campaign photo-op. Her destination was a camp for migrants who had entered the US illegally and were awaiting adjudication of their cases in Mexico.
Twelve thousand children are homeless here in California, and our homeless population has risen to 151,000. Last year, California was single-handedly responsible for the national increase in homelessness.
Homeless camp on a street in front of a school in Los Angeles (YouTube screen grab)
Adjusted for cost of living, Census Bureau data show that California is also by far the highest-poverty state in the nation.
But it was not to the tired and poor in California that the Biden campaign sent its emissary for a high-profile Christmas-season media event.
As a private citizen, Jill Biden unquestionably has the right to choose the beneficiaries of her charity. But this was no private outing, this was a campaign event. Clearly, the Biden campaign had calculated that bypassing America’s needy in favor of a Lady Bountiful appearance across the border would be a winning campaign strategy.
In the same vein, California’s legislature recently imposed a state penalty on residents who cannot afford the Affordable Care Act’s sky-high premiums, while approving free health care for young adult immigrants who lack legal status. My home county of Santa Clara has set aside millions for legal services for unauthorized immigrants, while the homeless shiver under our freeway underpasses, and food banks send out pleas for donations.
What does it say about our leaders, and our nation, that a closed fist for struggling Americans and an open hand for those who break our immigration laws is a winning political strategy?
In the four decades since I immigrated to the US from India, I have often observed that we immigrants think more deeply about the meaning of citizenship than our native-born peers. This is not surprising - we are here by conscious choice, not by chance. As part of our oath of citizenship we explicitly renounce “all allegiance” to the land of our birth and enter into community with a new people and a new nation. When we take that oath, we recognize that we are entering into a solemn compact of duty and loyalty to America’s Constitution and laws, as well as to the well-being of the American people, with whom we are now joined in nationhood.
Civil rights leader and Texas Democrat Barbara Jordan eloquently expressed this ethos: “A nation is formed by the willingness of each of us to share in the responsibility for upholding the common good… a spirit of harmony will survive in America only if each of us remembers that we share a common destiny.”
This has never been a partisan position. It should not be one now.
Another core truth that we immigrants have reason to understand better than most is that this nation of immigrants cannot absorb all who wish to gain entry -- 150 million people, by Gallup’s recent analysis. That being the case, our adopted country has a clear moral responsibility to put the well-being of its own citizens front and center when deciding who should be admitted, and the indisputable right to ensure that admittance is in accordance with its laws.
This, too, has never previously been partisan or controversial. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were both forthright about the importance of an immigration policy grounded in adherence to the law. Yet today, presidential candidates are engaged in a bidding war for votes by promising de facto uncontrolled admission to the US, coupled with commitments to extensive government services for those who enter illegally.
Given the chaos at our southern border, and the enormous number of visa overstays, a serious review of immigration policy and enforcement is clearly required. Unfortunately, what we are getting instead is divisive demagoguery about nativism and xenophobia, and a menu of false choices with heavily loaded framing: inclusive vs exclusive, pro-immigrant vs anti-immigrant, welcoming vs unwelcoming.
But as the Biden vignette illustrates, this rhetoric skirts the core moral question: do we “welcome” and “include” struggling Americans, and make their advancement and well-being our first concern, or do we callously pass them over in favor of unauthorized immigrants, who are in direct competition with Americans for already inadequate resources? At the national level, services for unauthorized immigrants impose a net fiscal burden of over $50B on taxpayers.
The moral problem does not end with government services. There is strikingly little attention paid to the inconvenient truth that uncontrolled entry of low-skill immigrants most impacts the wages of the poorest working Americans. As Harvard’s George Borjas has shown, unauthorized immigration reduces the wages of American workers by more than $100 billion a year. The poorest American workers, and those with the least education, are the most affected.
