America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Monday, May 22, 2023
HOMELESS IN CALIFORNIA - A COLONY OF MEXICO AND LA RAZA 'THE RACE' WELFARE STATE
“We are going to continue to make sure that, if migrants come into our state, we will send them to the sanctuary cites that have given them pre-consent to come and live off of their taxpayers, and not ours.”
While reporting on Canada’s surge in housing
prices, both establishment publications
detailed how the skyrocketing costs have
coincided with the nation’s insistence to
import millions of immigrants — all of whom
need housing.
“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.
Biden also wants to accelerate the inflow of chain migration migrants and dramatically accelerate the inflow of poor refugees to at least 125,000 per year.
“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 . NEIL MUNRO
Ask the average Californian his take on homelessness, and he’ll say that it’s gotten much worse. Back in the early 2000s, a visitor to Los Angeles’s Skid Row or San Francisco’s Tenderloin would have witnessed scenes of misery that seemed scarcely capable of further deterioration. Intense reaction against street conditions back then gave rise, in many California cities, to campaigns to end homelessness, prompting billions in new spending. But no California city ended homelessness; the average Californian’s impression is correct. According to the best data available, homelessness in California grew during the 2010s and is still growing.
It has also spread. Governments once aspired to contain homelessness-related disorder within the boundaries of forlorn neighborhoods like Skid Row and the Tenderloin. But containment strategies are now just as discredited as the goal of ending homelessness. Tents are everywhere: the suburbs, the beaches, riverbeds, beneath overpasses, urban parks, median strips, nature preserves, and sidewalks surrounding City Halls. The crisis’s dispersion has caused regional tensions, with neighboring communities trading accusations of dumping their homelessness problems on one another. To sort out inter-municipal disputes, and those between city and county governments, state government has had to step in. Since taking office in 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom has often identified homelessness as his top priority—another measure of the issue’s magnitude. Most states view homelessness as a local problem.
Public concern has intensified in response to the gruesome details that give twenty-first- century homelessness such a menacing character and that give California such a dystopian reputation in connection with it. In San Diego from 2016 to 2018, a homeless-encampment-related outbreak of hepatitis A infected hundreds, 20 fatally. In the early months of Covid-19, Los Angeles contracted with a portable restroom company to facilitate better hygiene among the street population. One employee of that firm was impaled in the hand by a syringe when cleaning out a handwashing station near a needle exchange. In April 2021, a dog was burned alive in Venice by a fire likely set by a member of that community’s unsheltered population. In January 2022, a dog attacked a security guard at the San Francisco Public Library when the guard tried to use Narcan to revive the dog’s owner, who had overdosed. This past December, a San Francisco toddler overdosed on fentanyl, after coming into contact with it while playing in a park. A June 2018 column in the San Francisco Chronicle titled “Homeless Camp Pushes SF Neighborhood to the Edge” related how a two-and-a-half-year-old had “invented a game called ‘jumping over the poop’” and that “[a]nother kid across the street collected syringe caps and floated them down the stream of dirty gutter water for fun.”
Social media have been crucial in advancing progressive causes such as Black Lives Matter, but they have pushed in the opposite direction with homelessness. The notion that homeless Californians are just down-on-their-luck cases has been undermined by viral videos such as Michael Shellenberger’s interviews with street addicts. In one, posted in February 2022, “Ben” reckoned that less than 10 percent of San Francisco’s street homeless are from the city originally and that the majority have an addiction, and he explained how he supports his own habit through petty crime. A video posted on July 8, 2022, by a San Francisco–based Twitter user showed schoolchildren exiting a bus in the city’s South of Market neighborhood into what looked like a junkie zombie apocalypse. Californians understand that rents in their state are punishingly expensive and that some people who might have found housing elsewhere have wound up living on the street here. But why do they have to live on the street like that?
Homelessness hardens the heart. In a crisis jurisdiction, one cannot use streets and sidewalks without passing by—and thus ignoring—the obvious suffering of one’s fellow man. But the homelessness story in California today is not one of neglect. Policymakers have been trying to help, but their programs have yet to make much headway.
All three levels of government—city, county, and state—have recently expanded outlays on homelessness, much of it flowing through specialized agencies, such as the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing ($670 million FY22 budget) and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority ($800 million FY22 budget). In fiscal 2022, state government spent over $7 billion on homelessness programs. The public has directly authorized more spending on homelessness and low-income housing through several recent ballot initiatives: Alameda County’s Measure A1 (2016); Santa Clara County’s Measure A (2016); Los Angeles City’s Proposition HHH (2016); Los Angeles County’s Measure H; the statewide No Place Like Home (2018); San Francisco’s Proposition C (2018); and Los Angeles City’s Proposition ULA (2022).
Most homelessness spending in California goes toward giving people a place to sleep. This can be done on a short-term, intermediate-term, or permanent basis, and accompanied, or unaccompanied, by programmatic goals like sobriety and employment. Permanent supportive housing is the form of housing that progressive advocates for the homeless favor most. It provides a subsidized private apartment, whose occupant can stay there as long as he likes, provided he abides by the terms of the lease. The program is “supportive” insofar as the unit is linked somehow to social services, but with no expectation that tenants use those services or pursue sobriety or employment. Permanent supportive housing is not optimal for nondisabled individuals capable of something more than lifetime dependency; other disadvantages are its high per-unit costs, which have topped $800,000, and the glacial pace of development. The program’s main advantages are that some people unquestionably need it, and it’s reasonably likely to keep people housed and off the street, at least for a few years.
“In San Diego, a homeless-encampment-related outbreak of hepatitis A infected hundreds, 20 fatally.”
At the other end of the housing spectrum stands shelter. Unlike permanent supportive housing, shelter is short-term and provides minimal privacy. Accommodations are shared, often in a dorm-style setting. Shelter’s advantages are that it’s easier to launch in bulk than permanent supportive housing (or any other form of affordable housing) and, compared with living on the streets, people are safer and warmer in shelter. Providing shelter, at least to some degree, is a legal requirement for any city that wants to restrict sleeping in public. The disadvantages of shelter are that it’s temporary and that, however much government spends on it, some street homeless will keep opting for the freer, if more hazardous, unsheltered life. The weather, often overlooked in homelessness discussions, makes shelter less of a pressing need in famously temperate California.
In between shelter and permanent supportive housing are so-called transitional housing programs. The traditional understanding of transitional housing was a place where someone could stay on an interim basis—and a place that was sobriety- and/or employment-oriented. The idea was to stabilize people so that, when they finally landed a private apartment, their tenancy would go more smoothly than if they had moved in directly off the street. Progressives have long disliked transitional housing for its reputation for paternalism and because it’s not permanent. Of late, support for something like transitional housing has revived in California, as policymakers have scrambled for a program that’s more attractive to the street homeless themselves than shelter and easier to build than permanent supportive housing. Some tiny-home programs—small villages of units around 100 square feet, built out of shipping containers or through a prefab/modular construction process—operate like transitional housing. In contrast with traditional transitional housing, new tiny-home programs generally don’t enforce robust behavioral expectations, which remain rare in California homelessness programs.
A village of tiny homes—units of about 100 square feet (TED SOQUI/SIPA USA/AP PHOTO)
Ask the average Californian his take on homelessness, and he’ll say that it’s gotten much worse. Back in the early 2000s, a visitor to Los Angeles’s Skid Row or San Francisco’s Tenderloin would have witnessed scenes of misery that seemed scarcely capable of further deterioration. Intense reaction against street conditions back then gave rise, in many California cities, to campaigns to end homelessness, prompting billions in new spending. But no California city ended homelessness; the average Californian’s impression is correct. According to the best data available, homelessness in California grew during the 2010s and is still growing.
It has also spread. Governments once aspired to contain homelessness-related disorder within the boundaries of forlorn neighborhoods like Skid Row and the Tenderloin. But containment strategies are now just as discredited as the goal of ending homelessness. Tents are everywhere: the suburbs, the beaches, riverbeds, beneath overpasses, urban parks, median strips, nature preserves, and sidewalks surrounding City Halls. The crisis’s dispersion has caused regional tensions, with neighboring communities trading accusations of dumping their homelessness problems on one another. To sort out inter-municipal disputes, and those between city and county governments, state government has had to step in. Since taking office in 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom has often identified homelessness as his top priority—another measure of the issue’s magnitude. Most states view homelessness as a local problem.
