First, Mexico is not a friend to the [...]]]>
First, Mexico is not a friend to the United States: the relationship is more like that of a pickpocket to his mark because of the easy money of remittances ($33.7 billion in 2018) and other benefits.
There’s nothing that could be called respect from south of the border. Mexican elites must hate this country, but still depend on all the goodies that their little citizens derive from the US being next door.
Conveniently Mexico has scheduled its escape date from its Trump deal, noting that it would review the migration reduction measure in 45 days.
Tucker Carlson discussed some aspects of the Mexico relationship with Colonel Douglas MacGregor, who pointed out that narco-states make unreliable friends.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Douglas MacGregor is a retired U.S. Army Colonel and author of the book, “Margin of Victory.” He joins us tonight to assess. Colonel, thanks very much for coming on.
COL. DOUGLAS MACGREGOR: Sure.
CARLSON: So it appears as of Friday night when the President announced the deal between the Mexican government and our government that the gambit worked. How significant is this?
MACGREGOR: Well, I think in the short run, there will be some temporary relief. But in the long run, this is not going to influence the crisis on the southern border, and for two very good reasons.
First of all, Mexico has no interest in halting the flow of either illegal immigrants from its country or any other in Latin America into the United States. That’s how they off-load excess population, discontented citizens and criminals onto the United States. They’ve been doing it for decades. So while there may be temporarily relief, it will resume inevitably.
Secondly, Mexico is a narco state. We need to be honest about this. The place is ruled by six drug cartels. These drug cartels control the government. They control the institutions of governance. No one can move in that country without their permission.
So ultimately, they have a permanent interest in keeping open borders. They have no interest whatsoever. They want to filter in people and they want to filter in drugs. You can’t do that if you close the border, so for those two reasons, it has no future in the long run.
So whatever we get from this, it will be temporary. It’s not as you say, a viable solution.
CARLSON: So, what you are saying is that when we leave our southern border porous, as it currently is, we are leaving ourselves exposed to whims of drug cartels?
MACGREGOR: Oh absolutely. I mean, that’s the great draw. People all over South America that are involved with organized crime are shipping drugs up through Mexico into the United States.
Why would they want that to stop, along with millions of people? Now, of course, we are talking about the interest of Central America and Latin America — why they want that open border and why they want to ship people north. We haven’t talked about the left in the United States, the Democratic Party and why it wants these open borders.
CARLSON: What do you make of elected officials, politicians who instinctively side with the government of Mexico over our own government on this question?
MACGREGOR: Well, keep in mind, this is very important, all of your viewers need to understand this. Just a few decades ago, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were elected to high office from the state of California. Is that possible today? Absolutely not. It’s impossible. Why? It’s called demographic change.
And right now, the largest ethnic minority in California is Mexican and hispanic. California is in the main today no longer a majority English-speaking white state. It is in the main something else, it’s something new, but largely Latino, largely Mexican.
The Latinos, the Mexicans are the base of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has decided they are the future for the left in the United States. The more of these people that can be brought in illegally as well as legally, the better it is for the Democratic Party because their goal is to transform the United States into a facsimile of California, so that any election is impossible from the standpoint of the right, from the standpoint of the Republican Party to win anything.
CARLSON: So you don’t believe there is any other calculation other than the political calculation that goes into the question assessing immigration.
MACGREGOR: Oh, sure. Of course. I mean, obviously they are going to sit there and say, “Oh, these people are poor. They need our help.” But we all know that in fundamental terms, not only is that not true, but secondly, we don’t need it. We can’t afford it. We have problems here in our own country with our own citizens. Our own citizens need help and assistance. So that’s a false argument.
The real interest is to create demographic change that will make them the permanent power inside the borders of the United States.
CARLSON: Douglas MacGregor, thank you, Colonel. Good to see you.
Naturally the election of the Somali muslim to the US Congress is [...]]]>
Naturally the election of the Somali muslim to the US Congress is a big deal in the sharia zones abroad, who are observing activities within the Great Satan for signs of weakness.
Rep. Ilhan Omar is now being presented as a fashion icon in addition to her reputation as a divisive political figure.
However, the American mainstream press has ignored the unseemly reports about Omar marrying her brother to ease immigration to the US. For details, see the investigative pieces of Powerline’s Scott Johnson, ILHAN OMAR: CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER and The Curious Case of Ilhan Omar.
