Both parties of the ruling elite represent the housing, land and commercial development interests who benefit from the astronomical rents which have forced hundreds of thousands of workers into absolute destitution and keep millions more on the brink of ruin.
The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.
Among the findings in the new data:
· The nation's immigrant population (legal and illegal) hit a record 44.5 million in July 2017, an increase of nearly 800,000 since 2016, 4.6 million since 2010, and 13.4 million since 2000.
“It’s just getting harder and harder to live”
Homeless in San Diego, “America’s Finest City”
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reported last week that 567,715 people across the nation experienced homelessness on a single night in January 2019, an increase of 14,885 people compared with the same time period in 2018.
The homeless population in the US increased 2.7 percent this year largely due to a surge of chronically homeless individuals in California. The HUD estimate found that California’s increase in homelessness was “higher than all other states combined.”
Queue to pick up donated items
Despite the fact that California’s median household income is just above the national median of $63,179, nearly a third of its workers make less than $15 an hour, compounding the difficulty to survive in many cities which possess some of the highest costs of living in the nation.
The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) created a California Poverty Measure to convey real poverty which is based on the high costs of living in the state. It found the share of that state’s population living in poverty is 17.8 percent. The PPIC also calculates the number who are “near-poverty” and found that an additional 18.5 percent of Californians fall into that category. Therefore, more than 35 percent of Californians, some 15 million people, live in severe economic distress.
The cities and counties at the epicenter of the poverty, housing and homelessness crisis in the state of California are Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose & Santa Clara County which possesses the first, fourth and fifth largest homeless population in the country respectively.
San Diego has the fourth-highest number of homeless residents in the country. Based on a HUD “Point-in-time” (PIT) count, the report estimated that over 8,500 residents were homeless in what tourism boosters claim is “America’s Finest City.”
The San Diego city’s Regional Task Force on the Homeless (RTFH) acknowledged in its 2019 annual report that the PIT count is more of a single night snapshot. The reality, however, is far worse. Even with the Report’s conservative estimate, the actual number of homeless residents in San Diego was over 20,000 last year.
Responding to public concern for the welfare of the homeless, the city administration has been forced to take limited action. San Diego’s Republican mayor Kevin Faulconer has made much of his “Connect. Support. House.” program that he proclaimed would “end the cycle of homelessness” in the city. His “dramatic actions,” his office boasts, serve “to move homeless individuals off the streets, offer them a chance for a better life, and restore pride to our communities.”
The city, Faulconer has reiterated time and again, “must reduce homelessness, not enable it; end suffering, not condone it; punish the criminals who hide and prey upon the homelessness, not ignore it.” San Diego, the Mayor has promised, “will not allow unsafe and unsanitary outdoor living conditions, nor will it tolerate the use of a sidewalk, a riverbed or a tarp as a home.” So far, it appears as though only that last part of the promise has been fulfilled, with the city escalating the brutality meted out against those forced to live on the streets.
In the past year, the City Council has overseen the creation of “Bridge Shelters,” a Housing Navigation Center presented as “one stop shop for homeless services,” and even unanimously passed a $1.9 billion plan that will supposedly get “half the city’s homeless off the streets in the next three years and find permanent homes for thousands more in the next 10 years.” This claim remains akin to a promise written in water.
The four bridge shelters offer 150 beds or less per night, while the one-stop shop remains shrouded in mystery for many forced to survive on the streets. The beds are but a drop in the bucket to help the 20,000 and growing in need, and no funding plans have been created for the city council’s plan. For a significant section of San Diego’s population, homelessness remains a nightmare with no end in sight.
San Diego remains one of the most unaffordable cities. According to a May 2019 report published by the California Housing Partnership, the median asking rent per month in San Diego is $2,005. In order to be able to afford this amount, renters in San Diego county need to earn $38.05 an hour, more than three times the current minimum wage. Since 2008, cuts in federal and state funding have reduced investment in affordable housing in San Diego County by more than $134 million annually, a 76 percent reduction.
What this has meant is that families barely getting by on minimum wage income have had to commit more than half of their income to rent. Given the steady increase in rents and the absence of affordable housing, combined with stagnant wages and the increasing casualization of the job market, those already in a precarious situation can at any moment find themselves without a roof above their heads.
A WSWS reporting team recently visited downtown San Diego to speak to residents who have been dealing with homelessness. The area is the location for several shelters run by Catholic Charities, as well as a Bridge Shelter run by the Alpha project. The neighborhood is characterized by the stark contrasts of tent-like shelters constructed in the shadows of shiny new condominiums.