Tellingly, American immigrants and minorities hold views that are sharply at variance with those of their self-appointed spokespeople. Immigrants in Maryland strongly opposed state sanctuary policies. Zogby’s survey found that Hispanics and blacks overwhelmingly feel that there are plenty of Americans available to fill unskilled jobs. They are also strongly in favor of immigration enforcement. That is unsurprising -- they are directly impacted by the negative consequences of large-scale unauthorized immigration, unlike elite progressives living in gated communities and doorman apartments.
When trouble strikes Americans abroad, our nation comes together as a community, and exerts extraordinary efforts to bring our citizens home to safety. With the Wuhan epidemic and quarantine making headlines, we read that the US government has evacuated Americans from the affected areas by special charter. We cheer the sustained high-level efforts by the State Department that have successfully brought Americans home from North Korea, Iran, and other trouble spots.
We can and should harness the same spirit of national solidarity, national community and national priority to address the needs of Americans here at home. America’s workers, as well as its tired and poor, deserve no less.
Paulette was a senior tech executive responsible for billion-dollar high-tech businesses in leading Silicon Valley companies. She immigrated to the US from India in 1978. Linkedin
White House Economic Plan Puts Migrants Ahead of American Families
President Joe Biden’s White House is prioritizing jobs for migrants above helping many millions of poor Americans get decent jobs, according to priorities in its annual “Economic Report of the President.”
A growing share of men are not even trying to find jobs, the baby boom generation is retiring, and there are fewer young Americans, said the Biden-endorsed report, which listed several “Options to Boost the U.S. Labor Supply.”
The report’s first option for raising the number of workers is “Increasing Immigration” — not helping Americans get decent jobs. It says:
Overall, research also suggests that the effects of newly arrived immigrants on the wages and employment of the domestic population are quantitatively very small, and that the fiscal effects of immigration are generally positive.
Vast evidence shows migration cuts family wages and spikes housing costs, yet the report also urges an amnesty for at least 11 million “undocumented individuals” and the importation of many more white-collar visa workers for the jobs needed by U.S. graduates:
immigration reform that provides a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented individuals would help to increase the labor supply … Additional immigration reforms could include removing per-country caps on employment, expanding diversity lottery visas, and expanding the J-1 exchange visa program, which would bring additional faculty, scientists, and students to the United States for training and sharing knowledge and method
The report’s second option is the nation’s traditional policy of rewarding investors and CEOs who find, train, and employ their fellow American citizens, including the least-qualified, least-employable workers.
Yet even this second option in the report — “Drawing More [American] Adults into the Labor Market ” — is portrayed as an opportunity for more government intervention, not as the normal workplace bargaining of growing companies and wage-seeking employees in a tight national labor market.
So the report’s list of approved interventions includes federal childcare, get-out-of-jail programs, aid checks, regional economic development, regulation to force better workplace conditions, and unionization, which is described as “Improving workers’ bargaining power.”
The report rejects the obvious option of helping Americans by tightening the labor market with migration curbs so employers must hire even the least-wanted Americans with offers of wages, training, and decent treatment.
President Donald Trump used that policy in 2019 and 2020 — and quickly pressured employees to pay higher wages and also invest in productivity-boosting machinery.
“The last expansion pulled many workers into the labor market, and the continued growth in participation between 2016 and 2019 surprised many economists,” the report admitted without mentioning Trump’s migration curbs.
But Biden’s business-backed progressives mostly prefer more migration and have welcomed at least 6 million legal, illegal, quasi-legal, and temporary migrants into Americans’ housing and workplaces.
“On average, wages adjusted for inflation declined over the year [2022], though they saw growth in the second half,” the report said without mentioning Biden’s migration expansions.
However, the White House’s report was written by a team of advisors with their own perspectives that can differ from Biden’s senior deputies.
So their report also includes admissions and evidence showing how migration curbs would help 150 million working Americans — plus the roughly 6 million non-retired Americans who were sidelined when factories were exported to China and local jobs were filled with migrants. For example, the report said:
The steepest declines in [workforce] participation since the 1970s have been among men without a four-year degree; these men have also experienced declines in wages throughout much of this period. It is reasonable to wonder, therefore, if declines in labor demand [by employers for Americans] can account for declines in participation, particularly among men without a four-year degree.