Interestingly, she is quite honest about hating America, a nation which rescued her and her family from a Kenyan refugee camp, yet she says living here is “an everyday assault.”
On his Monday show, Tucker Carlson characterized America as the most generous country in history, but Washington’s choices about the recipients of kindness has not always been wise. It would be better not to welcome historic enemies of Western Civilization inside the gates, and certainly not elect them to the US Congress. But immigration demography will have its effects, and they were totally predictable: admit sharia followers and eventually some will attain a degree of political power.
TUCKER CARLSON (0:58): Omar’s country collapsed as a child. She lived for years in Kenya in that refugee camp; she may have died there without outside help. But help came. From where? From here — America.
And this country didn’t just welcome Ilhan Omar to America: we paid to relocate her family and many others from a foreign continent purely for the sake of being good people, for altruism, because no country in history has been as generous as we are to places we have no ties to and no obligations we’ve been kind anyway, because that’s who we are.
Despite her humble and foreign birth Omar has been elected to our national lawmaking body and good for her — so how does she repay her adopted country, the one that may literally have saved her life? She attacks it as hateful and racist.
And for that she is applauded by the Democratic Party because they view this country as hateful and racist too. The more Ilhan Omar’s America has, they believe, the better, But is that what’s best for America? Here’s another suggestion we should think about. Maybe our immigration system should prioritize people who actually like this country and are grateful to be here. Why wouldn’t we do that?
Here are some clips from Omar’s Vogue interview:
Ilhan Omar: “To Me, the Hijab Means Power, Liberation, Beauty, and Resistance”, Vogue Arabia, March 28, 2019
Twenty years after becoming a US citizen, Ilhan Omar made history in her adopted country. With her hand on her grandfather’s Qur’an, she was sworn into the US Congress, becoming the first hijabi member to do so. The scene was all the more poignant as it marked the lifting of a 181-year-old ban preventing anyone from wearing any kind of headwear in the chamber. Along with Rashida Tlaib (who doesn’t wear a hijab), she was also one of the first two Muslim women to enter Congress, and the first Somali-American. [. . .]
As the US representative for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district, one of Omar’s policies includes promoting and establishing a just immigration system; something that is at odds with the current political climate in the country. “It’s challenging,” she says of living in President Trump’s America, where her status and heritage is constantly criticized. “It’s an everyday assault. Every day, a part of your identity is threatened, demonized, and vilified. Trump is tapping into an ugly part of our society and freeing its ugliness.”
Omar is an example of what Democrats have in mind for America with their immigration project of extreme diversity.
]]>Plus, in the real world, calling Trump a racist for immigration enforcement is particularly ignorant for a black man to say as seen in a clip in the video below, because working class black Americans arguably benefit the most from pruning down the firehose supply of subservient illegal workers.
US Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow came to the Tucker Carlson show on Monday armed with facts about how illegal immigration substantially harms black citizens.
So from a more informed viewpoint, it’s racist to have open borders that allow foreign job thieves to stay and steal from our fellow Americans of African descent.
(Spare video here.)
]]>TUCKER CARLSON [2:35]: Mr. Kirsanow, thank you very much for coming on, as always. So it just seems to me that this line — border walls are racist, secure borders are racist, you don’t like people who look differently from you, if you’re for it, you’re a white supremacist — I mean, this is the definition of propaganda, given who is hurt by these policies.
PETER KIRSANOW: Right, it may be an aspect of projection, if you’re going to give them the best opportunity to describe themselves, and not ascribe to them racism or immorality which they describe to anybody who wants a secure wall, and you’re exactly right: Professor [Vernon] Briggs testified before the Civil Rights Commission. We had a whole host of people testifying before the Civil Rights Commission — the one cohort, the one demographic in the United States of America most harmed, most palpably harmed by illegal immigration are black Americans, and politicians, open-borders politicians know this, they know this because there have been numerous hearings before Congress on this. I’ve testified at a number of these hearings.
George Borjas has testified at a number these hearings; Stephen Camarota testified, and we’ve presented all of this evidence, all of this data that the pernicious effect of illegal immigration, of open borders has had on black Americans in terms of employment: nearly one million fewer blacks work today because of competition from illegal immigration than otherwise would be the case if we had a secure border.
