WE CAN'T END THE HOMELESS AND HOUSING CRISIS UNTIL WE PUSH MEXICO OUT OF OUR JOBS, WELFARE OFFICES, VOTING BOOTHS AND BORDERS!
PELOSI – FEINSTEIN – GAVIN NEWOM’S MEXIFORNIA
THE MULTI-BILLION DEMOCRAT PARTY MEXICAN WELFARE STATE
City Journal
How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy
Immigration’s bottom line has
shifted so sharply that in a high-immigration state like California,
native-born residents are paying up to ten times more in state and local taxes
than immigrants generate in economic benefits.
The annual expenditure of state and local tax dollars
on services for that population is $25.3 billion
(DATED – NOW $35 BILLION AND ONLY
GOING UP). That total amounts to a yearly
burden of about $2,370 for a household headed by a U.S. citizen.
on services for that population is $25.3 billion
(DATED – NOW $35 BILLION AND ONLY
GOING UP). That total amounts to a yearly
burden of about $2,370 for a household headed by a U.S. citizen.
According to the Centers for Immigration Studies, April
'11, at least 70% of Mexican illegal alien families receive some type of
welfare in the US!!! cis.org
WHO
REALLY PAYS THE COST OF OPEN BORDERS?
More than
7-in-10 households headed by immigrants in the state of California are on
taxpayer-funded welfare, a new study reveals.
The
latest Census Bureau data analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)
finds that about 72 percent of households headed by noncitizens and immigrants
use one or more forms of taxpayer-funded welfare programs in California — the
number one immigrant-receiving state in the U.S. JOHN BINDER
This week, lawmakers
unveiled a $1 billion health care plan that would include spending $250 million to extend
health care coverage to all illegal alien adults. JENNIFER G. HICKEY
Two groups
of Central American migrants made separate marches on the U.S. Consulate in
Tijuana Tuesday, demanding that they be processed through the asylum system
more quickly and in greater numbers, that deportations be halted and that President Trump either let
them into the country or pay them $50,000 each to go home. MONICA SHOWALTER
This annual
income for an impoverished American family is $10,000 less than the more than
$34,500 in federal funds which are spent on each unaccompanied minor border
crosser.
A study by Tom
Wong of the University of California at San Diego discovered that more than 25
percent of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens in the program have anchor babies. That
totals about 200,000 anchor babies who are the children of DACA-enrolled
illegal aliens. This does not include the anchor babies of DACA-qualified
illegal aliens. JOHN BINDER
Tents occupied by the homeless line a freeway overpass in Los Angeles on Dec. 2, 2015. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)
Homeless Encampments Along Roadways Raise Concerns and Inspire Creative Solutions
December 4, 2019 Updated: December 4, 2019
The California Department of Transportation, known as Caltrans, is facing a surge of homeless encampments on its properties.
“Encampments on Caltrans property are often next to high-speed traffic areas and freeways that are unsafe locations for people to live,” Caltrans said in a statement to The Epoch Times. “For the safety of the homeless individuals, the motorists and Caltrans workers, the department must strive to keep the State right of way free of encampments.”
A temporary solution has been to sweep through the properties every week in order to clear out the area. The problem is that just as quickly as signs of encampment are removed, homeless individuals return.
“We’ve provided over 65 tents that were taken by Caltrans during these sweeps,” Andrea Henson, an advocate for the homeless behind the Where Do We Go? Berkeley movement, told The Epoch Times. “They were hit three weeks in a row.”
“Human existence should not be illegal,” she said.
“What we’re asking is that we be left in place, clean around us. Don’t take what we need to survive. There’s no place to go. There’s not enough shelter beds.”
Henson has been spending part of her time residing in the encampment in Berkeley.
“It changed my whole view point on surviving,” she said. “Once I stayed there, I realized how dire this situation is.”
As of Oct. 10, Bart Ney, the chief of public affairs for Caltrans, said that the cleaning and clearing was put to a stop. Still, notices go up informing the homeless that a sweep will occur even though it doesn’t.
“That’s a fair criticism,” Ney told the San Francisco Chronicle. “There isn’t always a notice put up when we are canceling a cleanup.”
In response to The Epoch Times’s inquiry into this matter, Caltrans said, “We work with social services agencies prior to removing any encampment to help find individuals living there find alternate shelter.”
“In areas where shelters or services may be harder to come by, it may take more time to help find alternate arrangements for individuals, which is why we may post a notice and determine it is best to reschedule any maintenance activities,” Caltrans explained.