“It’s a political document, that’s what it is,” explained Steven Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
[The White House is] indifferent to this decline in labor force participation [caused by immigration and outsourcing] and all of the social problems — everything from substance abuse, overdose deaths, obesity, crime, mental health problems, suicide, and early death — [that] are all associated with being out of the labor force.
The civic disasters impose huge costs on Americans’ society, he added:
All the fiscal costs [government spending] associated with the disability, incarceration, crime, and healthcare — that result from all these people being out of the labor force — are borne by all taxpayers, including gainfully employed persons.
And the social problems don’t stay confined to communities where all these people live. The crime and social dysfunction spills out everywhere.
On March 19, the New York Times described the civic and economic damage outside a sandwich shop in Phoenix, Ariz:
[The owner] looked out the window toward Madison Street, which [since 2018] had become the center of one of the largest homeless encampments in the country, with as many as 1,100 people sleeping outdoors. On this February morning, he could see a half-dozen men pressed around a roaring fire. A young woman was lying in the middle of the street, wrapped beneath a canvas advertising banner. A man was weaving down the sidewalk in the direction of Joe’s restaurant with a saw, muttering to himself and then stopping to urinate a dozen feet from Joe’s outdoor tables.
“It’s the usual chaos and suffering,” he told [his wife] Debbie …
…
Within a half-mile of their restaurant, the police had been called to an average of eight incidents a day in 2022. There were at least 1,097 calls for emergency medical help, 573 fights or assaults, 236 incidents of trespassing, 185 fires, 140 thefts, 125 armed robberies, 13 sexual assaults and four homicides. The remains of a 20-to-24-week-old fetus were burned and left next to a dumpster in November. Two people were stabbed to death in their tents. Sixteen others were found dead from overdoses, suicides, hypothermia or excessive heat. The city had tried to begin more extensive cleaning of the encampment, but advocates for the homeless protested that it was inhumane to move people with nowhere else to go, and in December the American Civil Liberties Union successfully filed a federal lawsuit to keep people on the street from being “terrorized” and “displaced.”
The authors of the report recognize the civic damage caused by the loss of jobs and wages, and they included a section titled “Deaths of Despair in the United States”:
… these deaths of despair primarily affect white Americans without a four-year college degree, living in areas of the country that have a very low share of the workingage population employed. While economists usually frame employment as a choice between paid work and alternative uses of time, Case and Deaton’s (2020) work highlights the importance of good jobs in providing meaning, structure, and purpose to a community. They write: “Destroy work and, in the end, working-class life cannot survive. It is the loss of meaning, of dignity, of pride, and of self-respect that comes with the loss of marriage and of community that brings on despair, not just or even primarily the loss of money.”
“Trying to fix the social pathologies of West Virginia or Baltimore, or even in the Rio Grande Valley is very hard … immigration lets them ignore the problems,” Camarota said.
The tacit admission that fewer Americans will work when their wages are forced down amid outsourcing and migration is repeated elsewhere in the 507-page report:
relative wages for men without a four-year degree have declined steadily for many decades, reducing their status, marriage prospects, and job satisfaction. [Pinghui] Wu finds that changes in relative wages account for almost half the growth in labor force exits among noncollege men between 1980 and 2019.
…
[President Barack Obama’s] CEA (2016) also concluded that low wages were the primary driver of male participation declines, with smaller roles for supply factors.
…
Despite the incomplete nature of the evidence on participation declines, the extensive research literature does point to policy measures that could boost participation among men … efforts to improve wages and working conditions for men without a four-year degree would likely draw more of them into the labor market.
…
stagnating wages and rising inequality are key drivers of declines in labor force participation.