It also depresses wage rates by a tune of $1800 a year. George Borjas estimates that the depressive effects of illegal immigration on wages is anywhere from $99 billion to $118 billion annually, cumulatively, but it has the most significant effect on the black community. And then you have the downstream effects from this economic effect, and that is you have higher crime rates and incarceration rates, lower marriageability rates, because no one gets married when they’re poor, and that has the worst effect on the black community where you’ve got a 72 percent out-of-wedlock birth rate in the black community. But it goes even beyond that. If you take a look at crime rates in the black community, we know that in a number of places — and in fact it’s the Obama administration’s Justice Department that brought indictments and convictions on the basis of illegal immigrant crime gangs that specifically targeted black communities, these were prosecutions by the Obama Justice Department based on racial targeting. Compton used to be 90 percent black; it’s now 30 percent black, and a large part of that is because of this targeting.
Other communities have suffered the same thing, so if you ask yourself what’s racist, I would like to ask members of the Congressional Black Caucus — it’s their moniker, they purportedly have assigned this designation to themselves because they have a peculiar interest with respect to issues pertaining to the black community — ask them about this. Instead they’ve capitulated to the open borders crowd for political reasons because an influx of immigration or illegal immigrants they believe secures them electoral advantage — they’ve thrown blacks under the bus in the process.
CARLSON: You mentioned what has happened to Compton, California. That’s at the very least an interesting story. I don’t think I’ve ever read that in the Washington Post or the New York Times — why?
KIRSANOW: Because it’s contrary to the overriding political narrative. You know, the narrative that says the biggest malady afflicting America today in the era of Trump is white supremacy. Unfortunately this has salience only in elevated academic circles; in the real world, that is not true. What you’re seeing on the ground is economic competition, you’re seeing crime rates, you’re seeing a whole host of things that happen to poor black folks and other Americans, and the elites apparently — they’re either consciously oblivious to it or unconsciously oblivious to it, but a lot of politicians know precisely what’s going on, yet they do nothing about it, and I know they know precisely what’s going on because of the testimonies we’ve given, because of the data we’ve submitted, and they simply ignore it.
The initial subject is Mexican Lupe Avalos who joined up with the local volunteer fire department in a Oklahoma panhandle town. Guymon (population 11,545) has been rapidly [...]]]>
The initial subject is Mexican Lupe Avalos who joined up with the local volunteer fire department in a Oklahoma panhandle town. Guymon (population 11,545) has been rapidly hispanicized since the opening of a meat-packing plant in 1996. Avalos’ friends can’t understand why he wants to spend time with white Americans at the firehouse, so it seems the principle of assimilation to the values and culture of the United States looks pretty much dead.
As usual, the great majority of foreigners come for the money and free stuff, period.
The American town has flipped to become majority hispanic in just two decades, and not all of the foreign residents are legal. The Post thinks the locals are not sufficiently embracing the secular religion of Diversity, and the paper characterized the cultural shift as “fraught.”
Fire chiefs look to growing Latino population to rescue the languishing small-town firehouse, Herald-News (Joliet, Illinois), By Tim Craig, The Washington Post, June 6, 2018
GUYMON, Okla. – Three months into the job, Lupe Avalos still hears from the skeptics.
His twin brother and Latino friends wonder why a 20-year-old man born in Mexico decided to volunteer for one of the oldest, clubbiest small-town traditions – the American firehouse.
“They are like, ‘Oh, you are over there being white again with your firefighter friends,’ ” said Avalos, who was born in Mexico and brought to the United States by his parents when he was 4 years old. “But I like it, and I’m learning a lot of new things by getting involved in the community.”
This town in the center of Oklahoma’s panhandle has seen a huge demographic shift, flipping from majority-white to majority-Hispanic in the span of two decades. It’s a transformation reflected across many parts of America, one that is reshaping core community institutions, including those that provide the most critical services.
The traditional firehouse is feeling particularly pressured as the population of young white men it typically relied on for staffing declines and it struggles to connect with a burgeoning immigrant community. The dynamic has left firehouses short-staffed and Latino communities underserved.
From 1984 through 2015, the number of volunteer firefighters dipped nearly 10 percent to about 815,000, even as calls to fire departments nearly tripled, according to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA).
