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    Senior Member lorrie's Avatar
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    The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave

    ** This article published few years ago describing in detail the erosion of both immigration and criminal law, the devastating results to American culture, financial stability, community safety and American lives. Our politicians knew what the problem was, how to fix it but ignored the magnitude of the problem and allowed it to manifest '10-fold' to what we have today.

    Why?

    To save their political jobs, careers and line there pockets!


    The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave
    Why can’t our immigration authorities deport the hordes of illegal felons in our cities?


    Public safety
    The Social Order
    California

    Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule against enforcing immigration law.

    The LAPD’s ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated cities around the country, from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and Houston. These “sanctuary policies” generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities.

    Such laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so irresistible that police officials shrink from even mentioning the illegal-alien crime wave. “We can’t even talk about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a predominantly Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].” Neither captain would speak for attribution.

    But however pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much broader disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control over immigration policy. Fifty years ago, immigration policy might have driven immigration numbers, but today the numbers drive policy. The nonstop increase of immigration is reshaping the language and the law to dissolve any distinction between legal and illegal aliens and, ultimately, the very idea of national borders.

    It is a measure of how topsy-turvy the immigration environment has become that to ask police officials about the illegal-alien crime problem feels like a gross faux pas, not done in polite company. And a police official asked to violate this powerful taboo will give a strangled response—or, as in the case of a New York deputy commissioner, break off communication altogether. Meanwhile, millions of illegal aliens work, shop, travel, and commit crimes in plain view, utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the immigration law.

    I asked the Miami Police Department’s spokesman, Detective Delrish Moss, about his employer’s policy on lawbreaking illegals. In September, the force arrested a Honduran visa violator for seven vicious rapes. The previous year, Miami cops had had the suspect in custody for lewd and lascivious molestation, without checking his immigration status. Had they done so, they would have discovered his visa overstay, a deportable offense, and so could have forestalled the rapes. “We have shied away from unnecessary involvement dealing with immigration issues,” exlains Moss, choosing his words carefully, “because of our large immigrant population.”

    Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond to, the illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling.

    Some examples:
    • In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

    • A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.

    • The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.

    Good luck finding any reference to such facts in official crime analysis. The LAPD and the L.A. city attorney recently requested an injunction against drug trafficking in Hollywood, targeting the 18th Street Gang and the “non–gang members” who sell drugs in Hollywood for the gang. Those non–gang members are virtually all illegal Mexicans, smuggled into the country by a ring organized by 18th Street bigs. The Mexicans pay off their transportation debts to the gang by selling drugs; many soon realize how lucrative that line of work is and stay in the business.

    Cops and prosecutors universally know the immigration status of these non-gang “Hollywood dealers,” as the city attorney calls them, but the gang injunction is assiduously silent on the matter. And if a Hollywood officer were to arrest an illegal dealer (known on the street as a “border brother”) for his immigration status, or even notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service (since early 2003, absorbed into the new Department of Homeland Security), he would face severe discipline for violating Special Order 40, the city’s sanctuary policy.

    The ordinarily tough-as-nails former LAPD chief Daryl Gates enacted Special Order 40 in 1979—showing that even the most unapologetic law-and-order cop is no match for immigration advocates. The order prohibits officers from “initiating police action where the objective is to discover the alien status of a person”—in other words, the police may not even ask someone they have arrested about his immigration status until after they have filed criminal charges, nor may they arrest someone for immigration violations. They may not notify immigration authorities about an illegal alien picked up for minor violations. Only if they have already booked an illegal alien for a felony or for multiple misdemeanors may they inquire into his status or report him. The bottom line: a cordon sanitaire between local law enforcement and immigration authorities that creates a safe haven for illegal criminals.

    L.A.’s sanctuary law and all others like it contradict a key 1990s policing discovery: the Great Chain of Being in criminal behavior. Pick up a law-violator for a “minor” crime, and you might well prevent a major crime: enforcing graffiti and turnstile-jumping laws nabs you murderers and robbers. Enforcing known immigration violations, such as reentry following deportation, against known felons, would be even more productive. LAPD officers recognize illegal deported gang members all the time—flashing gang signs at court hearings for rival gangbangers, hanging out on the corner, or casing a target.