Extraction Migration:
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
Democrats in California Oppose HUD Plan to Prioritize Americans over Illegals for Public Housing
A new proposed rule that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued earlier this week to enforce existing law requiring those who receive public housing to be U.S. citizens gained the ire of Democrats, including Barack Obama’s former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.
Solis, who is now on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, tweeted on Thursday support for 12 House members who sent a letter to HUD Secretary Ben Carson. The letter demands that the rule requiring everyone living in public houses to be in the country legally be revoked because some of those who could be affected are U.S. citizen children with illegal parents.
“Thank you @RepBarragan, @RepMaxineWaters, and other MoC for speaking out against @HUDgov’s proposal to evict families with an undocumented relative in the home. Yesterday, the #BOS approved my co-authored motion with @SheilaKuehl to send a letter against this unjust action,” Solis tweeted.
“The proposed rule is an unconscionable ploy by the administration to carry out its anti-immigrant agenda at the expense of thousands of families,” said Rep Nanette Diaz Barragán (D-CA). “Instead of addressing the homelessness problem in Los Angeles and across the country, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is admittingly attempting to put thousands of families, many with children who are U.S. citizens, onto the streets. I’m proud to lead Members of the Los Angeles Congressional delegation in speaking out and fighting against this cruel proposal.”
The letter reveals how many illegal aliens are living in public housing in just the Los Angeles area.
“An estimated 22 percent of all HACLA [Housing Authority for the City of Los Angeles]-assisted households, and 31 percent of the total population in HACLA’s public housing programs, will be negatively impacted by the proposed rule,” the letter states. “Further, with nearly one in three public housing residents impacted by the rule, the economic consequences for HACLA will be immense.”
“Including public housing and Section 8 housing, this rule could displace 2,587 households, totaling an estimated 11,600 individuals,” the letter states.
But, as Breitbart News reported, critics are ignoring the law HUD wants to enforce, which Carson included in his remarks about the new rule on social media.
“@HUDgov is proposing a rule to close a loophole and ensure we enforce what is already law,” Carson tweeted, adding the text of Section 214 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1980.
“There is an affordable housing crisis in this country, and we need to make certain our scarce public resources help those who are legally entitled to it,” Carson said. “Given the overwhelming demand for our programs, fairness requires that we devote ourselves to legal residents who have been waiting, some for many years, for access to affordable housing.”
The regulation, posted on the Federal Register, states, in part, about how the Act would be amended:
The proposed rule would require the verification of the eligible immigration status of all recipients of assistance under a covered program who are under the age of 62. As a result, the proposed rule would make prorated assistance a temporary condition pending verification of eligible status, as opposed to under the current regulation where it could continue indefinitely.
The proposed rule would also specify that individuals who are not ineligible immigration status may not serve as the leaseholder, even as part of a mixed family whose assistance is prorated based on the percentage of members with eligible status.
HUD believes the amendments will bring its regulations into greater alignment with the wording and purpose of Section 214.
HUD provided Breitbart News with some of the statistics on how many Americans in cities across the United States are in need of housing assistance, including 1.6 million waiting for public housing and 2.6 million who are in line for housing choice vouchers:
• Only 1 in 4 qualified households currently receive housing assistance in this country. That means, 3 out of 4 families who might otherwise qualify for our programs do not get any help to pay their rent whatsoever.
• If current recipients are representative of those waiting for HUD assistance, most are extremely poor seniors or persons living with a disability.
• In some states, public housing waitlists are closed, and local public housing agencies are not even accepting new applicants.
Hundreds of thousands of people are waiting in cities like Los Angeles and New York City, according to a HUD survey.
The other Democrats who signed the letter include Reps. Maxine Waters (D-CA), Grace F. Napolitano (D-CA), Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), Ted W. Lieu (D-CA), Linda T. Sánchez (D-CA), Yvette Clarke (D-NY), Katie Hill (D-CA), Jimmy Gomez (D-CA), Norma J. Torres (D-CA), Judy Chu (D-CA), and Alan Lowenthal (D-CA).
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