Donald
Trump visited enemy territory this week.
He came out here to the deep blue state of California to
raise a few million bucks at private fundraisers in Silicon Valley and Beverly
Hills.
He also went down to the border with Mexico to inspect the
wall the federal government is building to stop illegal immigration and protect
what no longer deserves to be called the Golden State.
What the president couldn't see while he was out here were
all the wealthy and productive Californians who are leaving this state in
droves.
They are the people who are tired of being tortured by high
state taxes and bad laws like the ones that prevent low-income housing from
being built, or that make their electricity and gasoline so expensive.
They are the people who've watched the sidewalks of their
great cities being turned into permanent tent communities for the poor, the
homeless, the drugged and the mentally disturbed.
They are the tax base that has been footing the bill for the
social welfare benefits and government services that are bestowed so generously
on state citizens and illegal immigrants.
They have seen the grim future of their formerly great state and
said to themselves, "We're outta' here."
But millions of Californians like me can't leave. We have
kids and grandkids here.
We love the state and its people. We love the weather, the
beaches, the deserts and the mountains.
What we don't love is what the Democrat Party and its
policies have been doing for decades to harm California and its big cities.
The
Democrats running this state almost act like they hate it. All they seem to
want is more illegal immigrants, more crippling environmental laws and higher
prices for everything.
The shocking TV images of huge homeless communities living in
tents in Los Angeles and San Francisco are the most glaring sign of the
Democrats' failure.
Even Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom agree that it has been
state policies like strict building laws and environmental regulations that
have created tens of thousands of homeless people.
Only let's please not call them "homeless people."
It's a misnomer.
Most of the thousands of people you see on TV living in tents
and sleeping bags are homeless by choice.
They're mostly drug addicts. Or mentally ill. Or bums or
vagrants who've chosen to live on the street amid their own garbage, used drug
needles and human waste.
They're also mostly males.
There are lots of genuinely homeless people in California who
need assistance from government or private social agencies.
But they're usually women and children and they're usually
living in shelters where they can get the help they need.
Shelters
have rules you have to follow and homeless mothers and their kids will abide by
them. Men won't.
We keep hearing that we need to build more low-income housing
units for the homeless.
But the truth is, most of the men on the sidewalks of
downtown L.A. wouldn't stay in a shelter if it was located in the penthouse of
the Westin Bonaventure Hotel.
Half of the country's unsheltered homeless people live in
California. LA Mayor Eric Garcetti wants President Trump to solve the state's
homeless crisis.
But it's the responsibility of the Democrat-controlled state
government, the Democrat governor and the Democrat mayors - the ones who
created the crisis in the first place.
For California natives like me, it's a crying shame.
The most beautiful state in the U.S. has been wrecked by
Democrats and it's only going to get worse as more illegal immigrants arrive
from Mexico and Central America.
I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before the state runs
out of money and the productive people who provide it. -
Report:
California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years
Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24
Middle-class wages in
progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a
study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.
“Earnings for California’s
workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or
stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled “California’s Workers Are
Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.” The report continued:
In
2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1%
higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars)
(Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at the
10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in 1979
to $11.12 in 2018.
The report admits that the
state’s progressive economy is delivering more to investors and less to
wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector [annual new
income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6 percentage
points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”
In 2016, California’s Gross
Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop shifted $146
billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in 2016.
The report notes that wages
finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits the credit between the
Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40 years of flat wages are
partly hidden by a wave of new products and services. They include almost-free
entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap imported coffee in
supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the impact of California’s
flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing costs, the report says,
even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of the establishment’s
pro-immigration policies:
In just the last decade
alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far outpaced the rise in
the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting that working
families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends
meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the state is more
than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even if all adults
are working full-time.
…
Specifically, inflation-adjusted
median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017, while
inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least 35
hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget
Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
Many workers are being paid
little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker productivity has
risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans sponsored by their
employers, leaving individual workers on their own to stretch limited dollars
and resources to plan how they’ll spend their later years affording the high
cost of living and health care in California. And as union representation has
declined, most workers today cannot negotiate collectively for better working
conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as retirement and health care, like
their parents and grandparents did. On top of all this, workers who take on
contingent and independent work (often referred to as “gig work”), which in
many cases appears to be motivated by the need to supplement their primary job
or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely granted the same rights and legal
protections as traditional employees.