    These illegal returnees are, simply by being in the country after deportation, committing a felony (in contrast to garden-variety illegals on their first trip to the U.S., say, who are only committing a misdemeanor). “But if I see a deportee from the Mara Salvatrucha [Salvadoran prison] gang crossing the street, I know I can’t touch him,” laments a Los Angeles gang officer. Only if the deported felon has given the officer some other reason to stop him, such as an observed narcotics sale, can the cop accost him—but not for the immigration felony.

    Though such a policy puts the community at risk, the department’s top brass brush off such concerns. No big deal if you see deported gangbangers back on the streets, they say. Just put them under surveillance for “real” crimes and arrest them for those. But surveillance is very manpower-intensive. Where there is an immediate ground for getting a violent felon off the street and for questioning him further, it is absurd to demand that the woefully understaffed LAPD ignore it.

    The stated reasons for sanctuary policies are that they encourage illegal-alien crime victims and witnesses to cooperate with cops without fear of deportation, and that they encourage illegals to take advantage of city services like health care and education (to whose maintenance few illegals have contributed a single tax dollar, of course). There has never been any empirical verification that sanctuary laws actually accomplish these goals—and no one has ever suggested not enforcing drug laws, say, for fear of intimidating drug-using crime victims.

    But in any case, this official rationale could be honored by limiting police use of immigration laws to some subset of immigration violators: deported felons, say, or repeat criminal offenders whose immigration status police already know.

    The real reason cities prohibit their cops and other employees from immigration reporting and enforcement is, like nearly everything else in immigration policy, the numbers. The immigrant population has grown so large that public officials are terrified of alienating it, even at the expense of ignoring the law and tolerating violence. In 1996, a breathtaking Los Angeles Times exposé on the 18th Street Gang, which included descriptions of innocent bystanders being murdered by laughing cholos (gang members), revealed the rate of illegal-alien membership in the gang. In response to the public outcry, the Los Angeles City Council ordered the police to reexamine Special Order 40. You would have thought it had suggested reconsidering Roe v. Wade. A police commander warned the council: “This is going to open a significant, heated debate.” City Councilwoman Laura Chick put on a brave front: “We mustn’t be afraid,” she declared firmly.

    But of course immigrant pandering trumped public safety. Law-abiding residents of gang-infested neighborhoods may live in terror of the tattooed gangbangers dealing drugs, spraying graffiti, and shooting up rivals outside their homes, but such anxiety can never equal a politician’s fear of offending Hispanics. At the start of the reexamination process, LAPD deputy chief John White had argued that allowing the department to work closely with the INS would give cops another tool for getting gang members off the streets. Trying to build a homicide case, say, against an illegal gang member is often futile, he explained, since witnesses fear deadly retaliation if they cooperate with the police. Enforcing an immigration violation would allow the cops to lock up the murderer right now, without putting a witness’s life at risk.

    But six months later, Deputy Chief White had changed his tune: “Any broadening of the policy gets us into the immigration business,” he asserted. “It’s a federal law-enforcement issue, not a local law-enforcement issue.” Interim police chief Bayan Lewis told the L.A. Police Commission: “It is not the time. It is not the day to look at Special Order 40.”

    Nor will it ever be, as long as immigration numbers continue to grow. After their brief moment of truth in 1996, Los Angeles politicians have only grown more adamant in defense of Special Order 40. After learning that cops in the scandal-plagued Rampart Division had cooperated with the INS to try to uproot murderous gang members from the community, local politicians threw a fit, criticizing district commanders for even allowing INS agents into their station houses. In turn, the LAPD strictly disciplined the offending officers. By now, big-city police chiefs are unfortunately just as determined to defend sanctuary policies as the politicians who appoint them; not so the rank and file, however, who see daily the benefit that an immigration tool would bring.