Now, community leaders across the country are rethinking firehouse cultures as they try to recruit more first- and second-generation immigrants.
“Communities that need help, they are reaching out to their neighbors, and their neighbors are changing,” said Rob Leonard of the Firemen’s Association of the State of New York.
The cultural shift has been fraught at times.
Following is a little story of illegal alien values: the mother of an unlawful family died when she received no medical attention after a heart attack because the family feared being deported.
Wait, weren’t we told that Mexicans have family values in abundance? Apparently not, which brings into question whether admitting millions of Third Worlder aliens is good idea, when some won’t even protect a mother.
]]>Jesus Uribe, a career firefighter in Guymon of Mexican descent, recalls when a Hispanic neighbor knocked on his door late one September night.
“Can you come help? My wife died,” the man said.
Uribe rushed next door and discovered the woman had suffered an apparent heart attack hours earlier. Her four children – two of whom were teenagers with cellphones – had been home at the time but never called for help. They worried it would trigger a response from immigration officials, Uribe said.
“He came to me,” said Uribe, 29, “but only because . . . if someone found his wife dead at his house, he feared he was going to get deported and all of his kids were going to be in the system.”
Tucker started the interview with the basic question which is nevertheless often ignored — how many of the world’s unhappy billions should America accept?
World population projections show an additional one billion people on earth in the next 13 years or so.
They will add to the many millions of poor who desire entrance to the United States.
Tucker’s guest, Ethan Bearman of San Francisco’s KGO radio, answered that “We have great capacity to accept people into our country” which is an odd thing for a California resident to say after the searing five-year drought (the worst in 450 years) that ended only two years ago. A region with a history of century-long droughts within the last thousand years shouldn’t be packing in immigrants and illegals at the current rate, but liberals often forget their earlier support for the environment — which was only a convenient pose, really.
Below, the drought-stricken Lake Oroville (which is also a reservoir) was nearly empty in September 2014.
Of course, there are many reasons beyond environmental ones to slow immigration — such as maintaining our own culture, for one. To go further, the coming automated workplace makes the idea of ending immigration totally reasonable.
Carlson preceded his interview with illustrative clips of leftist insanity about how “borders are immoral” and “walls suck” — which is apparently what CNN and MSNBC show these days.
TUCKER CARLSON: Ethan Bearman is a California radio host and he joins us tonight. So Ethan, I assume like every good progressive, you’re for letting the members of the caravan, and I just want to be clear I’m not against the members: I would want to come here too if I lived in Honduras. I understand completely, but it raises the question, since there aren’t the only people who want to come here, where do you draw the line? What’s the limit for people seeking a better life coming to this country?
ETHAN BEARMAN: Well we have great capacity to accept people into our country and it follows the Judeo-Christian ethic and morals that we would help those who are less fortunate plus we also signed the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees which actually sets forth the three aspects of how we determine who to let in under asylum and refugee status, and that’s what these people are coming here for is they’re fleeing the violence, they’re fleeing governments that are not able to protect them from violent gangs and they’re coming here to get a better life. . .
CARLSON: And in some cases joining violent gangs that our government refuses to protect us from so it is kind of the circle of life in some ways, but let me just ask you more precisely about what the limit is. So there are 1.2 billion people in Africa, probably a billion fall into the categories you just described. How many have a right to come here? What is our capacity?
BEARMAN: Well up until now, I mean we’ve been able to absorb roughly a million people legally immigrating into the United States per year. We know that under President Obama was over a hundred thousand refugees every year that we were able to allow in as well so we can absorb I mean that by the way this caravan. . .
CARLSON: Before you make generalizations, I want to get specific. So you are right with those numbers those are basically the numbers, and then various people come in under other programs. There’s maybe one and a half million a year legally, we’ve done this for a long time, but the left is saying that’s way too restrictive. So what’s the number? I mean again let’s stipulate a billion people want to move here next week, probably all to San Diego. How many should we let in under the Judeo-Christian ethic that you’re citing?
BEARMAN: Well this is also part of the Judeo-Christian ethic, would be to help their governments become better functioning and this is where. . .
CARLSON: Let’s not dodge the question — there’s no evidence our foreign aid has ever made any government better — I wish it were true, but it’s not. Life expectancy in a lot of Africa is lower than it was in 1965 when the colonial powers left, so it doesn’t necessarily work that way as you know. but what’s the number, like how many? “Cuz this is gonna keep happening with every wave it incites more waves and when can we say enough? When are we allowed to say that’s too many?