Maria
Maria, who is in her mid-40s, used to earn a living cleaning houses in the city. She told us that she had become homeless five years ago as a result of a car accident that led her to lose everything. Since then, she had to deal with a heart condition that required open-heart bypass surgery, making it almost impossible for her to get a job that would allow her to find a place of her own: “Everything is worse when you are homeless and have health problems—you don’t eat right, you don’t rest enough, you cannot sleep well because it is not safe on the streets. There are so many people with mental health problems, drugs, people get into fights over small things and it can become very bad… I do not wish this on anyone. This is a terrible, terrible way to live.”
Many of those who spoke to our reporters reiterated the fact that it had become incredibly hard to get into shelters, let alone try to transition from homelessness to finding a place. Dale Pickett, who had experienced homelessness once before in the 1990s, highlighted the deterioration of the assistance programs:
Dale Pickett
“Back [in 1996], it was easy to get into a shelter. Now, I don’t even know how to get in. At the Joan Kroc center, they put you on a waiting list; at the Alpha tent city, they don’t even tell you how you can get in. All around us, you can see these new buildings come up, and they all seem to have lots of rooms that are just empty. But nobody tells us what they are for, and nobody tells us how we can move on from here...
“There are so many homeless people, and I don’t see a lot of people moving on. I have tried to get help from all kinds of programs, but they are all limited and only allow a certain number of days before you are kicked out. I often look at job postings but many of those jobs are far off, they require transportation and bus passes which cost a lot. Some of them want you to have experience, which many of us don’t have and can’t get now when we have to worry about having shelter.”
These problems are magnified for single parents, as 26-year-old Stephanie explained. A mother of two young children under the age of 2, Stephanie had moved from Daytona, Florida, to San Diego along with her boyfriend. A series of personal setbacks and tragedies, including the death of her mother and the discovery that her children’s father was suffering from addiction, led to her being homeless. Since then, despite having worked for many years at the front desk of a Daytona hotel, Stephanie has been unable to find employment in San Diego mainly because of her inability to find a safe and affordable daycare for her children.
Stephanie collects donated items for her and her two young children
As Stephanie put it, “being a mother is incredibly stressful and challenging when you’re homeless. I’m alone and barely get any help providing for my kids. The closest I have to assistance are the diaper banks and food banks, which are generally once a month, and the food stamps. Even the shelters are cruel to us. They always assume the worst out of everyone. I’m currently staying at a shelter with my kids, but we’re on the third floor and the only empty room they have on the first floor is for the disabled and they say I can’t use it. I have to carry my kids and the stroller up to the third floor as a result. It’s miserable living like this. People waiting for housing turn to drugs from depression because it’s just getting harder and harder to live.”
The WSWS spoke to another young mother also named Stephanie, who outlined the trauma of having to watch her son develop a high fever, while knowing she did not have the resources to take him to the hospital. Her story like many others highlighted the dangers of living on the street with her family.
Stephanie and her three year old son
“Down here in San Diego the cost of living makes it impossible to find a place to live and it takes 5–10 years to find housing cheap enough to live in. Then, when you’re struggling and living in a car, you get fined and kicked to the street. Some people called the police on us once while we were sleeping in the car and they gave us a ticket for it. We can’t afford a ticket; we barely make any money already. There’s nowhere we can live without getting a ticket, and recently the front tires on our car got locked up, so we can’t even sleep in there. Without the car we’re trapped here on the streets and we have no place to go. When the rains were coming through we had to rely on others to help us. People would run to us and bring us emergency blankets to help us get through the rains and if there were no places with open beds we’d have to sleep in the lobby to get out of the weather.”
The struggles faced by the homeless are not lost on the volunteers who themselves have faced hardship. Suzie, a volunteer with the Hope WorldWide charity, told our reporters that it was her husband’s VA assistance that allowed them to barely make their rent. Even then, they were always aware of the perilousness of their lives—a simple issue with their car could force them into poverty and potential homelessness.
Another woman working in one of the volunteer tents informed our reporters that she lives across the US/Mexico border in Tijuana, Mexico, where rent was four to five times cheaper. “Live over there or be homeless here,” she said.
Sonia, who was also at one time homeless, added that she was fortunate to have a job. Most of the people that she dealt with were not so lucky: “I had opportunity, but they haven’t.”