Public concern has intensified in response to the gruesome details that give twenty-first- century homelessness such a menacing character and that give California such a dystopian reputation in connection with it. In San Diego from 2016 to 2018, a homeless-encampment-related outbreak of hepatitis A infected hundreds, 20 fatally. In the early months of Covid-19, Los Angeles contracted with a portable restroom company to facilitate better hygiene among the street population. One employee of that firm was impaled in the hand by a syringe when cleaning out a handwashing station near a needle exchange. In April 2021, a dog was burned alive in Venice by a fire likely set by a member of that community’s unsheltered population. In January 2022, a dog attacked a security guard at the San Francisco Public Library when the guard tried to use Narcan to revive the dog’s owner, who had overdosed. This past December, a San Francisco toddler overdosed on fentanyl, after coming into contact with it while playing in a park. A June 2018 column in the San Francisco Chronicle titled “Homeless Camp Pushes SF Neighborhood to the Edge” related how a two-and-a-half-year-old had “invented a game called ‘jumping over the poop’” and that “[a]nother kid across the street collected syringe caps and floated them down the stream of dirty gutter water for fun.”
Social media have been crucial in advancing progressive causes such as Black Lives Matter, but they have pushed in the opposite direction with homelessness. The notion that homeless Californians are just down-on-their-luck cases has been undermined by viral videos such as Michael Shellenberger’s interviews with street addicts. In one, posted in February 2022, “Ben” reckoned that less than 10 percent of San Francisco’s street homeless are from the city originally and that the majority have an addiction, and he explained how he supports his own habit through petty crime. A video posted on July 8, 2022, by a San Francisco–based Twitter user showed schoolchildren exiting a bus in the city’s South of Market neighborhood into what looked like a junkie zombie apocalypse. Californians understand that rents in their state are punishingly expensive and that some people who might have found housing elsewhere have wound up living on the street here. But why do they have to live on the street like that?
Homelessness hardens the heart. In a crisis jurisdiction, one cannot use streets and sidewalks without passing by—and thus ignoring—the obvious suffering of one’s fellow man. But the homelessness story in California today is not one of neglect. Policymakers have been trying to help, but their programs have yet to make much headway.
All three levels of government—city, county, and state—have recently expanded outlays on homelessness, much of it flowing through specialized agencies, such as the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing ($670 million FY22 budget) and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority ($800 million FY22 budget). In fiscal 2022, state government spent over $7 billion on homelessness programs. The public has directly authorized more spending on homelessness and low-income housing through several recent ballot initiatives: Alameda County’s Measure A1 (2016); Santa Clara County’s Measure A (2016); Los Angeles City’s Proposition HHH (2016); Los Angeles County’s Measure H; the statewide No Place Like Home (2018); San Francisco’s Proposition C (2018); and Los Angeles City’s Proposition ULA (2022).
Most homelessness spending in California goes toward giving people a place to sleep. This can be done on a short-term, intermediate-term, or permanent basis, and accompanied, or unaccompanied, by programmatic goals like sobriety and employment. Permanent supportive housing is the form of housing that progressive advocates for the homeless favor most. It provides a subsidized private apartment, whose occupant can stay there as long as he likes, provided he abides by the terms of the lease. The program is “supportive” insofar as the unit is linked somehow to social services, but with no expectation that tenants use those services or pursue sobriety or employment. Permanent supportive housing is not optimal for nondisabled individuals capable of something more than lifetime dependency; other disadvantages are its high per-unit costs, which have topped $800,000, and the glacial pace of development. The program’s main advantages are that some people unquestionably need it, and it’s reasonably likely to keep people housed and off the street, at least for a few years.
“In San Diego, a homeless-encampment-related outbreak of hepatitis A infected hundreds, 20 fatally.”
At the other end of the housing spectrum stands shelter. Unlike permanent supportive housing, shelter is short-term and provides minimal privacy. Accommodations are shared, often in a dorm-style setting. Shelter’s advantages are that it’s easier to launch in bulk than permanent supportive housing (or any other form of affordable housing) and, compared with living on the streets, people are safer and warmer in shelter. Providing shelter, at least to some degree, is a legal requirement for any city that wants to restrict sleeping in public. The disadvantages of shelter are that it’s temporary and that, however much government spends on it, some street homeless will keep opting for the freer, if more hazardous, unsheltered life. The weather, often overlooked in homelessness discussions, makes shelter less of a pressing need in famously temperate California.
In between shelter and permanent supportive housing are so-called transitional housing programs. The traditional understanding of transitional housing was a place where someone could stay on an interim basis—and a place that was sobriety- and/or employment-oriented. The idea was to stabilize people so that, when they finally landed a private apartment, their tenancy would go more smoothly than if they had moved in directly off the street. Progressives have long disliked transitional housing for its reputation for paternalism and because it’s not permanent. Of late, support for something like transitional housing has revived in California, as policymakers have scrambled for a program that’s more attractive to the street homeless themselves than shelter and easier to build than permanent supportive housing. Some tiny-home programs—small villages of units around 100 square feet, built out of shipping containers or through a prefab/modular construction process—operate like transitional housing. In contrast with traditional transitional housing, new tiny-home programs generally don’t enforce robust behavioral expectations, which remain rare in California homelessness programs.
A village of tiny homes—units of about 100 square feet (TED SOQUI/SIPA USA/AP PHOTO)
Why have billions of dollars in homelessness funding achieved so little? Some blame Housing First, a philosophy that calls for solving homelessness through permanent housing and prohibits the use of any requirements, such as sobriety or participation in services, as a condition of receiving housing benefits. This philosophy stood behind various local-level campaigns to end homelessness. Sacramento lawmakers made Housing First a requirement of state-funded programs in 2016 (SB 1380). Housing First’s reach has an important cultural dimension. Support for it runs deep among homelessness professionals—academics who specialize in the subject, as well as the leadership and staff of government agencies and prominent service providers such as People Assisting the Homeless, public law firms like the ACLU of Southern California, and advocacy groups like the San Francisco Coalition for the Homeless.
Housing First’s reputation has taken a hit, though, from Los Angeles’s experience with Proposition HHH, a ballot initiative passed in fall 2016, with a “yes” vote of over three-fourths. The measure authorized $1.2 billion in bond funding for permanent supportive housing, mostly. But, as documented in a series of scathing reports by former Los Angeles City controller Ron Galperin, it took three years to open the first units backed by HHH funds, and, by February 2022, only about 1,100 units were operating, a rate “wholly inadequate in the context of the ongoing homelessness emergency.” Galperin also criticized the program’s costs, which average above $500,000 per unit. The HHH experience is not unrepresentative. A June 2022 Los Angeles Timesanalysis found several examples of subsidized housing programs exceeding $1 million per unit.
The old wisdom on Housing First is that it’s the most practical solution to homelessness, far simpler and cheaper than any alternative. But experienced politicians, such as Newsom and Sacramento mayor Darrell Steinberg (a former leader of the state senate), have become aware of Housing First’s gross impracticalities. Here’s how a progressive Housing Firster imagines success: an encampment emerges, community members object to it as a public nuisance, and government promptly provides the dozens or hundreds of inhabitants of this encampment with their own subsidized private apartments. Experienced politicians know that things will never work like that.
Housing Firsters believe in devoting maximum resources to permanent supportive housing, but if one scans the landscape of California homelessness programs, one finds many examples of funding going toward other priorities. In this year’s budget, state government will devote hundreds of millions of dollars to dismantling encampments; an August 2022 press release put out by Governor Newsom celebrated how “California Clears More than 1,250 Homeless Encampments in 12 Months” and featured pictures of the governor himself participating in cleanups. The federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2018 Martin v. Boise decision prohibited cities from banning or tightly regulating camping in public unless they have provided their unsheltered population with an alternative to street-sleeping. Progressive advocates hailed Martin v. Boise, but it has led to more investment in shelters, which advocates see as a counterproductive diversion of resources.
The qualifications that California has had to put on its commitment to Housing First have resulted in strategic incoherence. What’s going on is neither orthodox Housing First nor some alternative philosophy that has replaced it. The reason: political conditions aren’t yet ripe for a full sea change on homelessness in California. Notwithstanding all the public outcry, the crisis has had only modest political repercussions. Beginning in the early 2000s, the once-mighty California GOP began an inexorable decline into irrelevance. The intensification of the state’s homelessness crisis, under Democratic rule, has done nothing to reverse that development. The attempted recall of Newsom in 2021 was more about homelessness than any other issue, but he handily defeated the effort. One recall candidate was Kevin Faulconer, Republican mayor of San Diego during the 2010s, who managed to reduce homelessness in his city at a time when it was getting worse everywhere else in the state. Yet, despite a compelling record on the issue of the day, he ran third among the contenders to replace Newsom, and far behind Newsom himself. Newsom coasted to reelection in 2022. Much like his predecessor Jerry Brown, Newsom has become a skilled practitioner of the politics of co-optation, throwing the occasional jab at far-left ideologues as a way of preserving the status quo.