BEARMAN: Well first things first, I mean I will answer your question as well which I think is that 1.5 million number. But at the same time the Trump administration has dramatically cut back on the number of legal immigration. Syrian refugees, we let 11 in so far this year, as opposed to 15,000.
CARLSON : These are on the margins. Again, is there a number, or does talking about it scare the crap out of the country and reveal your real agenda which is to totally overwhelm and change the country? because that really is what it’s about, as you know. I mean you don’t want to be honest about what the limit is. Is it just as long as our compassion lasts? It’s a sincere question.
BEARMAN: I actually just answered, I mean I think that 1.5 million number is fair.
CARLSON: So that’ll continue, that’ll make the country totally unrecognizable in 30 years but not in five years, so that’s enough, is 1.5 million. I mean I don’t think that’s what the left is arguing for because they’re saying we can’t turn anyone away.
Meanwhile, polls show Americans want substantially fewer immigrants. A Harvard poll from January found that 81 Percent of All Voters Support Reducing Immigration Levels. A Pulse Opinion Research survey from March showed that close to a majority of Christian voters chose a number that was a 75% reduction in the annual flow of the last two decades. A million and a half immigrants annually is not what Americans want shaping the nation’s future.
]]>Retired engineer Carole Dabak spent 40 years living in San Jose and she packed up a couple months ago for Tennessee. She said she “loved it here” when she first came, but now is disappointed in how California has changed for the worse. “We don’t like it here anymore,” she said. “We don’t like this sanctuary state status and just the politics here.” She got a mention from Rush Limbaugh on February 10 as an example of the California Exodus.
California has definitely lost its luster.
One politician who left got an interview on Fox News Tuesday morning: one-time California State Representative Chuck Devore was smart enough to leave in 2011:
He wrote an opinion piece for FoxNews.com posted below that brought attention to the subject. He hangs the Republican Party’s failure in California on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s leftward moves — an interesting analysis — but overlooks the changing demographics caused by extreme immigration.
]]>California’s crazy one-party liberal politics is why I had to finally leave the state — and I’m not alone, By Chuck DeVore, Fox News, April 16, 2018
Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, infamously tweeted a link in early April to a story calling for a bloodless civil war to solve America’s problems. The piece, “The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War: Why there’s no bipartisan way forward at this juncture in our history — one side must win” was authored by Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira.
The duo assert that this new civil war will follow a path blazed by California 15 years ago, namely, the crushing of the Republican Party. “The Democrats won; the Republicans lost,” they intone, “California is the future…”
Living and working in places like Washington and San Francisco as Teixeira and Twitter’s Dorsey do, tends to distort the view of the real world.
Teixeira’s and Leyden’s summary history of the California Republican collapse may seem convincing for people who didn’t live it, as I did as a lawmaker in the State Assembly from 2004 to 2010. To summarize: Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected in 2003 as a populist, governed as a conservative for a year and then veered to the left to preserve his political hide, massively boosting spending and signing the Global Warming Solutions Act. Democrats then started winning elections.
Conveniently left out of their narrative was Schwarzenegger’s championing of the largest state tax increase in U.S. history and a terrible national electoral climate in the 2006 midterms, due, in part, to war weariness, and the 2008 election blowout coinciding with the onset of the Great Recession.
In 2011, after spending my adult life in California, working in the once-thriving aerospace industry there, serving 19 years in the state’s National Guard and six years in the legislature, I picked up my family and moved to Texas.
(Continues)
Chabot must not have thought deeply about how California turned from a very conservative state into a very liberal one — the [...]]]>
Chabot must not have thought deeply about how California turned from a very conservative state into a very liberal one — the transformation was caused by immigration-fueled demographic change. And Texas is facing the same disintegration. Sure, it’s a conservative powerhouse now, but hispanic population is the major growth factor. Open borders, big families and the attraction of the welfare system will transform a state rapidly, as we can see from California.
The new Texan is an upbeat salesman for his product, conservative Texas, which he has monetized into a moving business called Conservative Move. But anyone considering a major relocation might want to avoid the border region because even if immigration were to end tomorrow (which it should because of automation), the remaining hispanics maintain their big-government preference for generations.