She described that the cruelties of living on the street forced people to crime in order to find food and survive; many were driven to addiction because of the sheer stress. And once that happens, finding a job is nearly impossible when a background check is run. “No job means no credit, which means no housing.”
While the nightmare continues to worsen for half a million unsheltered poor throughout the country and the millions more who live on the edge, the ruling elite are beginning to point fingers in the run up to November 2020 and shedding crocodile tears for the homeless.
This week President Donald Trump cynically blamed California Governor Gavin Newsom and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats, for the homeless crisis in the state, tweeting, “Nancy Pelosi’s District in California has rapidly become one of the worst anywhere in the U.S. when it come [sic] to the homeless & crime. It has gotten so bad, so fast—she has lost total control and, along with her equally incompetent governor, Gavin Newsom, it is a very sad sight!”
While there is no question of the culpability of the Democrats who control every aspect of political and social life in the state, the Republicans and the Trump administration are equally to blame for the horrific conditions which plunge large numbers of workers into poverty and desperation.
Trump recently announced massive cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food stamp program, which provides critical federal assistance to over 36 million Americans. Beginning in April 2020, the Urban Institute estimates the Trump administration’s rule changes will cut 3.6 million people from SNAP benefits per month, reduce monthly benefits for millions more, and lead to 982,000 students losing access to reduced-cost or free school meals.
Trump also proclaimed earlier this year that he would bring in federal resources to deal with homelessness in the state, “Governor Gavin N has done a really bad job on taking care of the homeless population in California,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “If he can’t fix the problem, the Federal Govt. will get involved!”
The president’s reported plan to “fix the problem” is a pending executive order which would funnel money into operations which target and tear down homeless encampments, empowering police departments to rip through encampments at a faster rate and potentially strip cities of housing funds if they do not wage a brutal enough attack on the unsheltered poor.
The cynical tweets from the upper echelons of society about the need to “address” and “fix” homelessness, which in reality neither party will do anything to end, point to the fact that the issue will be used as a pawn in the 2020 election and that escalated attacks on the working class as a whole are being prepared. Both parties of the ruling elite represent the housing, land and commercial development interests who benefit from the astronomical rents which have forced hundreds of thousands of workers into absolute destitution and keep millions more on the brink of ruin.
Another line they
cut into: Illegals get free public housing as impoverished Americans wait
Want some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so
many homeless encampments hovering around?
Try the reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free
public housing by the U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated,
unskilled, and largely unemployable. Those
are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier.
Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold
awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.
Thus, the tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these
emerging shantytowns are in blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal immigrants
- Orange County, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is there a
connection? At a minimum, it's worth looking at.
The Trump administration's Department of Housing and Urban
Development is finally trying to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals
prepare to enter the U.S. this year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do
it yesterday.
The plan would scrap Clinton-era regulations that allowed illegal
immigrants to sign up for assistance without having to disclose their status.
Under the new Trump rules, not only would the leaseholder using public housing
have to be an eligible U.S. person, but the government would verify all
applicants through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE)
database, a federal system that’s used to weed illegal immigrants out of other
welfare programs.
Those already getting HUD assistance would have to go through a new verification,
though it would be over a period of time and wouldn’t all come at once.
“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our
citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “Because of
past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal aliens were able to live in free public
housing desperately needed by so many of our own citizens. As illegal aliens
attempt to swarm our borders, we’re sending the message that you can’t live off
of American welfare on the taxpayers’ dime.”
The Times notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and
some illegal immigrant families are getting full rides based on just one member
being born in the U.S. The pregnant caravaner
who calculatingly slipped across the U.S. in San Diego late last year, only to
have her baby the next day, now, along with her entire family, gets
that free ride on government housing. Plus lots
of cheesy news coverage about how
heartwarming it all is. That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to
find back in Tegucigalpa.
Migrants would be almost fools not to take the offering.
The problem of course is that Americans who paid into these
programs, and the subset who find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact
being shut out.
The fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the
virtues of illegal immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice"
for them, but the hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are
stealing from others as they take this housing benefit under legal
technicalities. That's not a good thing under anyone's theological law.
But hypocrisy is comfortable ground for the entire open borders lobby as
they shamelessly celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the
impoverished of the U.S. out cold.
The Trump administration is trying to have this outrage fixed
by summer. But don't imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the
media sob stories, the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.