The issue of homeless encampments on Caltrans property is further complicated by the fact that their employees may not be trained to tackle the problem.
“This is not in their job specifications, this is not a job they were hired to do, nor were they trained or given proper protection and compensation,” Steve Crouch, the director of public employees stationary engineers at Local 39 who represents the workers, told The Epoch Times.
“There’s a lot of biohazard waste, there’s human waste, there’s propane canisters, there’s hundreds of thousands of needles in these camps,” he said. “We filed a grievance with Caltrans that said our people are not given protection, they’re just wearing regular tennis shoes…they’re stepping on needles.”
Crouch said that some Caltrans workers’ shoes had been pierced by needles. In addition, workers had been attacked by homeless individuals and dogs that were “let loose of their leashes to bite the Caltrans workers.”
“We were looking at it from a health and safety perspective,” he explained. “We argued that this is not their job, they shouldn’t be doing it anyway. It’s been a battle between us and Caltrans.”
When this matter was mentioned to Caltrans, they maintained that safety is their “top priority.”
“We bring in hazardous materials specialists to clear anything that could pose a threat to our maintenance crews including hypodermic needles, contaminated materials and biological waste,” they said.
Caltrans also said they provide training for their employees “relating to unsheltered encampments,” referencing “very specific policies” that the employees must follow for their safety.
As for additional compensation that is commiserate with their additional job duties, Caltrans said “wage increases must be negotiated through the collective bargaining process between IUOE and CalHR.”
“We all want to solve this problem,” Stefan Elgstrand, a legislative aide for the mayor of Berkeley, Jesse Arreguin, told The Epoch Times. “It’s a very difficult situation because it is Caltrans property. The city does not have the jurisdiction to go in and address that.”
Elgstrand referenced the fact that the city has taken measures to increase investments in services for the homeless over the last few years—including the STAIR Center that opened in June of last year.
“That’s been, from our point of view, a very successful program,” he said. “It’s helped provide housing to over a hundred people over the first year of its operation. In fact other cities in the East Bay are now looking at that as a model [for their] own navigation centers. I know we spent $2.4 million on that.”
But Henson suggests that the money being thrown at this issue is being insufficiently utilized.
“The City must conduct an audit of the STAIR center by an objective third party and speak to the unhoused in Berkeley about the quality of services, employee behavior, privacy, and safety issues, as well an an accounting of funds spent,” she tweeted on November 12.
Henson says that she was able to provide 50 tents and two porta-potties (“People were crying when we put those in”) for the homeless in Berkeley for $5,000. But, she said, the city was proposing 74 tents and two porta-potties at a cost of $500,000.
“Innovative approaches must be done because the conditions are inhumane, they’re being terrorized, and the things that they need to survive and being taken at every eviction,” she said. “They leave the trash but they pick up the things that basically protect them in the winter.”
Crouch has proposed a solution that he refers to as “a win-win for everybody.”
“What we’ve been trying to do even in Sacramento with the mayor and several council members is looking at taking city property, putting up a fence around [it], and putting up tiny houses for the homeless people,” he said. “And I’ve also suggested [that] the city of Sacramento work in conjunction with the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to have inmates build those tiny houses. That way they get training and skills in the construction industry.”
Crouch said there’s a shortage of about 360,000 construction jobs in the United States.
In his ideal scenario, “the homeless get a nice little tiny house to live in where they can keep their belongings, they can lock the door, they can feel safe at night. Inmates in the prisons get the skills they need to go out to the market when they come out of prison.”
For their part, Caltrans says the agency has taken its own steps toward solving the problem.
“Caltrans has created a workforce empowerment program to provide entry-level maintenance jobs to homeless individuals,” the agency said. “The first pilot program is currently underway, where we are working to onboard the first 10 people into new jobs, who are living at a community cabin site on Caltrans property at Mandela Parkway in Oakland.”
“We know that we cannot solve homelessness today, we know that it’s growing,” Henson said. “We need to look at this realistically in order to come up with new solutions, but the most immediate need is that people are freezing, they’re losing their possessions, and we’re terrorizing our most vulnerable.”
A homeless person sleeping under sheets along a sidewalk in Los Angeles on Aug. 22, 2019. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)
Orange County Supervisors Address Homeless Epidemic at Town Hall
August 28, 2019 Updated: August 28, 2019
In a town hall meeting held in Laguna Beach, Calif. on Aug. 24, Orange County lawmakers addressed a crowd of roughly 50 concerned citizens about the growing issue of homelessness in the county.