Here’s a print story about Chabot, who is quite the salesman:
]]>California conservative flees to Texas, hopes others join him, Fox News, July 21, 2017
Are you a conservative who’s found yourself increasingly surrounded by liberals? Well, relocation to Collin County in the Red State of Texas may be just what you need to blow away your Blue State blues.
A company called Conservative Move says its aim is to help conservatives find the kind of lifestyle that suits them best. “Helping families move Right,” is the company’s slogan.
Founder Paul Chabot, 43, is a former Californian who recently told the Los Angeles Times that he and his family moved to McKinney, Texas, north of Dallas, after he became disheartened watching his native San Bernardino County become less and less conservative and more and more liberal.
“In California, it’s like the liberals can do no wrong,” Chabot told the newspaper. “No matter what we (conservatives) do, we’re beating our heads against the wall.”
After losing his bid to win California’s 31st Congressional District seat last November, Chabot and his wife, Brenda, decided that the Golden State no longer seemed to have room for anyone who was a “pro-life, pro-family, pro-faith conservative Republican.”
So far Chabot’s company hasn’t attracted any serious clients, but he has received more than 1,000 inquiries, the Times reported. Emails from frustrated California conservatives seem to echo Chabot’s own yearnings to live among more like-minded people.
“My boys’ minds have been taken over by the liberal teachings of the schools here,” a woman from Westlake Village, California, wrote to Chabot, according to the Times.
“Conservative views here are silenced,” wrote another woman, from Perris, California.
But living in Collin County, Chabot told the Times, is “like living a dream.”
Instead of the graffiti and gangs of California, he’s now surrounded by new homes, malls and golf courses – and taxes are lower.
But the Times notes that a rise in corporate relocations to north Texas has also brought more Democrats to the area. And it says Donald Trump took only 56 percent of the vote in Collin County in 2016, compared with 65 percent for Mitt Romney in 2012.
“There may be a fair number of conservatives who come here and say, ‘I like this much better than California,” Mike Rawlins, chairman of the Collin County Democratic Party told the Times. “But that’s a drop in the bucket. Ten or 20 years from now, they’re going to find out they don’t like it as much as they do now.”
The Pew map tells the overall story:
[...]]]>The Pew map tells the overall story:
The list of the most afflicted cities is explanatory, although not surprising.
Naturally, this report got attention in California newspapers, like the San Jose Mercury, which produced a wonky article with facts and numbers: San Jose, San Francisco among areas with largest undocumented immigrant populations.
But the LA Times went into full freakout mode in its coverage, because apparently few of the hispanic residents in the area are legal or citizens. Worse than we thought — is it possible?
Plus, the Times seems to think that if illegals were to go away, the economy would shrink and fail. Actually, if Los Angeles were a more American-friendly area where English is spoken and schools are not dysfunctional and crime is not overwhelming, many citizens would love to live there, perhaps with some returning from places to which they escaped.
Los Angeles was a nice American city before the illegal alien invasion and could be again.
And anyway, what wrong with living in Mexico? The nation ranks #15 on world GDP, and its middle class has been growing, so it’s a country with a bright future, and no annoying English is needed! Adios, Mexicans!
]]>L.A., Orange counties are home to 1 million immigrants who are in the country illegally, analysis shows, Los Angeles Times, February 9. 2017
The chatter of Spanish serves as the backdrop of Pico-Union, where the aroma of pastries from the panaderia merge with the synthetic smells of an auto repair garage. A predominantly Latino neighborhood, it has for decades been a first stop for immigrants — both legal and illegal — coming from various corners of Latin America.
Over the years, this community has faced challenges, including from politicians threatening crackdowns on illegal immigration. But to many in this densely populated area near MacArthur Park, the presidency of Donald Trump poses a threat of an altogether different scale. Trump has vowed mass deportations of those here illegally, which if carried out, could fundamentally alter the rhythms of life in Pico-Union and numerous other immigrant enclaves around Southern California and beyond.
The potential threat of emptied homes and shuttered businesses has residents envisioning the worst.
“Una desolación. Imagínate no más,” worried Graciela Sandoval, 79, who has lived in Pico-Union for five decades. A desolation. Just imagine it.