Los Angeles County Pays
Over a Billion in Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years
In 2015 and 2016, Los Angeles County paid
nearly $1.3 billion in welfare funds to illegal aliens and their families. That
figure amounts to 25 percent of the total spent on the county’s entire needy
population, according to Fox News.
The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other
state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in
California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants
reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with
children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.
The welfare benefits data acquired by Fox News comes from the Los
Angeles County Department of Public Social Services and shows welfare and food
stamp costs for the county’s entire population were $3.1 billion in 2015, $2.9
billion in 2016.
The data also shows that during the first five months of 2017, more than
60,000 families received a total of $181 million.
Over 58,000 families received a total of $602 million in benefits in
2015 and more than 64,000 families received a total of $675 million in 2016.
Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior
fellow who studies poverty and illegal immigration, told Fox the costs represent “the tip of
the iceberg.”
“They get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector said. It can
cost the government a total of $24,000 per year per family to pay for things
like education, police, fire, medical, and subsidized housing.
In February of 2019, the Los Angeles city council signed a resolution
making it a sanctuary city. The resolution did not provide any new legal
protections to their immigrants, but instead solidified existing policies.
In October 2017, former California governor
Jerry Brown signed SB 54 into law. This bill made
California, in Brown’s own words, a “sanctuary state.” The Justice
Department filed a lawsuit against the State of California over the law. A
federal judge dismissed that suit in July. SB 54 took effect on Jan.
1, 2018.
According to Center for
Immigration Studies, “The new law
does many things: It forbids all localities from cooperating with ICE detainer
notices, it bars any law enforcement officer from participating in the
popular 287(g) program, and it prevents state and local police
from inquiring about individuals’ immigration status.”
Some counties in California have protested its implementation and joined
the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the state.
California’s campaign to provide public services to illegal immigrants
did not end with the exit of Jerry Brown. His successor, Gavin Newsom, is
just as focused as Brown in funding programs for illegal residents at the
expense of California taxpayers.
California’s budget earmarks millions of dollars annually to the One
California program, which provides free legal assistance to all aliens,
including those facing deportation, and makes California’s public universities
easier for illegal-alien students to attend.
According to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal
Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2017 report, for the estimated 12.5 million illegal
immigrants living in the country, the resulting cost is a $116
billion burden on the national economy and taxpayers each year, after
deducting the $19 billion in taxes paid by some of those illegal immigrants.
BLOG: MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF
ILLEGALS IN THE U.S. AT ABOUT 40 MILLION. WHEN THESE PEOPLE ARE HANDED AMNESTY,
THEY ARE LEGALLY ENTITLED TO BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY EFFECTIVELY
LEAVING MEXICO DESERTED.
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than 22 million
non-citizens now live in the United States. UNFORTUNATELY THESE ARE ONLY THE ONES THAT ELECTED TO BE COUNTED!
Record 44.5 Million
Immigrants in 2017
Non-Mexico Latin American, Asian, and African populations grew most
Steven A. Camarota is the director of research and Karen Zeigler is a demographer at the Center.
On September 13, the Census Bureau released some data from the 2017 American Community Survey (ACS) that shows significant growth in the immigrant (legal and illegal) population living in the United States. The number of immigrants (legal and illegal) from Latin American countries other than Mexico, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa grew significantly, while the number from Mexico, Europe, and Canada stayed about the same or even declined since 2010. The Census Bureau refers to immigrants as the "foreign-born", which includes all those who were not U.S. citizens at birth. The Department of Homeland Security has previously estimated that 1.9 million immigrants are missed by the ACS, so the total number of immigrants in 2017 was likely 46.4 million.1
Among the findings in the new data:
· The nation's immigrant population (legal and illegal) hit a record 44.5 million in July 2017, an increase of nearly 800,000 since 2016, 4.6 million since 2010, and 13.4 million since 2000.
· It is worth noting that the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS), released the same week but collected in March 2018, shows 45.4 million immigrants, an increase of 1.6 million over the prior year. While the CPS is smaller than the ACS, the newer survey may indicate the pace of growth has accelerated.
· As a share of the U.S. population, the ACS (used in the remainder of this report) shows that immigrants (legal and illegal) comprised 13.7 percent or nearly one out of seven U.S. residents in 2017, the highest percentage in 107 years. As recently as 1980, just one out of 16 residents was foreign-born.