At the local level, San Francisco seems better positioned to make progress on homelessness than Los Angeles. Stirrings of sanity in the City by the Bay include an August 2022 property-tax revolt among small-business owners in the Castro, fed up with disorder, and the success of two centrists (Joel Engardio and Matt Dorsey) in closely fought races for supervisor this past November. Most notably, voters recalled progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin in June 2022 and elected his more law-and-order-oriented successor, Brooke Jenkins, first appointed by Mayor London Breed, in November 2022. Though big changes should not be expected in San Francisco—Mayor Breed is another consummate co-opter—progressive hopes are on pause for now.
Los Angeles is in a darker place. Last year, two incumbent city councilmembers, Gil Cedillo and Mitch O’Farrell, both liberal Democrats, lost reelection bids to challengers endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America–Los Angeles and who campaigned on platforms of more accommodation toward encampments. Voters also turned out Sheriff Alex Villanueva, one of the last Southern California elected officials with a law-and-order brand and who had served, in county politics, as a vital counter against the irresponsible “defund the police” agenda of the Board of Supervisors. Lastly, Angelenos voted “yes” on Proposition ULA, thus authorizing higher taxes for more low-income housing and belying the notion that HHH’s disappointing legacy has somehow made the public ready to “starve the beast.” Los Angeles appears poised to become more progressive on homelessness and street disorder in the 2020s than it was in the 2010s.
California is host to half the country’s unsheltered population. Over the last decade, many encampments have taken on massive scale and acquired proper names: Ross Camp in Santa Cruz (about 200 people, dismantled in 2019); Echo Park Lake and the Venice Boardwalk in Los Angeles (200 people each, dismantled in 2021); in San Jose, the Jungle (300; 2014) and an even larger camp near the airport (500; 2022); Division Street in San Francisco (350; 2016); Wood Street in Oakland (200; 2022); Palco Marsh in Eureka (300; 2016); the Santa Ana Riverbed (“Skid River”) in Orange County (1,000; 2018); and the Joe Rodota Trail in Sonoma County (300; 2020). Scale attracts a criminal element and increases all manner of risks: infectious-disease outbreaks caused by deficient sanitation and hygiene, fires that threaten not only lives but also nearby energy and transportation infrastructure (most fires that the Los Angeles Fire Department responds to are homelessness-related), sexual assault, overdoses, and so on. The experience of public housing taught Americans about the hazards of concentrating poverty, but the average encampment is host to a far more troubled population than even the most derelict housing project.
A more common sight than the brand-name tent cities set up in parks or outside central business districts are smaller groups of tents, spread throughout dense urban areas. These lead to just as much public outcry because it doesn’t take many tents to diminish residents’ and businesses’ quality of life. No one, even if poor or mentally ill, should be allowed to take public property for his own private use via do-it-yourself eminent domain. Encampment cleanups are the democratic thing to do. Left-wing critics criticize them as a futile exercise in Whac-A-Mole that just shifts the problem around. But in the world of homelessness, success is relative. Building housing has not proved effective. Between 2015 and 2020, California expanded the number of permanent supportive housing units in the state by almost one-third (15,700), while the unsheltered count grew by 50 percent (40,000). Even if all that housing didn’t reduce homelessness, advocates argue, it prevented it from getting a lot worse. By the same token, however, cleanup proponents can argue that, absent enforcement, California would have on its hands even larger encampments—and in more places.
Homelessness is a housing problem in the sense that low-income Californians face a dire shortage of rental units within their means. Efforts to create more subsidized housing—both through mainstream affordable-housing programs and supportive-housing efforts targeted to the currently homeless—will continue. But in the short and intermediate terms, subsidized housing must be coupled with other approaches if California is to make any headway in managing homelessness.
Policymakers should keep expanding intermediate-length transitional programs as an alternative to both permanent supportive housing and traditional shelter. The next logical step in this expansion should be more sobriety-oriented homelessness programs, which remain overly stigmatized in California’s Housing First culture. More sober housing programs would provide homelessness policy in California with some desperately needed success stories. Sober programs also have a reputation as safer than programs with a laxer attitude toward whether tenants are using drugs or alcohol. Unsheltered homeless often cite unsafe conditions in shelters as one reason that they stay on the streets. To the extent that that complaint is sincere, sober programs can respond to it. They can also help repair “burned bridges” with friends and family. Someone who sticks with a program that has behavioral requirements sends an objective signal to former friends and family that he has changed. More “inclusive” Housing First–style programs cannot do that.
Above all, on housing, policymakers should try to stop the bleeding. They must make a determined effort to preserve what few low-rent (even if low-quality) housing options remain. Examples include board-and-care homes for the mentally disabled and SROs in San Diego, both of which have been declining during the recent era of rising homelessness.
Other specific steps should be pursued as well—including the repeal of SB 1380, California’s Housing First law, which it does not need. Some people are best served by permanent supportive housing or other “low barrier” programs, but many others are not, and this second cohort is now being neglected by state policies. Without SB 1380, many avenues would remain to pursue funding for permanent supportive housing, including ballot initiatives and city- and county-funded programs. In the homelessness context, California spends too much time debating process and administration. Often, what passes for a robust exchange is little more than city versus county versus state blame-gaming. Public officials should spend more time debating philosophy; taking up SB 1380’s repeal would be one way to pursue that end.
“Shutting down open-air drug markets in hot spots may make it easier to coax tent-dwellers to accept services.”
Another step would be to pursue creative litigation. Democracy suffers when courts, instead of elected politicians, make policy. But when faced with one-party rule and aggressive public-interest law groups, asking centrists and conservatives not to pursue policy aims via litigation looks like a request for unilateral disarmament. The LA Alliance on Human Rights is a private organization that, through the courts, has constructively pressured city and county government to expand both shelter and enforcement in Los Angeles. If nothing else, pro-public-order litigation may force the eventual involvement of the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify the still-disputed parameters of encampment enforcement. (In late 2019, the Court declined to hear an appeal on Martin v. Boise.)
Finally, the criminal-justice system’s role in homelessness policy needs to be reaffirmed. Questions about law enforcement and homelessness tend to focus narrowly on camping regulations, but a larger context exists. Over the past ten to 15 years, California has pursued an increasingly progressive agenda on criminal justice. Examples include the passage of Prop. 47 in 2014 and the ongoing push to close Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles, which would slash capacity in that county’s jail system by about 25 percent. It cannot be a coincidence that California’s criminal-justice-reform era has coincided with, per popular impression, the worsening of the homelessness crisis. More enforcement of all laws would help site new housing programs. A commitment to expanded, targeted enforcement around a new shelter or supportive housing facility would neutralize neighborhood concerns about disorder far more effectively than simply admonishing people to trust in social and health systems long notorious for their failures. Shutting down open-air drug markets in homelessness hot spots like the Tenderloin would improve conditions and may well make it easier to coax some tent-dwellers to accept services. This would require directing police to get more involved in social problems than many California Democrats now consider appropriate. But social work and police work should not be viewed as mutually exclusive.
California’s homelessness crisis may not have led to a political revolution, but it has engendered great distrust of government. The homeless themselves, as well as residents and business owners, have endured years of dashed hopes. Under-promising and over-delivering now seem like the most prudent course for government to take, but popular impatience requires at least some wins in the near term, such as the reclamation of trails and parks for public use. Good intentions long ago ceased to suffice. Enforcement actions will continue to be criticized as shortsighted. But excessive faith in solutions that proponents insisted would succeed has led to a legacy of broken promises and cynicism.
New York Magazine admitted this week that mass immigration to the United States is, in fact, “bad for housing prices” for Americans looking for affordable single-family homes.
The admission from the left-wing publication comes as years of research has shown that the nation’s admission of more than a million legal immigrants annually, in addition to millions of illegal aliens, helps send housing prices surging for working- and middle-class Americans.
“Yet one key sector in which immigrants drive higher demand is housing. People need homes,” New York Magazine writer Eric Levitz admitted.
Rather than decreasing overall immigration levels, as most Americans want, Levitz argues that despite mass immigration being “bad for housing prices,” the U.S. ought to make mass immigration “work” by enriching real estate developers with a dismantling of local zoning laws and rapid construction of multi-family complexes in single-family neighborhoods.