“It’ll be a ghost town here,” added Manuel Blanco, 42, a lifelong Pico-Union resident who runs an auto repair shop in the area. “It’s not even going to be worth being in business.”
An analysis released Thursday by the Pew Research Center underscores just how much immigrants here illegally have been embedded into the culture and economy of Los Angeles. Woven, often seamlessly, into dozens of cities’ infrastructures, they have become a workforce and community that makes up much of the fabric of Southern California.
Nearly 10% of the nation’s 11.1 million immigrants who are in the country illegally reside in Los Angeles and Orange counties, according to the research center. The region is home to 1 million such immigrants, second only to the greater New York area, which has 1.2 million. Third on the list was Houston with 575,000. The city of Los Angeles alone has an estimated 375,000.
Up to 8 million people in the country illegally could be considered priorities for deportation, according to calculations by The Times based on interviews with experts who studied internal documents related to Trump’s directive. Trump has said that his order allows immigration officials to detain nearly anyone who has crossed the border illegally.
The Pew analysis, using augmented 2014 data collected by the American Community Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, focused on the 20 major metropolitan areas with the highest numbers of immigrants here illegally. It showed that the population tends to live among legal immigrants and is highly concentrated.
In 2014, 61% of immigrants here illegally lived in those 20 metropolitan areas, whereas only 36% of the total U.S. population lived in the same regions. All but one of the areas remained in the top 20 over the previous decade.
Five of those — including Riverside, San Francisco, San Diego and San Jose — were in California, a state at the forefront of the sanctuary movement, where leaders have insisted cities will continue to offer refuge to immigrants in the face of Trump’s threat to cut their funds.
Although Los Angeles has not explicitly declared itself a sanctuary city, it has taken measures to protect those here illegally. Early this month, City Council members pushed forward a plan to draft a law that would decriminalize street vending. Many, if not most, who peddle items like bacon-wrapped hot dogs, fruit and ice cream are in the country illegally, and city leaders hope to keep them from being charged for selling goods or food on the sidewalk — which would make them more vulnerable to deportation.
If the unauthorized population were to leave areas where they contribute to the local economy, cities could find themselves in trouble.
“They would face not just a loss of population or loss of labor … but also loss of buying power,” said Louis DeSipio, a professor of political science at UC Irvine who specializes in immigration from Latin America.
Immigrants who are here illegally often contribute to the economy even in neighborhoods where they don’t live, as service workers in restaurants or in the homes of the more well-heeled.
In Santa Ana, businesses catering to immigrants kept the downtown financially viable after white residents left decades earlier. The county seat of Orange County, Santa Ana boasts a downtown with gourmet restaurants and hipster shops, but its vibrancy is fueled by the Mexican immigrant community — a good portion of which lacks legal status.
On Sundays, vehicles cruise 4th Street blaring Mexican ranchera music while families amble about bridal and hair salons, snack carts, jewelry shops and check-cashing stores that wire money to Latin America.
Claudia Arellanes, secretary of the Santa Ana Business Council and owner of a furniture store, said the area is reliant on its immigrant clientele.
“Many people don’t understand this,” she said. “It would be devastating. The downtown area would fail.”
Businesses that don’t specifically cater to new immigrants, such as mainstream malls, movie theaters and restaurants, also reap the benefits from a large unauthorized population that quickly acculturates to its surroundings, DeSipio said.
In Maywood, a 1.2-square-mile municipality that declared itself a sanctuary city more than a decade ago, the effects of Trump’s directive have residents envisioning a collapsed community. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the city has a population of 28,000, but city officials say that number doubles when immigrants in the country illegally are included.
Residents can point out neighbor after neighbor who don’t have documents. Most have relatives in the same situation. Friends, too.
“You would have empty homes and empty apartments,” Mayor Pro Tem Eduardo De La Riva said of potential mass deportations. “People would be afraid to come outside.”
Indeed, Democrats may see the 2016 failure as a reinforcement of their idea that the traditional population must be replaced by immigrants who are culturally attached to big government. So tough immigration enforcers running the government is exactly what Democrats don’t want, because law and borders mess up the Democrats’ Final Solution to the American problem.