The center’s report tries to
blame the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the declining clout of unions.
But unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan elites’ policy of
mass-migration and imposed diversity.
In
2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for
Immigration Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the
economic impact of migration:
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do
a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was
the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. For a helper, it was
about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45
an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically
got $25 an hour.
…
Now, the average wage in Los
Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower
than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour
at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood
that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor
can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099,
which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity
also damaged the unions by shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007,
the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title
“Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing
Blacks.” In the same year, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times described another murder by Latino
gangs as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic
cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The center’s board members
include the executive director of the state’s SEIU union, a professor from the
Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and
the research director at the “Program for Environmental and Regional Equity” at
the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Outside
California, President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring
employers to raise Americans’ wages in a hot economy. The Wall Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall, median weekly earnings
rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34,
that increase was 7.6%.
The New York Times laments that reduced immigration does force wages
upwards and also does force companies to buy labor-saving, wage-boosting
machinery. Instead, NYT prioritizes "ideas about America’s identity and
culture.” http://bit.ly/2Zp2u2J
NYT Admits Fewer Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More
Labor-Saving Machines
.
THE INVITED INVADING HORDES: IT’S ALL
ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the
financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful
blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working
class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic
hardship not seen since the 1930s."
"Inequality has reached unprecedented
levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net
worth of the poorest half of the US population."
Warren's core insight
was fascinating: She argued that massive expansion of the labor force had
actually created more stressful living and driven down median wages. BEN
SHAPIRO
“MORE
THAN 10 MILLION” ILLEGALS IN CALIFORNIA ALONE
Xavier Becerra breaks the
news, files suit against Trump administration public-charge rule.
August
19, 2019
More than 22 million
people are illegally present in the United States, according to a recent study
by scholars at MIT and Yale. Pew Research pegged the figure at 11 million, and for years
it stood as the official count for media and government. It now emerges that 11
million is more like the number illegally present in California alone.
“California is home to
over 10 million immigrants,” reads a chart displayed by California attorney
general Xavier Becerra and governor Gavin Newsom as they announced a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s public-charge rule.
“Immigrants,” is California code for “illegals,” a term the state’s ruling
class has banned. As Rachel Bovard notes at American Greatness, even a legal
immigrant’s ability “to stay off the welfare system must be taken into account
when considering qualifications for a green card.”
California heaps welfare
benefits on those illegally present, including nearly $100 million for health care in the recent budget. Many of those 10 million illegals
came to California specifically to get those taxpayer-funded benefits. It
disturbs Becerra and Newsom that this disqualifies the recipients from any
future legal status, but there’s more to it. As attorney Madison Gesiotto explains in The Hill, voting must also be taken
into account.
“Voting as an illegal
alien in federal elections is a crime punishable by fine, imprisonment,
deportation, or inadmissibility.” According to a State Department investigation, false-documented illegals have been voting in federal,
state and local elections for decades. In 1996, illegals cast 784 votes against Republican Robert Dornan in a congressional race
Democrat Loretta Sanchez won by only 984 votes.
If Newsom and Becerra are
certain that more than 10 million people illegally reside in the state, they
doubtless know how many voted in 2016. Trouble is, California Secretary of
State Alex Padilla refused to release any voter information to a federal voter-fraud
probe.
Back in 2015, Padilla
told the Los Angeles Times, “At the latest, for the 2018 election
cycle, I expect millions of new voters on the rolls in the state of
California,” with “new voters” code for ineligible voters. True to form, by
March, 2018, more than one million “undocumented” immigrants received driver’s licenses from the state Department of
Motor Vehicles, which automatically registered them to vote under the “Motor
Voter” program.
Padilla is now claiming
that only six “California residents” were erroneously added to voter rolls for 2018, that it
was all due to DMV errors, and that none was guilty of “fraudulently voting or
attempting to vote.” To paraphrase John Goodman in The Big Lebowski,
this is what happens when the governor’s own department of finance, not the
official state auditor, investigates the DMV.