WATCH: Fmr. Obama Acting ICE Director: “Majority” of Arrivals at Border Will Be Released for Years, and That Will “Draw People Here”:
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“In a world of restrictive zoning and housing scarcity, the nationalist right’s anti-immigrant narrative attains a modicum of plausibility: If the supply of housing units is largely fixed, then allowing immigrants to enter your city will reduce the housing security of the native-born,” Levitz writes:
This insight should not lead us to abandon large-scale immigration, however, but to facilitate housing development. As a matter of ethics and economics, the United States must increase legal immigration. Since our nation’s population is aging, a shrinking share of prime-age workers will need to support a growing share of retirees in the coming decades. At the same time, the working-age population of sub-Saharan Africa is set to grow by 700 million by mid-century and that of Latin America and the Caribbean by 40 million. [Emphasis added]
…
When housing construction fails to match population growth, massive immigration imposes burdens on ordinary people. As recent events in New York make clear, that will create political difficulties in even the most cosmopolitan of areas. [Emphasis added]
WATCH: DHS Chief Mayorkas Refuses to Recognize Cost of Illegal Immigration to American Citizens:
CBS News
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“Immigration into Canada is on pace to hit a record high in 2022, but the intake has run into a bottleneck: not enough homes,” the Journal noted in October 2022.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) has similarly called out the issue of mass immigration driving up home prices for Americans, telling Breitbart News that the policy of importing millions annually is akin to “economic warfare.”
“Think of the effects that this has on working Americans’ wages to have 10 million more people who shouldn’t be here competing for jobs,” Vance said. “Think about what this does for housing prices, when you have to house 10 million people that shouldn’t be here, that drives up the costs of housing when interest rates are already through the roof.”
“This is economic warfare and theft of the American dream from American citizens, that is the big problem here and that’s why we have to keep fighting it,” he continued.
In 2013, a study by the Michael Bloomberg-funded New American Economy, which promotes mass immigration, explained how the importing of tens of millions of immigrants over decades had helped raise housing costs by $3.7 trillion for the next generation of homebuyers but spun the figure as the creation of “housing wealth.”
“The 40 million immigrants in the United States represent a powerful purchasing class — reflected by their demand for housing, as well as for other locally produced goods and services — that bolster the value of homes in communities across the country,” the study admitted.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
A 16% increase in homelessness in California accounted for most of the 3% national increase, putting more heat on the state’s lagging effort to curb the surge, according to a new federal report.
The Housing and Urban Development Department late Tuesday released its homelessness report and counted 568,000 people without homes. Significantly, it found that homelessness among veterans, youths, and families is down. For veterans, it’s down 40% over the last 10 years.
The department, which bases the numbers on a one-night national count of homeless people, said that if California hadn’t seen such an explosion in homelessness, the national number would not have increased.
Essentially, said a senior HUD official, California’s increase “offset” the national trend downward.
In the report, the second “key finding” singled out California. It said: “While homelessness in most states declined between 2018 and 2019, homelessness in California increased by 16 percent, or 21,306 people. The large increase in California is reflected in a nationwide increase of 3 percent, or 14,885 people experiencing homelessness, between 2018 and 2019.”
HUD Secretary Ben Carson also didn’t mince words in his memo included in the 2019 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress. He wrote, “This year’s report shows that there was a small increase in the one-night estimates of people experiencing homelessness across the nation between 2018 and 2019 (3%), which reflects a 16 percent increase in California, and offsets a marked decrease across many other states.”
He added in a statement, "California is at a crisis level and needs to be addressed by local and state leaders with crisis-like urgency. Addressing these challenges will require a broader, community-wide response that engages every level of government to compassionately house our most vulnerable fellow citizens."
The administration has been critical of California’s handling of the crisis, which is notable for tent cities in downtown areas. California has blamed President Trump for the crisis, but HUD recently pushed back, claiming that the state is sitting on $450 million in federal aid and doing nothing to slash regulations that have driven up the price of a single low-income unit to $750,000.
Throughout the report, California’s woes were highlighted. A sampling:
· In terms of absolute numbers, California has more than half of all unsheltered homeless people in the country (53% or 108,432), with nearly nine times as many unsheltered homeless as the state with the next highest number, Florida (6% or 12,476), despite California’s population being only twice that of Florida.
· An increase in the number of individuals experiencing homelessness, specifically unsheltered individuals, drove the national increase in all people experiencing homelessness. The number of unsheltered individuals in California rose 21 percent between 2018 and 2019, an increase of more than 18,000 people.
· Nearly half of all people experiencing homelessness in the country were in three states: California (27% or 151,278 people); New York (16% or 92,091 people); and Florida (5% or 28,328 people).
· California and New York had the largest numbers of people experiencing homelessness and the highest rates of homelessness, at 38 and 46 people per 10,000, respectively.
· California also had the highest percentage of all people experiencing homelessness staying in unsheltered locations (72%).
California to house homeless people on vacant state land
Gov. Gavin Newsom also wants to create a fund to build housing for formerly homeless people
PUBLISHED: January 8, 2020 at 12:27 pm | UPDATED: January 9, 2020 at 10:07 am
Cities will be able to open emergency homeless shelters on vacant state land under a new executive order from Gov. Gavin Newsom that escalates his attempts to handle the growing crisis.
The order, which comes amid a surge in homelessness throughout the state and growing concern about the issue from residents, will require state agencies to identify by the end of this month empty lots near highways, fairgrounds, decommissioned hospitals and other spaces where cities, counties or nonprofits can provide space for people to live temporarily.
The news, coupled with a new budget proposal from the governor to spend more than $1 billion serving homeless people, comes as President Donald Trump berates Newsom and other California Democrats for failing to do enough to address the issue.
“The state of California is treating homelessness as a real emergency — because it is one,” Newsom said in a statement. “Californians are demanding that all levels of government — federal, state and local — do more to get people off the streets and into services — whether that’s housing, mental health services, substance abuse treatment or all of the above.”
“That’s why we’re using every tool in the toolbox — from proposing a massive new infusion of state dollars in the budget that goes directly to homeless individuals’ emergency housing and treatment programs, to building short-term emergency housing on vacant state-owned land,” he continued.
In the order, Newsom said the state also would distribute 100 travel trailers and modular tents to local partners, who will receive help from state crisis response teams if they agree to provide counseling and help transition people into permanent housing.
A map of “excess” state-owned property from the Department of General Services shows a number of Bay Area locations that could potentially be considered, from Santa Cruz and San Jose over to Hayward and San Lorenzo.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf told reporters she felt “tremendous excitement” about the announcement.
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“I was very excited to see the philosophy and experience of Oakland reflected in his recommendations,” Schaaf said, pointing out that the city has worked with Caltrans to open cabins for homeless people on the agency’s land.
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, who spent months in tense negotiations with Caltrans to lease land for tiny homes for the homeless, said he hopes Newsom’s announcement will prompt the agency to be more collaborative.
“It’s a positive step,” Liccardo said. “What’s sometimes more valuable than the resources is the deadline and by that I mean big cities throughout the state have been scrambling to build various alternative kinds of housing on vacant land. And it’s often been a challenge to get other agencies to move at the speed that this crisis demands.”
Liccardo suggested that housing could even go on cloverleafs near freeways.
“It seems to me like there’s a lot of wasted land,” Liccardo said, “that we should absolutely be able to use.”
The budget, Newsom said, should include a new fund to both pay rent for people facing homelessness and build housing for formerly homeless people. Initially, the fund would be backed by $750 million from the general fund, but the governor will call on nonprofits and businesses to kick in additional money.
The fund would need to be approved by state lawmakers, which wouldn’t happen until later this spring, but the governor’s executive order to open up vacant land does not and is more immediate.
Still, the order relies heavily on local elected officials and other community leaders being willing to manage the emergency shelters and work to move people into more stable housing, which remains in short supply. And they will be tracked on their efforts. The executive order calls for a system to monitor how many people local jurisdictions help get into stable housing.
“We’re glad to see the governor interested in allocating significantly more dollars to addressing our homelessness crisis,” said David Low of Destination: Home, a San Jose-based nonprofit aimed at eliminating homelessness. “It’s going to be equally important that we look at how we can deploy those dollars in a way that supports our local strategies and will have the most impact possible.”
In the last year, the state moved to distribute $650 million in emergency homeless aid to cities and counties across the state, with the final payments going out this week. San Jose, which has seen homelessness spike 42 percent over the last few years to more than 6,000 residents, was set to receive nearly $24 million. Oakland and San Francisco, which also both saw major increases in homelessness, were allocated more than $19 million each.