· Between 2010 and 2017, 9.5 million new immigrants settled in the United States. New arrivals are offset by roughly 320,000 immigrants who return home each year and natural mortality of about 290,000 annually among the existing immigrant population.2 As a result, growth in the immigrant population was 4.6 million from 2010 to 2017.3
· In addition to immigrants, there were 17.1 million U.S.-born minor children with an immigrant parent in 2017, for a total of 61.6 million immigrants and their children in the country — accounting for one in five U.S. residents.4
· Of immigrants who have come since 2010, 13 percent or 1.2 million came from Mexico — by far the top sending country. However, because of return migration and natural mortality among the existing population, the overall Mexican-born population actually declined by 441,190.5
· The sending regions with the largest numerical increases from 2016 to 2017 in the number of immigrants living in the United States were South America (up 233,696); East Asia (up 226,728); South Asia (up 216,495); Sub-Saharan Africa (up 149,846); the Caribbean (up 121,120); and Central America (up 71,720).6
· Looking longer term, the regions with the largest numerical increases since 2010 were East Asia, (up 1,118,937); South Asia (up 1,106,373); the Caribbean (up 676,023); Sub-Saharan Africa (up 606,835); South America (up 483,356); Central America (up 474,504); and the Middle East (up 472,554).
· The decline in Mexican immigrants masks, to some extent, the enormous growth of Latin American immigrants. If seen as one region, the number from Latin America (excluding Mexico) grew 426,536 in just the last year and 1.6 million since 2010 — significantly more than from any other part of the world.
· The sending countries with the largest numerical increases in immigrants in the United States between 2010 and 2017 were India (up 830,215); China (up 677,312); the Dominican Republic (up 283,381); the Philippines (up 230,492); Cuba (up 207,124); El Salvador (up 187,783); Venezuela (up 167,105); Colombia (up 146,477); Honduras (up 132,781); Guatemala (up 128,018); Nigeria (up 125,670); Brazil (up 111,471); Vietnam (up 102,026); Bangladesh (up 95,005); Haiti (up 92,603); and Pakistan (up 92,395).
· The sending countries with the largest percentage increases in immigrants since 2010 were Nepal (up 120 percent); Burma (up 95 percent); Venezuela (up 91 percent); Afghanistan (up 84 percent); Saudi Arabia (up 83 percent); Syria (up 75 percent); Bangladesh (up 62 percent); Nigeria (up 57 percent); Kenya (up 56 percent); India (up 47 percent); Iraq (up 45 percent); Ethiopia (up 44 percent); Egypt (up 34 percent); Brazil (up 33 percent); the Dominican Republic (up 32 percent); Ghana (up 32 percent); China (up 31 percent); Pakistan (up 31 percent); and Somalia (up 29 percent).
· The states with the largest numerical increases since 2010 were Florida (up 721,298); Texas (up 712,109); California (up 502,985); New York (up 242,769); New Jersey (up 210,481); Washington (up 173,891); Massachusetts (up 172,908); Pennsylvania (up 154,701); Virginia (up 151,251); Maryland (up 124,241); Georgia (123,009); Michigan (up 116,059); North Carolina (up 110,279); and Minnesota (up 107,760).
· The states with the largest percentage increases since 2010 were North Dakota (up 87 percent); Delaware (up 37 percent); West Virginia (up 33 percent); South Dakota (up 32 percent); Wyoming (up 30 percent); Minnesota (up 28 percent); Nebraska (up 28 percent); Pennsylvania (up 21 percent); Utah (up 21 percent); and Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan, Florida, Washington, and Iowa (all up 20 percent).
Data Source. On September 13, 2018, the Census Bureau released some of the data from the 2017 American Community Survey (ACS). The survey reflects the U.S. population as of July 1, 2017. The ACS is by far the largest survey taken by the federal government each year and includes over two million households.7 The Census Bureau has posted some of the results from the ACS to its American FactFinder website.8 It has not released the public-use version of the ACS for researchers to download and analyze. However, a good deal of information can be found at FactFinder. Unless otherwise indicated, the information in this analysis comes directly from FactFinder.
The immigrant population, referred to as the "foreign-born" by the Census Bureau, is comprised of those individuals who were not U.S. citizens at birth. It includes naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents (green card holders), temporary workers, and foreign students. It does not include those born to immigrants in the United States, including to illegal immigrant parents, or those born in outlying U.S. territories, such as Puerto Rico. Prior research by the Department of Homeland Security and others indicates that some 90 percent of illegal immigrants respond to the ACS. Thus all the figures reported above are for both legal and illegal immigrants.
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