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Examining SoCal's illegal immigration
by Matt Bonzer

January 30, 2006

I have recently found myself stumped by the issues surrounding illegal immigration. For some reason, I can't ever seem to find myself satisfied with the solutions that are presented. Frankly, I have no idea where to even start with the issue, but I know that there is a problem in this country and something has to be done.

Being from Grand Forks I can't say that I very often find myself in day-to-day situations that involve either the positive or negative aspects of illegal immigration. Fortunately, I have been blessed with the ability to travel occasionally, which has opened my eyes to a lot of things in this world.

This past summer I was in revolting ... cough, excuse me, beautiful southern California visiting family when I had the opportunity to participate in a "ride-along" with my uncle, a police officer in Huntington Park (for those of you who aren't familiar with the SoCal area, I'm not talking about Huntington Beach). I guess you could say HP's claim to fame is that the film "Grease" was filmed at the high school.

Let me be the first to tell you that HP has gone through some "perspective changing" events, mostly major riots, since John Travolta was making our mothers drool over his incriminating moves and stunning good looks.

HP 2006 looks a little more like this: population 61,348 in a city with a total area of 3.0 square miles (GF crams a solid 49,321 into 19.2 sq. miles), 95.6 percent Hispanic, approximately 50 percent of which are illegal immigrants. The city's two main gangs are the Florencias and the 18th Streets, of which most students drop out of school by the 10th grade to join, essentially begging to be killed before they could have even had a chance to earn a diploma. Not exactly the American dream.

My night in HP, a night I would later find out was considered to be a "slow" one, consisted of witnessing some crazy things, including a stolen car with a loaded weapon, statutory rape, DUI and possession of crystal meth and shots fired at a nearby bar. To make matters even worse, the bar was full of nasty Honduran prostitutes with cleft palates like Esteban's lady in "Kill Bill Vol. 2." I also entered a tiny apartment that was home to about eight people, one of whom claimed that her friend's husband had beaten her.

Sounds real "slow" to me.

The point I'm trying to make with all of this is that this town used to be straight out of a movie, literally. Now it is a complete hellhole full of people who didn't even legally enter the country. I don't blame it on all of them, because there are plenty of good citizens who just so happen to be illegals, but something has to be done.

I am aware that many of the people living in HP work for pretty cheap and are willing to do jobs that natural born Americans wouldn't even think about doing, and they do it for almost nothing. In an ideal world we would be able to just send them all home and let the country run itself, but unfortunately that isn't the reality.

Think about it. Approximately there are 30,000 illegal immigrants living in a 3.0 square mile radius. It's absolutely unreal. There would be even more if they weren't killing each other off by the age of 18 in gang fights, which almost always are initiated simply by someone from the opposing gang spray painting their sign on the other gang's "turf."

I don't know what the solution is or where to even begin, but I do know that there is a serious problem out there and something needs to be done.