Yet despite such efforts, according to data recently released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, California has more than 151,000 homeless people, including more than half of the country’s unsheltered population — a 16 percent increase over last year.
In addition to the $750 million fund, the governor’s budget proposal calls for boosting Medi-Cal funding to address the healthcare needs of chronically homeless people, particularly where mental health struggles, addiction or other issues that could be addressed with healthcare have led people to the streets. The budget also calls for around $25 million — which would rise to about $364 million over six years — to fund a new pilot program to put people with mental illness into care facilities in communities rather than in big state hospitals.
The executive order and budget proposal surface as a number of lawmakers in Sacramento put forward their own ideas to tackle the state’s persistent housing and homelessness problems. Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) recently brought back a controversial proposal to force cities to build denser housing near transit stops and job centers. And Sen. Jim Beall (D-San Jose) reintroduced a bill that would create a new ongoing funding source for affordable housing.
U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) applauded Newsom on Wednesday for treating homelessness “as the all-hands-on-deck crisis that it is.”
“Homelessness will require additional measures from local, state, and the federal government,” Feinstein said in a statement. “I’m heartened that California is stepping up; I will continue to fight for additional tools at the national level as well.”
New Yorkers Say Their Hotel Rooms Are Being Canceled and Given to Migrants
Google Maps/Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images
As illegal immigration overwhelms the United States as a result of President Joe Biden ending the Title 42 border control, New Yorkers say hotel rooms they booked months in advance are now being given to newly arrived border crossers and illegal aliens.
A couple, originally from New York but now residing in Florida, told the New York Post the 30 hotel rooms they had booked at the Crossroads Hotel in Newburgh, New York, were abruptly canceled to accommodate border crossers and illegal aliens.
Another couple, from Queens, New York City, said they had booked 37 hotel rooms at the Crossroads Hotel for their wedding but that the rooms, similarly, were canceled to make room for border crossers and illegal aliens.
The cancelations come as Mayor Eric Adams (D) has started busing newly arrived border crossers and illegal aliens out of New York City, a sanctuary city, to surrounding suburban counties, including Orange County, New York where the Crossroads Hotel sits.
Specifically, the Crossroads Hotel is enjoying a lucrative contract to house at least two dozen border crossers and illegal aliens as of late last week. Likewise, Adams vowed to bus migrants to Rockland County, New York but officials quickly secured a temporary restraining order, blocking the mayor from putting new arrivals up in a county hotel.
Orange County officials have filed a similar lawsuit against Adams, stating that the migrant relocation effort exceeds the mayor’s legal authority.
Eric Adams, mayor of New York, during a New York State Financial Control Board meeting in New York, US, on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Adams’ insistence to begin busing migrants out of New York City comes after he has long called Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) migrant busing policy — where border crossers and illegal aliens are sent out of the state to various sanctuary cities — “anti-American.”
American war veterans have also said that they are being booted from hotel rooms at the Crossroads Hotel to make way for border crossers and illegal aliens.
Adams has turned New York City’s massive illegal immigration problem into a quasi-slush fund for the powerful real estate and hotel industry which helps fund his political initiatives.
WATCH: Illegal Immigrants BAIL When DPS Conducts Traffic Stop, Find 38 POUNDS of Meth:
Texas Department of Public Safety
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Most recently, for example, Adams is looking to transform the iconic now-closed Roosevelt Hotel into a migrant shelter — a boon for the hotel’s owners while costing New Yorkers some $75 million annually.
In total, New Yorkers are expected to spend $4 billion by next year. Much of that cost is being spent on border crossers and illegal aliens whom Adams has placed in multiple luxury hotels at no cost to them, transferring millions from taxpayers to wealthy landlords.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Census: New York City Loses Nearly Half a Million Residents in Two Years
New York City has lost nearly half a million residents over the course of just two years, newly released United States Census Bureau data reveals.
The Census Bureau data, which shows population estimates for mid-2022, finds that fewer than 8.4 million residents remain living in New York City — still making the Big Apple the nation’s most populous city by several million.
In April 2020, the very start of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, more than 8.8 million residents lived in New York City. This figure indicates a population loss of more than five percent from April 2020 to July 2022 with almost half a million residents leaving the city.
Americans moving out of deep blue cities is widespread, the Census Bureau data shows.
The second largest city, Los Angeles, California, and the third largest city, Chicago, Illinois, also lost residents over the course of two years. In Los Angeles, for instance, about 3.8 million residents remain in the city as of July 2022 compared to about 3.9 million residents in April 2020, a loss of about 100,000 residents.
Similarly, Chicago had about 2.67 million residents as of July 2022 but in April 2020, the city had about three percent more residents. Over the two years, about 85,000 residents left Chicago
In addition to crime and social unrest following racial riots, housing prices are a major driver for Americans to leave one area for another. As the real estate site Redfin recently noted, only four major cities in the U.S. have home prices that are cheaper than rent prices: Detroit, Michigan; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Cleveland, Ohio; and Houston, Texas.
Mass immigration helps send housing prices soaring, research has shown. Cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago — all of which are sanctuary cities that offer public benefits to illegal aliens — are inundated annually by illegal and legal immigration which, in return, raises home prices and rents, a boon for local landlords.
RELATED: “Gyms Are for Children!” NY Parents Protest Plans to Use Public Schools for Migrant Shelters:
Christopher Leon Johnson via Storyful
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John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Walmart Closing All Stores in Chicago and Guess Who's Mad!?
— National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) (@GLFOP) June 22, 2021
Every year in America, some 500 whites are murdered by black assailants, more than twice as many as blacks killed by whites. The media need to report all of these cases fairly and without bias so as to counter the false reporting and misplaced emphasis in the national press. All victims, of whatever race, deserve justice because all human life is precious. The reporting of violence should not be based on race — it should be proportionate to the crime, without regard to the race of the perpetrator or the victim. Jeffrey Folks
BLACKS MAKE UP ONLY 8% OF THE POPULATION OF S.F. BUT PERPETRATE MORE THAN 40% OF CRIMES. THOSE STATS ARE DATED. THE CAR BREAK-INS AND MOB LOOTING ARE PERPETRATED BY BLACKS.
The media has omitted the race of the perpetrators, a policy that ironically makes race even more salient. Video footage shows the perpetrators were black. Eyewitness accounts confirm that. And the same tactic and demographic makeup were seen at the Louis Vuitton smash and grab earlier in San Francisco.
Walnut Creek is a quiet exurban town outside of San Francisco. It uncharacteristically made national news over the last few days, and not for anything good. It was the scene of a large-scale smash and grab in the wake of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict.
Over a dozen vehicles pulled up to the Broadway Plaza shopping mall. Some eighty vandals, some wielding crowbars, ran inside Nordstrom and stole merchandise. Five Nordstrom employees were physically assaulted.
The action was said to be over in less than a minute. With their bounty in hand, estimated at $200,000, the thieves drove off in different directions. Only three were apprehended. Of those, one was illegally carrying a firearm.
The media has omitted the race of the perpetrators, a policy that ironically makes race even more salient. Video footage shows the perpetrators were black. Eyewitness accounts confirm that. And the same tactic and demographic makeup were seen at the Louis Vuitton smash and grab earlier in San Francisco.
The neighborhood blogs are filled with discussions. Liberals predictably claim this is because of the divide between the haves and have nots. Others have opined that it is part of the no justice, no peace result of the Rittenhouse verdict. And, of course, there was the inevitable search for root causes, which are always looked for and never really found, at least not empirically.
The cause few want to talk about is what happened at the same mall during the George Floyd riots, in June of 2020. Then our police and civic leaders decided to have the police stand in place. Macy’s was ransacked by hordes of young people who sometimes fought among themselves because some were perceived to have acquired better loot than others.
In the wake of the George Floyd case, our civic leaders, in their infinite wisdom, decided the optics of arresting young black people would not be good. It would be better to let them sate their appetite for theft. On the way out of the mall area, one vandal shot a firearm into a crowd of shoppers, hitting a young black woman in the arm. The police that were the object of the rioters’ derision were quickly giving her first aid and securing transport to the regional medical center.
So, it is not surprising that our mall was once again targeted. After all, during the first smash and grab at Macy’s, the thieves were not stopped. The police stood there like a bunch of robots whose batteries had gone dead. I doubt the rank and file desired this. This was a decision that most likely came from our cowardly civic leaders, who were more worried about optics than public safety.
New York policing has taught us the virtues of the concept of broken windows. Don’t fix the small things in a neighborhood and soon you have big things with which to deal. Start with the broken windows because societal neglect and crime are intertwined. Show that minor infractions are not going to be tolerated. In New York, dealing with broken windows has put a big damper on crime.