In reality, California
officials know full well how many non-citizens voted in 2016 and 2018. With
more than 10 million illegals in the state, the ballpark figure of one million
illegal voters is probably low. In California, illegals are the Democrats’
electoral college, and the Democrats reward them with welfare benefits and
protection from deportation through sanctuary laws. This raises another issue.
Illegals’ use of welfare
benefits and practice of voting in federal elections disqualifies them from
legal residency and citizenship. This makes for a permanent group of more than
10 million foreign nationals in California alone. In these conditions, Congress
should start pushing back.
Public officials who
apportion taxpayer-funded benefits for foreign nationals should be required to
register as agents of the governments of those foreign nationals. The primary
candidates would be the governments of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, which Gavin Newsom visited before he had even toured his own state.
State and federal
governments should also bill the foreign governments for welfare, medical,
education and incarceration costs. Some of this could be alleviated by a
tax on remissions, such as the 33.4 billion Mexicans
abroad sent back last year. That amount is impossible without massive
inputs from U.S. taxpayers. Legitimate citizens and legal immigrants have no
obligation to relieve foreign governments of responsibility for their own
citizens.
Meanwhile, as Rachel
Bovard also notes, the Trump administration’s new rule only updates a 1996 law
proclaiming “inadmissible” those aliens likely to become a public charge. The
law was supported by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden and other leading
Democrats. The Trump administration measure gives more definition to what
constitutes a welfare benefit, food stamps, Medicaid, public housing assistance
and such. Those benefits are all for legitimate citizens and legal immigrants
but Bovard cites Census data showing that 63 percent of non-citizens use the
welfare system.
Those who thought there
were only 11 million illegals nationwide were mistaken. Thanks to Jerry Brown
crony Gavin Newsom, and Xavier Becerra, once on Hillary Clinton’s short list as
a running mate, Americans now understand that “more than 10 million” illegally
reside in California alone, and that might understate the figure.
The MIT-Yale estimate
ranges as high as 29.1 million nationwide, more than the population of Australia, with 25,088,636 and a veritable occupation. To all but the willfully
blind, politicians have abandoned the rule of law, and made false-documented
illegals a protected, privileged class.
This is how a nation loses
its sovereignty.
Census Bureau:
Immigration Driving Half of
U.S. Population Growth
2:43
Immigration to
the United States is now driving nearly half of all population growth in the
country instead of increased birth rates, the U.S. Census Bureau finds.
The latest Census Bureau
estimates on the U.S. population reveal that about 48.5 percent of all
population growth is driven by the country’s mass illegal and legal immigration
policy, where more than 1.5 million foreign nationals are admitted to the
country every year.
(Axios)
Axios analysis by Stef Knight details the growing share to which
immigration is increasingly driving population growth across the U.S. Since
2011, for example, the level to which immigration has accounted for overall
population growth has increased more than 13 percent.
According to the Wall
Street Journal analysis, about nine percent of U.S. counties
are growing solely because of immigration.
This concludes that about nine percent of counties have regional birth rates
that do not exceed the annual number of deaths in the area.
Similarly, the Wall
Street Journal notes, more than half of all population growth in
states like Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Kansas, and Michigan, among others, is
because of immigration.
Though pundits have
claimed that the country’s admittance of 1.2 million legal immigrants a year is
necessary to increase birth rates, researchers have found that the growth of
the immigrant population has little impact on birth rates.
Center for Immigration
Studies Director of Research Steven Camarota discovered in his latest study this year that
“immigrant fertility has only a small impact on the nation’s overall birth
rate,” citing that immigrants in the U.S. raise the nation’s birth rate for all
women by two births per 1,000 women.
“Immigration has a minor
impact because the difference between immigrant and native fertility is too
small to significantly change the nation’s overall birth rate,” Camarota noted
in the study.
At current legal
immigration levels, the U.S.
million residents by 2060 — including a foreign-
born population of 69 million.
The U.S. does not have
to rapidly increase its total
resident population and foreign-born population,
as legal immigration moratoriums have
arrivals to properly assimilate to American life.
Halting all immigration to the country would
stabilize the population to a comfortable 329
million residents in the next four decades.
OF COURSE,
THEY REALLY HAVE NO IDEA HOW MANY HAVE JUMPED OUR BORDERS!
