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.
California will open vacant state land for homeless shelters under Newsom order
SACRAMENTO — California will open vacant state land to emergency shelters for homeless people under an executive order that Gov. Gavin Newsom intends to sign Wednesday.
The order, which Newsom announced ahead of his annual budget plan due this week, would also create a fund to pay rent and build affordable housing for homeless people. The governor will propose to start the fund with $750 million in taxpayer money, which the Legislature would have to approve.
With the homeless population surging by double-digit percentages in many cities across the state, and California coming under fire from President Trump for its widespread encampments, Newsom is under increasing pressure to get people off the streets. Homelessness has become the biggest issue of concern to Californians, recent polls show.
Newsom’s executive order will create a state system to track how well local governments are doing in moving homeless people from the street to more stable living situations, according to a summary provided by the governor’s office.
Newsom said in a statement that the order aims to directly connect homeless people with emergency housing and treatment programs.
“Californians have lots of compassion for those among us who are living without shelter,” he said. “But we also know what compassion isn’t. Compassion isn’t allowing a person suffering a severe psychotic break or from a lethal substance abuse addiction to literally drift towards death on our streets and sidewalks.”
The order instructs four state agencies to identify properties that could be made available for short-term homeless shelters. The properties include excess state land that has been set aside for affordable-housing development, lots next to highways and state roads, decommissioned hospitals and health care centers, and fairgrounds.
It will also provide cities and counties with 100 travel trailers from a state fleet and tent structures to set up temporary housing and health and social services. Details about the timeline and eligibility criteria were not included in the summary of the executive order.
There is ample precedent for using excess government land for homeless programs, starting with a 1987 law that allows the leasing of surplus federal property for homeless services for free. And over the past two years, San Francisco has put two Navigation Center shelters on underused Caltrans property on Fifth Street and in the Bayview, at virtually no cost for the land.
Although the governor’s order creates the new fund to support housing access for homeless people, which could also include board-and-care homes for the mentally ill, any state appropriation would require the Legislature’s approval as part of the budget process. Lawmakers will not approve a spending plan until June. In the meantime, Newsom said he will seek contributions to the fund from the private sector and philanthropies.
As part of his 2020-21 budget plan, Newsom will also propose expanding Medi-Cal, the state’s health care program for the poor, to include preventive care and housing support services that could keep chronically homeless people out of the emergency room and other costly care. With matching federal money, the expansion would cost $1.4 billion a year.
Other new initiatives in Newsom’s budget proposal include a task force to redesign mental health services for homeless people and a study of the root causes of homelessness in California.
Newsom entered office a year ago promising a greater focus on combatting California’s homelessness crisis, including by appointing a statewide homelessness czar to lead the state’s response.
In his first year, he gave cities and counties $650 million in emergency aid to fight homelessness and signed laws to speed up shelter construction by granting exemptions to environmental regulations and eliminating the public’s ability to challenge the approval of Navigation Centers that meet local zoning requirements.
But his czar never materialized. In August, Newsom said he would rely instead on the advice of a task force he appointed to explore strategies for addressing homelessness.
The panel has been looking into possibilities including mandating shelter or housing for street people, and Newsom credited it for inspiring many of the ideas in his order. But several members have long said that their understanding is that whatever they come up with, Newsom will follow his gut.
“Gavin is the homeless czar in California. Period. End of story,” said Philip Mangano, who is on the task force and was national homeless czar as head of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “He will own this issue and do the right things — not the task force.
“He is a businessman, and he is smart enough to want some R&D, so he appointed the task force. And that is what we are doing. We are bringing research and development to the governor, and he will act.”
Mangano worked closely with Newsom when he was San Francisco mayor to steer the city’s emphasis more toward supportive housing than shelter, and the effort dramatically reduced the street counts for several years in the mid-2000s before they began climbing again. The city’s homeless population was up 17% over the past two years in the most recent count.
Statewide, homelessness has also shot up in recent years, despite billions of dollars being approved by voters up and down California for supportive and affordable-housing programs. The latest count taken in 2019 found 151,278 homeless people in the state, an increase of 16% since 2018.
Alexei Koseff and Kevin Fagan are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com, kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @akoseff, @KevinChron
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