Our civic leaders chose the opposite perspective. Let them run wild. Let them steal. Let them flee without obstruction, and they will simply go away. Of course, the civic leaders didn’t think that they had now provided an open invitation for thieves to return for another round.
We will shortly hear from academic pundits about black rage, a theory that is used to justify all sorts of anti-social and criminal behavior. Stealing Louis Vuitton luxury goods will be justified because of the legacy of slavery and discrimination. Only harebrained academics take such nonsense seriously.
An organized criminal enterprise is not the consequence of episodic rage, but of a purposeful undertaking. And before we get too hung up on the race of the perpetrators, we should consider that a lot of different kinds of people will be buying these luxury goods on social media, knowing they are stolen.
On the streets of San Francisco, a city where shoplifting under $950 is a misdemeanor, street vendors hawk stolen goods in original wrapping, sometimes just yards from the stores from which they were stolen. Walgreens is closing twenty-two stores in San Francisco, and communities are whining about a prescription desert, but not taking social action to prevent the ongoing plague of theft.
We have a criminal underclass in our society, one that festers and then finds excuses to explode. While my white suburban neighbors have had their societal equilibrium disturbed as a result of the violence and chaos at Nordstrom, inner-city minorities deal with these problems every day, and our criminal justice system ignores them.
We are becoming acclimated to violence. Gangs shooting at each other on Interstate 880 and killing a two-year-old is just another day in Oakland. On Route 4, near Oakley, there was gunfire from a housing development at passing vehicles headed west. Our public hospitals are overrun with shooting victims, usually as part of ongoing gang wars.
There is no leadership. But there is hypocrisy. The so-called congressional “Squad” calls for defunding the police but hires private security for its own protection. An open border brings in desperate people without relevant economic skills. How will they survive? The media find both justification and sanctification for the riots it deems politically appropriate: witness Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle. In so doing, the media provide legitimacy to thuggery.
The separation between the haves and the have nots is really a separation between the elites and the ordinary, hard-working citizens. The elites have joined with the underclass, but in the end, those who rule with an absence of the heart, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted, are to be vanquished in a single historical night. It will not come soon enough.
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the Haym Salomon Center.
Records said four capital murder suspects arrested for Tuesday’s murder of a man at a Costco parking lot in Dallas are young people, according to Fox 4.
BLACK Suspect(s) wanted in a series of aggravated robberies in Houston at the 9700 block of S. Post Oak.
Four people were pronounced dead following an attempted traffic stop in Maryland, as a manhunt was underway in the state for two former police officers who were considered armed and dangerous. On Thursday night, police confirmed two of the deceased were the former officers.
Three passengers were pronounced dead at the scene in Smithsburg late Thursday afternoon, including a female driver, an adult man and one child, according to Maryland State Police.
BLACKS ARE 15xs to 30xs MORE LIKELY TO PERPETRATE VIOLENCE THAN WHITES.
Dr. Williams comments on another reality: that the rate of black homicide and armed robbery as well as other violent crimes are as is as much as 15–30 times more than whites
Blacks are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes—by 50 percent—according to the most recent Justice Department data from 2017; whites are underrepresented by 24 percent. This is particularly true for anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate crimes.
JOE BIDEFOLKS, THESE PEOPLE WOULD NOT BE HOMELESS AND LIVING ON SIDEWALKS IF THEY'D ONLY WORK AS CHEAP AS OUR DEM VOTING ILLEGALS!
Hundreds of Border Crossers to Soon Enjoy Living in Manhattan’s Iconic Roosevelt Hotel, Paid for by Taxpayers
The migrant inflow has successfullyforced down Americans’ wages and alsoboosted rentsandhousing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to therising death rateof 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 alsoreduces the politicalcloutof native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites to divorce themselves fromthe needsandinterestsof ordinary Americans.
The result is that today there are upwards of 40 million illegal aliens in the country, with millions more crossing the border every year.
Like the gun data, the data on illegal aliens isn’t hard to understand. It’s pretty simple math. The phones alone that the Biden administration gives to illegals cost $360,000 every day while, in the aggregate, illegal aliens cost Americans $250 billion per year. To put that in perspective, the wall Trump wanted to build was estimated to have a price tag of under $25 billion.
When nations die, they do so with surprising speed. Ernest Hemingway made a similar observation when a person in his novel was asked how he went bankrupt, and his reply was, "Gradually, then suddenly."
Nations are built upon classical values — perseverance, self-reliance, and honor. A great nation is one whose values have made it unusually prosperous. In its latter days, the nation becomes hollowed out and burdened with a costly, top-heavy government. The middle class is expected to provide generosity to the masses. Over time, traditional values fade away, and everyone seeks to live off everyone else.
The United States shows aspects of a once great power past its prime. It is socially and politically divided, aware of the necessity for changes, unable or unwilling to make them, and losing the conviction in the shared goals that earlier invigorated it.
The decay that started gradually decades ago is now metastasizing at warp speed. The United States, ripped apart internally, has become ever less willing and able to lead internationally. The doctrines that built the United States and Western civilization, assimilated from ancient cultures over thousands of years, are being methodically dissolved. America is entering an uncharted, revolutionary time. The foundation of American life, abundant food, energy autonomy, a sound economy, sound education at all levels, and enforceable and equal application of the law, are eroding.
Our society is "fundamentally changing," and these changes are not for the better. Hard-left fanatics have absorbed the Democrat party and are transforming the country with woke and equality-of-result agendas. Prosperity and leisure have misled a complacent society into thinking the modern age no longer needs to worry about law and order.
As we recoil from spontaneous street violence and looting, Americans are coming to learn just how degraded the foundations of their society have become. Criminals walk out with stolen merchandise without fear of the law or even the outrage of witnesses. Defunding the police has discharged a torrent of criminals into the streets. Downgrading felonies, no cash bail, and no jail time are spiking violent crime. Lawlessness has become a political matter where race, ideology, and politics decide how the law will be enforced.
At the border, millions of people enter our country illegally. Joe Biden is shamefully welcoming an unvetted third-world population into our country to dilute and displace native-born Americans. No country can exist without a border, much less allow foreign crime cartels to control it while killing 100,000 citizens with drugs yearly.
The FBI is more likely to go after parents at school board meetings than those threatening the homes of Supreme Court justices. CIA and FBI directors lie under oath without consequence. They mislead the public and deceive Congress with stories of fake dossiers. They contract private news organizations to censor stories they do not like and writers whom they fear. And the IRS is weaponized against political opponents of the Democrats.
Possibly a million homeless people now live on our streets. Our major cities are cesspools of human filth with open sewers, garbage-strewn streets, and drugged out drifters.
Grocery shelves are increasingly bare, and many food items are now beyond people's budgets. Fuel costs are reaching record levels, new cars and homes are unaffordable, and inflation is at a 40-year high. The necessary medicine of high interest rates to bring down inflation is nearly as painful as the inflation itself.
The federal government spends $1.29 for every dollar in tax revenues it receives, and a quarter of IRS revenues are now needed to cover interest payments on the debt. Economic doom, market collapse, and bank runs are not far from people's minds.
China is leading BRICS countries to replace the dollar's standing as the world's reserve currency. Any success they attain will lessen demand for dollars and possibly collapse the dollar's exchange rate.
Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party authorities think they have a chance to bolster their power and change the world order in their favor. Because China's broad geopolitical interests are on the rise, a pressing question is how to check China's ambitions at a time of division and discord in America. China's current foreign policy could not happen without its substantial military forces and three-decades-long economic growth, underwritten by its exports to America.
Sensing American weakness, the CCP may invade Taiwan before Joe Biden leaves office. Are the American people willing to fight over Taiwan or freedom of navigation issues near Chinese-claimed islands? What are we truly ready to fight for? When that happens, are we prepared for economic devastation to the U.S. and the world? Meanwhile, thousands of Chinese sleeper agents are crossing our open southern border to cause mayhem when called upon to do so.
Today's threat arises from a disintegrating world order. More than at any other recent time, many dangerous intersecting events are happening at a time when the United States is unprepared to deal with them.
And it all culminates with the elections in November 2024. Democrats can win only by cheating, and since they did it successfully in 2020, you can expect them to do it again. While some election integrity measures have been increased in some states, almost nothing has been done anywhere to require open-source computer programming code of voting machines so we can be assured they are counting votes correctly. Moreover, nothing has been done to prevent voting machines from being hacked to alter election outcomes. At this point, the left has become brazenly indifferent as to whether anyone even knows of its cheating. Court challenges almost always go the leftists' way.