    Immigration politics have similarly harmed New York. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani sued all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the city’s sanctuary policy against a 1996 federal law decreeing that cities could not prohibit their employees from cooperating with the INS. Oh yeah? said Giuliani; just watch me. The INS, he claimed, with what turned out to be grotesque irony, only aims to “terrorize people.” Though he lost in court, he remained defiant to the end. On September 5, 2001, his handpicked charter-revision committee ruled that New York could still require that its employees keep immigration information confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government. Six days later, several visa-overstayers participated in the most devastating attack on the city and the country in history.

    New York conveniently forgot the 1996 federal ban on sanctuary laws until a gang of five Mexicans—four of them illegal—abducted and brutally raped a 42-year-old mother of two near some railroad tracks in Queens. The NYPD had already arrested three of the illegal aliens numerous times for such crimes as assault, attempted robbery, criminal trespass, illegal gun possession, and drug offenses. The department had never notified the INS.

    Citizen outrage forced Mayor Michael Bloomberg to revisit the city’s sanctuary decree yet again. In May 2003, Bloomberg tweaked the policy minimally to allow city staffers to inquire into immigration status only if it is relevant to the awarding of a government benefit. Though Bloomberg’s new rule said nothing about reporting immigration violations to federal officials, advocates immediately claimed that it did allow such reporting, and the ethnic lobbies went ballistic.

    “What we’re seeing is the erosion of people’s rights,” thundered Angelo Falcon of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. After three months of intense agitation by immigrant groups, Bloomberg replaced this innocuous “don’t ask” policy with a “don’t tell” rule even broader than Gotham’s original sanctuary policy. The new rule prohibits city employees from giving other government officials information not just about immigration status but about tax payments, sexual orientation, welfare status, and other matters.

    But even were immigrant-saturated cities to discard their sanctuary policies and start enforcing immigration violations where public safety demands it, the resource-starved immigration authorities couldn’t handle the overwhelming additional workload.

    The chronic shortage of manpower to oversee, and detention space to house, aliens as they await their deportation hearings (or, following an order of removal from a federal judge, their actual deportation) has forced immigration officials to practice a constant triage. Long ago, the feds stopped trying to find and deport aliens who had “merely” entered the country illegally through stealth or fraudulent documents. Currently, the only types of illegal aliens who run any risk of catching federal attention are those who have been convicted of an “aggravated felony” (a particularly egregious crime) or who have been deported following conviction for an aggravated felony and who have reentered (an offense punishable with 20 years in jail).

    That triage has been going on for a long time, as former INS investigator Mike Cutler, who worked with the NYPD catching Brooklyn drug dealers in the 1970s, explains. “If you arrested someone you wanted to detain, you’d go to your boss and start a bidding war,” Cutler recalls. “You’d say: 'My guy ran three blocks, threw a couple of punches, and had six pieces of ID.'

    The boss would turn to another agent: 'Next! Whaddid your guy do?' 'He ran 18 blocks, pushed over an old lady, and had a gun.' ” But such one-upmanship was usually fruitless.

    “Without the jail space,” explains Cutler, “it was like the Fish and Wildlife Service; you’d tag their ear and let them go.”

    But even when immigration officials actually arrest someone, and even if a judge issues a final deportation order (usually after years of litigation and appeals), they rarely have the manpower to put the alien on a bus or plane and take him across the border. Second alternative: detain him pending removal. Again, inadequate space and staff. In the early 1990s, for example, 15 INS officers were in charge of the deportation of approximately 85,000 aliens (not all of them criminals) in New York City. The agency’s actual response to final orders of removal was what is known as a “run letter”—a notice asking the deportable alien kindly to show up in a month or two to be deported, when the agency might be able to process him.

    Results: in 2001, 87 percent of deportable aliens who received run letters disappeared, a number that was even higher—94 percent—if they were from terror-sponsoring countries.