Tucker Carlson discussed the upcoming Jeff Sessions nomination as being opposed because of his strong enforcement position on immigration, though that reason will not be discussed much in the hearing, Carlson thinks.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: This is really about Jeff Sessions, make no mistake at all: it’s about the Attorney General which is the most significant appointment the new president will make for a bunch of different reasons, and Jeff Sessions, of course, has been vetted; he’s been in the Senate a long time, he’s been in public life for more than 30 years, the FBI has vetted him, so there’s no question about his bona fides, there’s no question that he’s not some secret Russian agent.
They just don’t like his views and they especially don’t like his views on immigration, but they’re not going to attack on immigration because his views are actually pretty close to where the public is on immigration: secure the borders, don’t undercut American labor with low-wage immigrants etc. I mean people agree with him, so they’re going to attack him as they always do — wait for it — as a racist and that’s what they’re doing now but there’s no evidence of that at all, and it’s a slur and it lowers the tone dramatically, it’s bad for the country but that’s all they’ve got, so that’s what you’re going to hear.
STEVE DUCEY: Of course the Democrats are bringing up some what that has been depicted as a joke like 30 years ago that he made as as an example that he’s racist, but here’s the thing, Tucker, because the Democrats changed the rules a number of years ago, all these guys are gonna get through and the Democrats have only themselves to blame. . .
CARLSON: (2:45) What bothers me about this is I think the country could use a debate on immigration and trade, and those are the two issues that people are actually upset about but again, we’re not getting that. Instead you’re going to hear all kinds of implications about the character of these people — let’s debate the issues. These are real issues and I think all of us would benefit from from an adult conversation about them but we’re not going to get it.
In 2005, I blogged about polygamous families sleeping in shifts in France because apartments are designed for monogamous groupings: there are so many ways [...]]]>
In 2005, I blogged about polygamous families sleeping in shifts in France because apartments are designed for monogamous groupings: there are so many ways in which Islam does not fit in the West.
Below, hordes of Syrian and other Muslim men have marched into Europe on the welcome mat German Chancellor Merkel stupidly provided.
Keep in mind that the population of Africa is now around 1.2 billion and its growth is not slowing down. Africa could send a hundred million humans to Europe and not even notice they’re gone.
The Gates of Vienna blog recently posted a video with transcript of a Bulgarian talk show where the immigration topic was on the table: Bulgarian Demographer: 100 Million Migrants in Europe by 2050.
TRANSCRIPT:
]]>MODERATOR: Let us hear Mr. Bardarov too, who has been quietly listening to our discussion so far from the height of his position as a man of letters, a demographer and so on… how he sees all this process — an ordinary refugee crisis or a civilizational shift, and what did we, Bulgarians, learn about ourselves from this crisis?
GEORGI BARDAROV (Associate Professor, Sofia University): My opinion is that we have been witnessing global changes since the beginning of the 21st century, and this is not some kind of temporary phenomenon. What puzzles me are other processes: that Europe turned out to be unprepared for this refugee wave, given the data from UN and Eurostat that I used four years ago for my monograph — “Immigration, conflicts and transformation of identities in the EU”. The UN published a chart that predicted 1.5 million immigrants per year as far back as 2007, 1.2 million from Asia, 377,000 from Africa each year.
If it really happens every year, if they were to be as many as last year, this means that by the middle of the century there will be about 60 million new immigrants, and taken together with those already living on the continent and their high birth rate, this makes about 100 million by the mid-21st century. So we really are witnessing a global change, It is not without precedent in world history — It is enough to recall the Migration Period, when the ancient world was populated by barbarian tribes, or the settling of the New World by Europeans during the 19th and 20th centuries.
So, there have been replacements of populations many times in different places in the world. This really is a threat from the viewpoint of Europe and Christianity but it is a process that has happened before and is subject to causal links — the colonial system, the suppressed development of these territories…
I too am of the opinion that this migration pressure will continue, not to mention the pressure from Africa that has not yet been fully unleashed — you have been talking about just Asian countries so far. The situation in Africa — I’ll give Uganda as an example — it had a population of 24 million in 2001 and is facing a drinking water shortage. The UN’s projected population growth for it is 302 percent by 2050. I even contacted the demographic agency of the UN, because when I saw this figure I decided this was impossible — 302 percent. They replied to me that the figure is correct — they will be 100 million by the middle of this century.
MODERATOR: Uganda? From 24 to…? — 100, in just 50 years.
BARDAROV: And they are facing water shortage now. What will happen then?!