Regardless of who is declared the winner, there will be unrest. There could be a breakdown in civil order nationwide. If the left loses, leftists will riot and loot in a replay of the 2020 BLM riots. If the right loses, this will be a turning point, as we can't go on being lied to and threatened by the left. Another stolen election will break our country.
The decay that began slowly long ago is now upon us in full force. The only election historically comparable to 2024 was in 1860, and that one was followed by a civil war. We must defend our freedom and our country and protect it with everything we have or lose it all. We must be involved and understand that if we lose the election in 2024, America, as we know it, is over. To save the nation, all constitutionally minded Americans must see the danger and gird themselves for what lies ahead.
Jeff Lukens is a West Point graduate, U.S. Army veteran, and conservative activist. He can be reached at jplukens@hotmail.com.
Newly sworn-in Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) welcomed border crossers and illegal aliens to the sanctuary city in his inaugural address on Monday just as black Chicagoans protest illegal immigration flooding their neighborhoods.
Since August 2022, thousands of border crossers and illegal aliens have inundated Chicago — many arriving with illnesses like COVID-19 and without any ties to the city — spurring former Mayor Lori Lightfoot to declare a state of emergency last week.
Already, Chicago officials have opened police stations and abandoned schools to border crossers and illegal aliens, paid for by local taxpayers. Despite Lightfoot saying the city is at a “breaking point,” Johnson said there is more than enough room for border crossers and illegal aliens.
“We don’t want our story to be told that we were unable to house the unhoused or provide safe harbor for those who are seeking refuge here because enough room for everyone in the city of Chicago, whether you are seeking asylum or you are looking for a fully funded neighborhood,” Johnson said in his address.
The remarks sharply break from black Chicagoans who wield significant political power. Late last week, many attended a town hall meeting at the former South Shore High School where city officials want to house potentially hundreds of migrants.
“Looking at the numbers coming out of city hall and the state of Illinois, upwards of $150 million for six months,” one resident explained:
We believe that $150 million would have been, in some way, eligible to come into our community to help our crime problem, help our economic problem, and help with our housing issues. And as we’re all aware, black people are the largest number of homeless in Chicago so if you’re going to help anyone, help the current black homeless first. [Emphasis added]
At the town hall, one black Chicagoan held a sign that read “BUILD THE WALL 2024,” a sign of support for closing the United States-Mexico border to illegal immigration rather than President Joe Biden’s current approach of releasing tens of thousands of border crossers and illegal aliens into American communities every month.
Chicago residents are so fed up with illegal immigration that a group has filed a lawsuit against the city to stop them from housing border crossers and illegal aliens in the South Shore neighborhood.
“It is a slap in the face that we as citizens of the United States of America do not have the resources and support but you’re going to bring people who are not citizens here in our community, in our buildings that we pay taxes for that you took away from us,” one Chicago resident told local media.
“… at the end of the day, if Chicago can’t take care of its own, why should they take care of others? If the resources are given to others, why can’t the resources be given to us?” another Chicago resident asked.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Exclusive – J.D. Vance: GOP Must Call Out Illegal Immigration as ‘Economic Warfare’ Against Working Americans
Migrant Apprehensions Jump to 182K in Last Full Month of Title 42
Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 182,000 migrants during the month of April — the last full month of the CDC’s Title 42 migrant expulsion program. The latest report from CBP confirms Breitbart Texas’ article on May 3 revealing the third straight month of increased apprehensions along the border.
The apprehension of migrants who crossed the border between ports of entry began to increase dramatically in the final days of April. U.S. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz tweeted that during the final 72 hours of April, agents apprehended 22,220 migrants — 7,406 per day. By the end of the month, agents apprehended a total of 182,114 migrants, according to the CBP Southwest Land Border Encounters Report for April.
CBP officials reported that about 35 percent of the apprehended migrants were expelled under Title 42, a program that ended on May 11. The apprehensions included 124,599 single adults. Of those, approximately 46 percent were processed for expulsion under Title 42.
Family unit apprehensions increased by 28 percent over March to a total of 45,891 migrants. The apprehension of unaccompanied minors fell slightly to 11,478 in April from 58,964 in March, the report states.
The El Paso Sector continued to lead in April migrant apprehensions as agents took 41,894 migrants into custody. This was followed by the Rio Grande Valley Sector (37,796), the Tucson Sector (33,894), San Diego Sector (25,093), and Del Rio Sector (20,124).
The April apprehensions brought the Fiscal Year total to 1,234,930 migrants — up 1.4 percent over the same seven-month period one year ago. These numbers do not include another 453,000 migrants classified as known got-aways.
The largest number of migrants came from Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of Central America (54,766). The next largest demographic group was Venezuelan migrants (25,514).
The number of apprehensions continued to increase during the first ten days of May.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s What’s Your Point?Sunday-morning talk show. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.
Mayorkas Welcomed Record Surge of Migrants in April
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images, JOAQUIN SARMIENTO/AFP via Getty Images
President Joe Biden’s border deputies welcomed a record surge of economic migrants in April, shortly before they lifted the Title 42 barrier on May 11.
Alejandro Mayorkas’ Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the record inflow on May 17, saying that 137,374 migrants were admitted during the month, before the flood of roughly 40,000 migrants through the border in the days before May 11.
The April inflow exceeded the 135,211 migrants who were admitted in April 2022.
Biden’s April 2023 inflow is 87 times as many as were admitted by President Donald Trump in April 2020.
The April inflow number also excludes the roughly 50,000 migrants who were invited to take Biden’s parole pathways, and it excludes the roughly 60,000 young migrants who sneaked past the thinly monitored border. All together, Biden’s deputies have allowed 250,000 migrants in April. — or roughly two migrants for every three U.S. births.
Since January 2021, Biden’s deputies have admitted roughly 4.5 million migrants across the southern border.
The migration is expected to remain high even after the administration imposed supposedly tough border rules on May 11. The May numbers will be hidden until early June.
Biden’s deputies want more economic migrants to get through the border, despite the huge pocketbook and status damage to ordinary Americans and their children. So they have twisted U.S. laws to open up a series of doorways to help deliver the extra workers, consumers, renters, and government clients to the party’s donors and unions — despite the migration caps set in 1990 by Congress.
On May 11, for example, Biden’s pro-migration border secretary, the Cuban-born Alejandro Mayorkas, was asked about the taxpayer cost of migration. He dodged the question and argued that U.S. investors should be allowed to hire cheap workers from poor countries — such as Columbia in South America — instead of being forced to fairly compete for American white-collar and blue-collar employees in a level U.S. labor market:
Let me turn that question around … I’m going to turn it around to match the question that an international partner asked of me and the question that the international partner asked of me is ‘What is the economic cost of your broken immigration system?’ Since there are businesses around this country that are desperate for workers, there are … desperate workers in foreign countries that are looking for jobs in the United States, where they can earn money lawfully and send much-needed remittances back home. ‘What is the cost of a broken immigration system?’ That is the question I am asked and that is the question that I pose to Congress, because it is extraordinar[ily high].
CBS News
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Mayrokas, however, is also a fierce zealot for foreign migration regardless of the damage to Americans and America. On May 17, he explained his ideological motives in a graduation speech to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy:
My drive has been defined by a very clear purpose. My mother’s and father’s life journeys were defined by displacement. My mother was twice a refugee, first from war-torn Europe and, 19 years later, with my father, my sister, and me from the communist takeover of Cuba.
My mother lost most of her family to the Nazi concentration camps, and she never really regained her sense of security. In Cuba, my father lost the business he had started, as well as the chance to be by his mother’s side when she passed. My parents were both extraordinary people – principled and kind beyond measure. They instilled in me the values by which they lived unflinchingly … They are the primary engine of my drive, and the primary reason why I work so hard, my purpose.
But even many Democratic voters are alarmed by Mayorkas’s policies, and more Republicans are denouncing his pro-poverty policies.
“Think of the effects that this has on working Americans’ wages to have 10 million more people who shouldn’t be here competing for jobs,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) said on May 13. He added:
Think about what this does for housing prices, when you have to house 10 million people that shouldn’t be here, that drives up the costs of housing when interest rates are already through the roof … This is economic warfare and theft of the American dream from American citizens, that is the big problem here and that’s why we have to keep fighting it.
“Nobody has a right to immigrate to this country,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on May 10 as he signed his sweeping state-level law curbing illegal migration in Florida’s jobs and housing. He continued:
We determine as Americans what type of immigration system benefits our country, but when you’re doing immigration, it’s not for their benefit as foreigners, it’s for your benefit as Americans.