    To other law-enforcement agencies, the feds’ triage often looks like complete indifference to immigration violations. Testifying to Congress about the Queens rape by illegal Mexicans, New York’s criminal justice coordinator defended the city’s failure to notify the INS after the rapists’ previous arrests on the ground that the agency wouldn’t have responded anyway. “We have time and time again been unable to reach INS on the phone,” John Feinblatt said last February. “When we reach them on the phone, they require that we write a letter. When we write a letter, they require that it be by a superior.”

    Criminal aliens also interpret the triage as indifference. John Mullaly a former NYPD homicide detective, estimates that 70 percent of the drug dealers and other criminals in Manhattan’s Washington Heights were illegal. Were Mullaly to threaten an illegal-alien thug in custody that his next stop would be El Salvador unless he cooperated, the criminal would just laugh, knowing that the INS would never show up. The message could not be clearer: this is a culture that can’t enforce its most basic law of entry. If policing’s broken-windows theory is correct, the failure to enforce one set of rules breeds overall contempt for the law.

    The sheer number of criminal aliens overwhelmed an innovative program that would allow immigration officials to complete deportation hearings while a criminal was still in state or federal prison, so that upon his release he could be immediately ejected without taking up precious INS detention space. But the process, begun in 1988, immediately bogged down due to the numbers—in 2000, for example, nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born. The agency couldn’t find enough pro bono attorneys to represent such an army of criminal aliens (who have extensive due-process rights in contesting deportation) and so would have to request delay after delay. Or enough immigration judges would not be available. In 1997, the INS simply had no record of a whopping 36 percent of foreign-born inmates who had been released from federal and four state prisons without any review of their deportability. They included 1,198 aggravated felons, 80 of whom were soon re-arrested for new crimes.

    Resource starvation is not the only reason for federal inaction. The INS was a creature of immigration politics, and INS district directors came under great pressure from local politicians to divert scarce resources into distribution of such “benefits” as permanent residency, citizenship, and work permits, and away from criminal or other investigations. In the late 1980s, for example, the INS refused to join an FBI task force against Haitian drug trafficking in Miami, fearing criticism for “Haitian-bashing.” In 1997, after Hispanic activists protested a much-publicized raid that netted nearly two dozen illegals, the Border Patrol said that it would no longer join Simi Valley, California, probation officers on home searches of illegal-alien-dominated gangs.

    The disastrous Citizenship USA project of 1996 was a luminous case of politics driving the INS to sacrifice enforcement to “benefits.” When, in the early 1990s, the prospect of welfare reform drove immigrants to apply for citizenship in record numbers to preserve their welfare eligibility, the Clinton administration, seeing a political bonanza in hundreds of thousands of new welfare-dependent citizens, ordered the naturalization process radically expedited. Thanks to relentless administration pressure, processing errors in 1996 were 99 percent in New York and 90 percent in Los Angeles, and tens of thousands of aliens with criminal records, including for murder and armed robbery, were naturalized.

    Another powerful political force, the immigration bar association, has won from Congress an elaborate set of due-process rights for criminal aliens that can keep them in the country indefinitely. Federal probation officers in Brooklyn are supervising two illegals—a Jordanian and an Egyptian with Saudi citizenship—who look “ready to blow up the Statue of Liberty,” according to a probation official, but the officers can’t get rid of them. The Jordanian had been caught fencing stolen Social Security and tax-refund checks; now he sells phone cards, which he uses himself to make untraceable calls.

    The Saudi’s offense: using a fraudulent Social Security number to get employment—a puzzlingly unnecessary scam, since he receives large sums from the Middle East, including from millionaire relatives. But intelligence links him to terrorism, so presumably he worked in order not to draw attention to himself. Currently, he changes his cell phone every month. Ordinarily such a minor offense would not be prosecuted, but the government, fearing that he had terrorist intentions, used whatever it had to put him in prison.