“Between 2005 and 2017, chain
migration, alone, brought nearly 10 million foreign nationals to the U.S.”
DOJ: Federal Arrests of Foreigners More than Tripled in Last 20 Years
DOJ: Federal Arrests of Foreigners More Than
Tripled in Last 20 Years
As Breitbart News reported, though non-U.S.
citizens represent just seven percent of the total U.S. population, they
accounted for 15 percent of all federal arrests and 15 percent of all
prosecutions for non-immigration related crimes in 2018. This indicates that
non-U.S. citizens were about 2.3 times as likely to be arrested or prosecuted
for non-immigration related crimes.
For non-immigration offenses, the total of federal arrests for
non-U.S. citizens between 1998 and 2018 increased nearly eight percent, and
between 2017 and 2018 rose almost ten percent.
Non-U.S. citizens were most likely to be prosecuted for illegal
re-entry, that is illegal aliens who have been previously deported, drugs,
fraud, alien smuggling, and misuse of visas.
A 2018 Government Accountability
Office (GAO) report discovered nearly all
illegal and legal immigrants in U.S. federal prisons are from Mexico, Honduras,
El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, and Guatemala.
Between 2010 and 2015, the average annual cost to incarcerate
criminal illegal and legal immigrants slightly decreased — as the criminal
alien population slightly decreased as well — from $1.56 billion to about $1.42
billion. That cost is paid for by American taxpayers who are forced to offset
the costs of mass immigration to the country.
Every year, the U.S. admits more
than 1.5 million foreign nationals, with the overwhelming majority arriving
through the process known as “chain migration,” whereby newly
naturalized are able to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the
country. Between 2005 and 2017, chain migration, alone,
brought nearly 10 million foreign nationals to the U.S.
Ben
Carson Warns of Potential ‘Epidemic’ Among Homeless in California Cities
18 Sep 2019173
2:50
LOS ANGELES, California — Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben
Carson warned that conditions among homeless people in many California cities
were so bad they could “foster an epidemic, if we’re not careful.”
Carson spoke
to reporters after touring the Union Rescue Mission, a homeless shelter and non-profit organization
on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, at the core of the city’s homeless
population of almost 60,000 individuals.
The streets
surrounding the mission are lined with tents and trash. Homeless families sat
on the sidewalks, some in chairs, as cars struggled to navigate the chaos: a
homeless pair of lovers quarreled in the middle of an intersection.
Union Rescue Mission, Skid Row, Los Angeles (Joel Pollak /
Breitbart News)
Homeless couple, L.A. Skid Row (Joel Pollak / Breitbart News)
Last
year, Los Angeles suffered a typhus outbreak that spread from the homeless
population to City Hall. Some, including Dr. Drew Pinsky, are now warning that
L.A. could see an outbreak of bubonic plague, which is endemic.
The
secretary focused his remarks on partnerships between the federal, state, and
local governments, as well as the private sector, in urging Americans to
cooperate to find housing solutions for those who had fallen on hard times.
But
Carson also address the ongoing homeless crisis in California — a crisis that has
led President Donald Trump, who is visiting the state, to suggest emergency
federal intervention, overriding state and local government authority.
The
president could invoke the National Emergencies Act of 1976 and
the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of
1988 to intervene. Federal officials reportedly visited the
state last week to look at facilities that could be used to house homeless
people after they had been relocated from the center of the city.
“My
preference, obviously, is to work with the state,” Carson said. “But what we’re
concerned about are the conditions. And these are conditions that … can foster
an epidemic, if we’re not careful. And then, after that occurs, what will
everybody be saying? How come you guys didn’t do anything? You knew all this
was going on?”
Carson
also addressed questions about the eviction of illegal aliens from public
housing, telling reporters that the law not only barred illegal aliens from
living in public housing, but those giving shelter to illegal aliens. The only
solution, he said, was an act of Congress, which could change the law with
“comprehensive immigration reform.”
Update: Secretary Carson also rejected requests
for additional federal funds to the state, arguing that state and local
authorities had to revise zoning regulations that discouraged the building of
additional affordable housing units.
Joel B.
Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social
Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a
J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak
Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside
Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter
at @joelpollak.
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