So if there’s legal immigration that’s harming Americans, we shouldn’t do that either. For example, some of these H-1B visas, they would fire American tech workers and hire foreigners at lower wages. I don’t agree with that. I think that’s wrong.
The migrant inflow has successfullyforced down Americans’ wages and alsoboosted rentsandhousing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to therising death rateof 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 alsoreduces the politicalcloutof native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites to divorce themselves fromthe needsandinterestsof ordinary Americans.
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver foreign workers to wealthy employers and investors and providing “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
For example, a 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according toan August 2022 pollcommissioned 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.
Hundreds of Border Crossers to Soon Enjoy Living in Manhattan’s Iconic Roosevelt Hotel, Paid for by Taxpayers
Since the spring of 2022, more than 60,000 border crossers and illegal aliens have arrived in the sanctuary city of New York City, with most being bused directly from Texas by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in an effort to save his state the financial burden of illegal immigration.
As New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) has scrambled to handle the influx, his office has turned the city’s coffers into a slush fund for the powerful hotel and real estate industry, which also serves as some of his biggest political donors.
The latest decision will have close to 1,000 border crossers and illegal aliens soon living in Manhattan’s iconic Roosevelt Hotel, which first opened in 1924 and is named after former President Theodore Roosevelt.
This week, Adams will open the Roosevelt Hotel as a welcome center for newly arrived border crossers and illegal aliens before eventually opening almost 200 rooms to migrant families with children.
Eventually, the hotel is set to house close to 1,000 border crossers and illegal aliens. The cost will fall exclusively on New Yorkers, who will foot an annual $75 million bill to convert the Roosevelt Hotel into a migrant shelter.
The hotels-to-migrant-shelters policy by Adams is proving lucrative for the powerful real estate and hotel industry in New York City. Once closed hotels are now opening as migrant shelters, enticed by city contracts and fronted by taxpayers.
An attorney for a financial district hotel, also now housing border crossers and illegal aliens, told NBC New York that the city contract is providing “substantially more revenue” for the hotel’s owners than if they rented rooms to tourists.
In total, New Yorkers are expected to spend $4 billion on illegal migrants by next year.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
California, in Deficit, Considers Unemployment Benefits for ‘Undocumented’ Workers
The California state legislature is considering a bill that would grant unemployed workers who are illegally in the country access to unemployment benefits — even though the state is running a massive budget deficit.
As Breitbart News reported earlier this week, California’s fiscus has fallen in the space of one year from a surplus of $100 billion, partly based on federal cash for coronavirus relief, to a staggering deficit of $32 billion.
In his revised budget, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) cautioned legislators to maintain “prudence.” But under SB 227, “excluded” workers who are in the country illegally would be able to receive $300 per week in benefits.
As Fox News reported, proponents say migrant workers “deserve” the benefits, despite entering the U.S. unlawfully:
In March, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors unanimously adopted a resolution supporting the statewide bill.
“We cannot take people’s money, take people’s taxes, take people’s labor and then deny them the very benefits and rights that they deserve and that they have earned,” Supervisor Shamann Walton said at a protest before the board met.
Payroll taxes on illegal immigrants contribute $485 million a year to the state’s Unemployment Insurance system, according to the Safety Net for All Coalition, a group of over 120 organizations across California seeking to expand welfare programs for undocumented workers. The weekly checks plus administrative expenses in the proposed legislation [are] estimated to cost $356 million in state funds.
California’s unemployment insurance program is already controversial, having lost $30 billion in fraudulent claims during the pandemic. The state recently defaulted on a federal loan to cover a shortfall in benefits.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
D.C. Taxpayers Fund Laundry Service for Poor Migrants
Michael Robinson Chávez/The Washington Post via Getty
An estimated $15 million has been spent by Washington, DC, residents to provide hotels, meals, laundry, English classes, and security to roughly 1,300 illegal migrants who have been welcomed by President Joe Biden and the city’s Democratic government.
The Washington Postreported on May 11 the illegal population and the bills are rising fast in the small city of 310,000 households:
A contract with a soul food restaurant to provide three meals a day for the hotel families is budgeted for $3.6 million, while an agreement with SAMU First Response, a D.C. nonprofit, to coordinate mental health counseling and other services in the city is expected to cost $1.7 million, DHS said. Laundry at the hotels, covered by another contract, costs about $1.1 million, while security to keep outsiders out of the areas of the hotels where the migrants stay is budgeted for $4.5 million. The cumulative hotel billalone is projected to reach $12 million by October, DHS said.
The city’s bills are also rising because 340 foreign children have been added to the schools. That policy adds roughly $4 million in costs to the failing school system, which serves a local population with many prosperous whites and many poor black Americans. Roughly one-sixth of the city’s residents live in poverty as the city officials accept more poor migrants.
Pro-migration Democratic politicians are feeling political opposition from working-class Americans in New York, New Jersey, and Chicago.
Mandi Rivera and her children Jahir Emanuel Buada, 9, left, and Javier Andres Buada, 7, wait for a bus during their one and a half hour morning commute to school in Washington, DC, on April 11, 2023. Mandi and her family are from Venezuela. Families of migrants are staying at hotels that are being administered by the District. (Michael Robinson Chávez/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The Washington Postshowed local politicians complaining as Americans are being forced to pay for the administration’s border gateway:
“I don’t think anybody could tell you where we’re going,” D.C. Council member Robert C. White Jr. (D-At Large) said, noting that the city is facing budget cuts to programs designed to serve its existing poor and homeless population.
The economic migrants are too poor and unskilled to support themselves without welfare in the high-cost, high-rent city. The Post described one migrant family from Peru:
[Arianmi] RamÃrez said that with help from volunteers from the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, she and her husband [and one child] have tried finding a place. So far, none of the rents have been within their reach. “I would love to live in a house, but even an apartment with at least two rooms would be better,” said RamÃrez, who supplements the income her husband receives from his temporary construction job by selling the Venezuelan snacks she prepares in the room’s tiny kitchenette to other hotel residents.
The husband’s “temporary construction job” would have been awarded to Americans at higher wages if Biden had not accepted the illegals. The Post did not calculate the pocketbook impact on D.C. residents.
The Washington Post article also ignores the impact of Biden’s migration on the city’s rising rents.
Meanwhile, in a separate article, the Washington Postreported on May 5 that homelessness in D.C. spiked by 12 percent over the last year to 4,410 people
The new figures also represent a stark turnaround from recent years, which saw consecutive drops in the District’s homeless population. The DHS maintains that the recent figures reflect national economic pressures such as inflation and the end of pandemic-era programs and protections.
Biden’s deputies are smuggling many more economic migrants into the country via multiple illegal and quasi-legal routes. including the asylum route for people who are repressed b hostile governments.
During the next 12 months, the inflow is scheduled to bring in at least 800,000 poor migrants above the legal cap of one million migrants set by Congress. in 1990.
The total is equal to one migrant for every two births.
VIDEO: Biden-Deployed Soldier Opens Texas Border Gate, Allows Migrants to Enter
A U.S. National Guard soldier deployed to the Texas border by the Biden administration is seen in a video unlocking a border barrier gate to allow a large group of migrants to enter. The soldier is not a member of the Texas National Guard deployed by Governor Greg Abbott, officials stated.
A video tweeted by Fox LA reporter Bill Melugin shows a female soldier opening a gate in a border fence near Eagle Pass, Texas. The date on the video is May 15, shortly after the end of the CDC Title-42 migrant expulsion protocol.
The video shows the soldier opening the gate in what appears to be a Texas-built border fence along the Rio Grande. The soldier steps back as the gate swings open and a large group of migrants begin to enter.
The migrants line up to wait for Border Patrol agents who will process the migrants and place them on the bus for transportation to an Eagle Pass processing facility.
Melugin tweeted that Texas National Guard officials told him the soldier is a Missouri National Guard member deployed to assist Border Patrol agents under Title 10 by the Biden administration. She is not an Operation Lone Star-deployed soldier.
A second video shows the migrants lining up to be processed by the Border Patrol agents. A CBP bus stands by to provide transportation to a processing center in Eagle Pass.
On May 15, Del Rio Sector agents apprehended 650 migrants, according to a law enforcement report obtained by Breitbart Texas. The group shown crossing in the video above would account for a significant portion of these apprehensions.
Agents along the entire southwest border with Mexico apprehended more than 4,800 migrants who crossed the border between ports of entry. This is the fifth straight of declining apprehensions following the end of the Title 42 program.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s What’s Your Point?Sunday-morning talk show. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.
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