    Now, probation officers desperately want to see the duo out of the country, but the two ex-cons have hired lawyers, who are relentlessly fighting their deportation. “Due process allows you to stay for years without an adjudication,” says a probation officer in frustration. “A regular immigration attorney can keep you in the country for three years, a high-priced one for ten.” In the meantime, Brooklyn probation officials are watching the bridges.

    Even where immigration officials successfully nab and deport criminal aliens, the reality, says a former federal gang prosecutor, is that “they all come back. They can’t make it in Mexico.” The tens of thousands of illegal farmworkers and dishwashers who overpower U.S. border controls every year carry in their wake thousands of brutal assailants and terrorists who use the same smuggling industry and who benefit from the same irresistible odds: there are so many more of them than the Border Patrol.

    For, of course, the government’s inability to keep out criminal aliens is part and parcel of its inability to patrol the border, period. For decades, the INS had as much effect on the migration of millions of illegals as a can tied to the tail of a tiger. And the immigrants themselves, despite the press cliché of hapless aliens living fearfully in the shadows, seemed to regard immigration authorities with all the concern of an elephant for a flea.

    Certainly fear of immigration officers is not in evidence among the hundreds of illegal day laborers who hang out on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York, in front of money wire services, travel agencies, immigration-attorney offices, and phone arcades, all catering to the local Hispanic population (as well as to drug dealers and terrorists). “There is no chance of getting caught,” cheerfully explains Rafael, an Ecuadoran. Like the dozen Ecuadorans and Mexicans on his particular corner, Rafael is hoping that an SUV seeking carpenters for $100 a day will show up soon. “We don’t worry, because we’re not doing anything wrong. I know it’s illegal; I need the papers, but here, nobody asks you for papers.”

    Even the newly fortified Mexican border, the one spot where the government really tries to prevent illegal immigration, looms as only a minor inconvenience to the day laborers. The odds, they realize, are overwhelmingly in their favor. Miguel, a reserved young carpenter, crossed the border at Tijuana three years ago with 15 others. Border Patrol spotted them, but with six officers to 16 illegals, only five got caught. In illegal border crossings, you get what you pay for, Miguel says. If you try to shave on the fee, the coyotes will abandon you at the first problem. Miguel’s wife was flying into New York from Los Angeles that very day; it had cost him $2,200 to get her across the border. “Because I pay, I don’t worry,” he says complacently.

    The only way to dampen illegal immigration and its attendant train of criminals and terrorists—short of an economic revolution in the sending countries or an impregnably militarized border—is to remove the jobs magnet. As long as migrants know they can easily get work, they will find ways to evade border controls. But enforcing laws against illegal labor is among government’s lowest priorities. In 2001, only 124 agents nationwide were trying to find and prosecute the hundreds of thousands of employers and millions of illegal aliens who violate the employment laws, the Associated Press reports.

    Even were immigration officials to devote adequate resources to worksite investigations, not much would change, because their legal weapons are so weak. That’s no accident: though it is a crime to hire illegal aliens, a coalition of libertarians, business lobbies, and left-wing advocates has consistently blocked the fraud-proof form of work authorization necessary to enforce that ban. Libertarians have erupted in hysteria at such proposals as a toll-free number to the Social Security Administration for employers to confirm Social Security numbers. Hispanics warn just as stridently that helping employers verify work eligibility would result in discrimination against Hispanics—implicitly conceding that vast numbers of Hispanics work illegally.

    The result: hiring practices in illegal-immigrant-saturated industries are a charade. Millions of illegal workers pretend to present valid documents, and thousands of employers pretend to believe them. The law doesn’t require the employer to verify that a worker is actually qualified to work, and as long as the proffered documents are not patently phony—scrawled with red crayon on a matchbook, say—the employer will nearly always be exempt from liability merely by having eyeballed them. To find an employer guilty of violating the ban on hiring illegal aliens, immigration authorities must prove that he knew he was getting fake papers—an almost insurmountable burden.

    Meanwhile, the market for counterfeit documents has exploded: in one month alone in 1998, immigration authorities seized nearly 2 million of them in Los Angeles, destined for immigrant workers, welfare seekers, criminals, and terrorists.