Second District Supervisor Michelle Steel told The Epoch Times homelessness is a big problem for California, especially in places like Orange County.
“We are trying to take care of these 6,900 [homeless] people here. But people [want to] come here because of the weather, especially in places like New York because in the wintertime people cannot really stay outside, but here they can,” she said.
The state of California hosts 25 percent of the nation’s homeless population, with Los Angeles and San Francisco facing increasing numbers in recent years.
According to the Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, the population of homeless in the County of Los Angeles stands at 58,936, as of June.
Of that, 14,722 are sheltered and 44,214 are unsheltered. The population has seen a 12% increase since last year. Reports of typhoid fever and now warnings of a potential outbreak of bubonic plague have been additional points of concern for Southern California residents.
Orange County, while having a significantly lower homeless population, stands at 6,860 as of April. According to the Orange County Register, this is a 43 percent increase from 2017’s total of 4,792 homeless. This has become concerning for residents and policymakers alike.
At the town hall, Orange County Firth District Supervisor Lisa Bartlett addressed the new Be Well Orange County Regional Mental Health and Wellness Campus, which is slated to open next year. It’s designed to help mitigate many mental and behavioral health issues in the homeless, including addiction, substance abuse, mental health disorders, and crisis stabilization.
“There is a huge nexus between mental health, behavioral health and homelessness,” said Bartlett. “We are building out a 60,000-square foot mental health ecosystem, or campus, in the City of Orange. It’s going to be a complete lockdown facility. We hope to have three of them: one north, one central, one south.”
Bartlett said the plan was inspired by the fact that there aren’t enough in-hospital mental health beds, and hospitals in Orange County are overwhelmed. The facility will be open to anyone in the county, regardless of whether they are homeless or have an insurance plan.
“[The hospitals] are getting inundated in their ERs. If you are in a head-on accident and you’re going to Mission Hospital, and you’ve got a lot of homeless that are taking up space in the ER and they’re getting triage, the poor person in the ambulance is getting diverted to another hospital that might be 7 or 10 minutes away, so it’s putting people’s lives at risk,” she said.
For this reason, the county has set up a public-private partnership with hospitals and CalOptima, the county organized health system, to fund the new facility. The county has invested $16.6 million for the $40 million project, while CalOptima has contributed $11.4 million.
“This is going to have a really significant positive impact. Right now, if someone gets picked up on a 5150 [mental health hold], they either get taken to jail or they get taken to the ER. Once this facility is open next year, they’ll get taken to this facility. They’ll get the care that they need. The ERs can’t really help them from a mental health perspective, and of course the jail system isn’t the appropriate place for a lot of these individuals.”
The Epoch Times also spoke with Bartlett’s counterpart Supervisor Steel on the issue of the growing homeless population and its related issues.
“Two years ago, the County [surveyed] a portion of the [population] and [multiplied] the number to an estimated amount. It wasn’t really an accurate or clear number,” said Supervisor Steel, referring to the homeless count in Orange County.
“This year they had a different method. For two nights, person by person, they [surveyed the homeless population]. So, this number is much more accurate.”
Steel explained that most of the blame of the growing homeless population lays at the feet of California’s legislators and their policies.
“The state’s obfuscation of responsibility on public safety, court rulings make it very difficult to get people off the street. They keep on failing to address mental health in California. They neglected that,” Steel explained.
Steel said that while local law enforcement are doing their best to prevent criminal homeless people from endangering local communities, state laws have made it difficult.
“AB 109 transfers state prisoners to local jails, while Proposition 47 and 57 reduces sentencing and theft up to $950. You don’t go to jail. These [laws] actually create more cases of petty theft, drug possession and shoplifting. At this point, the Sheriff’s office and local police are doing a great job up to what they can do. It’s just really tough,” she said.
Steel also addressed that while most homeless people claim to be from Orange County, there have been indicators that some may be led from out of the state. She pointed out a flyer that a colleague of hers saw in New York encouraging homeless to come to Southern California
“One of my friends went to New York and he saw a flyer saying that if you’re homeless, go to Orange or LA County, California. The weather is good and you’ll get all the full services as long as you say that you are a resident of that county.”
Steel said that in the February count, 73 percent of homeless people said their last permanent address was in Orange County, and only 21 percent were from outside the county.
The Be Well Orange County Regional Mental Health and Wellness Campus is slated to open in the spring of next year, and residents hope it will be able to significantly help address the mental health issues of Orange County’s growing homeless population.
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