    For illegal workers and employers, there is no downside to the employment charade. If immigration officials ever do try to conduct an industry-wide investigation—which will at least net the illegal employees, if not the employers—local congressmen will almost certainly head it off. An INS inquiry into the Vidalia-onion industry in Georgia was not only aborted by Georgia’s congressional delegation; it actually resulted in a local amnesty for the growers’ illegal workforce.

    The downside to complying with the spirit of the employment law, on the other hand, is considerable. Ethnic advocacy groups are ready to picket employers who dismiss illegal workers, and employers understandably fear being undercut by less scrupulous competitors.

    Of the incalculable changes in American politics, demographics, and culture that the continuing surge of migrants is causing, one of the most profound is the breakdown of the distinction between legal and illegal entry.

    Everywhere, illegal aliens receive free public education and free medical care at taxpayer expense; 13 states offer them driver’s licenses. States everywhere have been pushed to grant illegal aliens college scholarships and reduced in-state tuition.

    One hundred banks, over 800 law-enforcement agencies, and dozens of cities accept an identification card created by Mexico to credentialize illegal Mexican aliens in the U.S. The Bush administration has given its blessing to this matricula consular card, over the strong protest of the FBI, which warns that the gaping security loopholes that the card creates make it a boon to money launderers, immigrant smugglers, and terrorists. Border authorities have already caught an Iranian man sneaking across the border this year, Mexican matricula card in hand.

    Hispanic advocates have helped blur the distinction between a legal and an illegal resident by asserting that differentiating the two is an act of irrational bigotry. Arrests of illegal aliens inside the border now inevitably spark protests, often led by the Mexican government, that feature signs calling for “no más racismo.” Immigrant advocates use the language of “human rights” to appeal to an authority higher than such trivia as citizenship laws.

    They attack the term “amnesty” for implicitly acknowledging the validity of borders. Indeed, grouses Illinois congressman Luis Gutierrez, “There’s an implication that somehow you did something wrong and you need to be forgiven.”

    Illegal aliens and their advocates speak loudly about what they think the U.S. owes them, not vice versa. “I believe they have a right . . . to work, to drive their kids to school,” said California assemblywoman Sarah Reyes. An immigration agent says that people he stops “get in your face about their rights, because our failure to enforce the law emboldens them.” Taking this idea to its extreme, Joaquín Avila, a UCLA Chicano studies professor and law lecturer, argues that to deny non-citizens the vote, especially in the many California cities where they constitute the majority, is a form of apartheid.

    Yet no poll has ever shown that Americans want more open borders. Quite the reverse. By a huge majority—at least 60 percent—they want to rein in immigration, and they endorse an observation that Senator Alan Simpson made 20 years ago: Americans “are fed up with efforts to make them feel that [they] do not have that fundamental right of any people—to decide who will join them and help form the future country in which they and their posterity will live.”

    But if the elites’ and the advocates’ idea of giving voting rights to non-citizen majorities catches on—and don’t be surprised if it does—Americans could be faced with the ultimate absurdity of people outside the social compact making rules for those inside it.

    However the nation ultimately decides to rationalize its chaotic and incoherent immigration system, surely all can agree that, at a minimum, authorities should expel illegal-alien criminals swiftly. Even on the grounds of protecting non-criminal illegal immigrants, we should start by junking sanctuary policies. By stripping cops of what may be their only immediate tool to remove felons from the community, these policies leave law-abiding immigrants prey to crime.

    But the non-enforcement of immigration laws in general has an even more destructive effect. In many immigrant communities, assimilation into gangs seems to be outstripping assimilation into civic culture. Toddlers are learning to flash gang signals and hate the police, reports the Los Angeles Times. In New York City, “every high school has its Mexican gang,” and most 12- to 14-year-olds have already joined, claims Ernesto Vega, an illegal 18-year-old Mexican.

    Such pathologies only worsen when the first lesson that immigrants learn about U.S. law is that Americans don’t bother to enforce it. “Institutionalizing illegal immigration creates a mindset in people that anything goes in the U.S.,” observes Patrick Ortega, the news and public-affairs director of Radio Nueva Vida in southern California. “It creates a new subculture, with a sequela of social ills.” It is broken windows writ large.

    For the sake of immigrants and native-born Americans alike, it’s time to decide what our immigration policy is—and enforce it.

    https://www.city-journal.org/html/il...ave-12492.html


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  2. #2
    Senior Member lorrie's Avatar
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    The Immigrant Gang Plague

    Hispanic gang violence is spreading across the country, the sign of a new underclass in the making

    The Social Order
    Public safety
    California

    Before immigration optimists issue another rosy prognosis for America’s multicultural future, they might visit Belmont High School in Los Angeles’s overwhelmingly Hispanic, gang-ridden Rampart district. “Upward and onward” is not a phrase that comes to mind when speaking to the first- and second-generation immigrant teens milling around the school this January.

    “Most of the people I used to hang out with when I first came to the school have dropped out,” observes Jackie, a vivacious illegal alien from Guatemala. “Others got kicked out or got into drugs. Five graduated, and four home girls got pregnant.”

    Certainly, none of the older teens I met outside Belmont was on track to graduate. Jackie herself flunked ninth grade (“I used to ditch a lot,” she explains) and never caught up. She is now pursuing a General Equivalency Diploma—a watered-down certificate for dropouts or expelled students—in the school’s “adult” division. Vanessa, who sports a tiny horseshoe protruding from her nostrils, is applying to the adult division, too, having been kicked out of Belmont at age 18. “I didn’t come to school very often,” says this American-born child of illegal aliens from El Salvador. Her boyfriend, Albert, a dashing 19-year-old with long, slicked-back hair, got expelled for truancy but has talked his way back into the regular high school. “I have good manipulative skills,” he smiles. After a robbery conviction, Albert was put on probation but broke every rule in the book: “Curfews, grades, attendance, missed court days,” he boasts. “But they still let me off the hook.”

    These Belmont teens are no aberration. Hispanic youths, whether recent arrivals or birthright American citizens, are developing an underclass culture. (By “Hispanic” here, I mean the population originating in Latin America—above all, in Mexico—as distinct from America’s much smaller Puerto Rican and Dominican communities of Caribbean descent, which have themselves long shown elevated crime and welfare rates.) Hispanic school dropout rates and teen birthrates are now the highest in the nation. Gang crime is exploding nationally—rising 50 percent from 1999 to 2002—driven by the march of Hispanic immigration east and north across the country. Most worrisome, underclass indicators like crime and single parenthood do not improve over successive generations of Hispanics—they worsen.

    Debate has recently heated up over whether Mexican immigration—unique in its scale and in other important ways—will defeat the American tradition of assimilation. The rise of underclass behavior among the progeny of Mexicans and other Central Americans must be part of that debate. There may be assimilation going on, but a significant portion of it is assimilation downward to the worst elements of American life. To be sure, most Hispanics are hardworking, law-abiding residents; they have reclaimed squalid neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles and elsewhere. Among the dozens of Hispanic youths I interviewed, several expressed gratitude for the United States, a sentiment that would be hard to find among the ordinary run of teenagers. But given the magnitude of present immigration levels, if only a portion of those from south of the border goes bad, the costs to society will be enormous.

    The Soledad Enrichment Action Charter School in South Central Los Angeles is at the vortex of L.A.’s gang culture. Next door to a rose-colored, angel-bedecked church, the boxy school glowers behind barred gates like those that surround prisons. Soledad’s students, about half blacks and half Hispanics, have been kicked out of other schools. They have brought violence with them. In early March, a gunman opened fire on 20 students entering the school at 7:30 am, wounding two. Tensions were high again as school let out one day this April. A boy had been sent home earlier for fighting; the question now was, would he return to retaliate? The school’s probation officer radioed the LAPD’s 77th Division to plead for some officers to keep watch, without success. As the students, dressed in plain white T-shirts, filed out to the sidewalk, two burly security guards and a gang counselor warily eyed the street.

    Asked about gangs, the teens proudly reel off their affiliations: SOK (Still Out Killing); HTO (Hispanics Taking Over); JMC (Just Mobbing Crazy). A cocky American-born child of Salvadoran parents says that most of his peers from the eighth grade are “locked up or dead.” “Four are dead—three were shot, one was run over.” Were you just lucky? I ask. “They were gangbanging more than me,” says the 17-year-old, who won’t give his name. “I try to control myself, respect my parents.” That respect only goes so far. Asked if he’s been in jail, he swaggers: “Yup, for GTA”—grand theft auto. And he has no intention of leaving his gang: “They’re the homeys, part of the family.”

    Eighteen-year-old Eric, born here to an illegal Mexican and Guatemalan, is one of the few students I talked to who doesn’t gangbang, though he is on probation for second-degree robbery, his second conviction. Half his friends from elementary school are involved in crime, he says. Of course, gang problems in Los Angeles schools are hardly confined to academies for delinquents like Soledad. Gang fights in some of L.A.’s regular high schools draw such crowds that youthful pickpockets have a field day working the spectators and participants. “People would steal your pagers and cell phones,” reports one student who has bounced through several schools.

    David O’Connell, pastor of the church next door to Soledad, has been fighting L.A.’s gang culture for over a decade. He rues the “ferocious stuff” that is currently coming out of Central America, sounding weary and pessimistic. But “what’s more frightening,” he says, “is the disengagement from adults.” Hispanic children feel that they have to deal with problems themselves, apart from their parents, according to O’Connell, and they “do so in violent ways.” The adults, for their part, start to fear young people, including their own children.

    The pull to a culture of violence among Hispanic children begins earlier and earlier, O’Connell says. Researchers and youth workers across the country confirm his observation. In Chicago, gangs start recruiting kids at age nine, according to criminologists studying policing and social trends in the Windy City. The Chicago Community Policing Evaluation Consortium concluded that gangs have become fully integrated into Hispanic youth culture; even children not in gangs emulate their attitudes, dress, and self-presentation. The result is a community in thrall.

    Non-affiliated children fear traveling into unknown neighborhoods and sometimes drop out of school for lack of protection. Adults are just as scared. They may know who has been spray-painting their garage, for example, but won’t tell the police for fear that their car will be torched in retaliation. “It’s like we’re in our own little jails that we can’t leave,” said a resident. “There isn’t an uninfested place nearby.”

    Washington, D.C., reports the same “ever-younger” phenomenon. “Recruitment is starting early in middle school,” says Lori Kaplan, head of D.C.’s Latin American Youth Center. With early recruitment comes a high school dropout rate of 50 percent. “Gang culture is gaining more recruits than our ability to get kids out,” Kaplan laments. “We can get this kid out, but two or three will take his place.” In May, an 18-year-old member of the Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha gang used a machete to chop off four left fingers and nearly sever the right hand of a 16-year-old South Side Locos rival in the Washington suburbs.

    Ernesto Vega, a 19-year-old Mexican illegal who grew up in New York City, estimates that most 12- to 14-year-old Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in New York are in gangs for protection. “If you’re Mexican, you can’t go to parties by yourself,” he says. “People will ask, ‘Who you down with? Que barrio?’ They be checkin’ you out. But if it’s 20 of you, and 20 of them, then it’s OK.”

    For some children, the choice is: get beat up once a week, or get beat up once to enter the gang. Others join for the prestige and sense of belonging. Mario Flores was one of them; he joined Santa Ana, California’s, Westside Compadres. “When I was 13, I was like, ‘Wow.’ I wanted them to jump me,” he says in the soft near-whisper of the cool. “They’re like, ‘You want to get down?’ They got to jumping at you, they go to call you, ‘Trips from Westside Comps’—you feel good.”

    Flores (or “Trips”) is a depressing specimen of gang culture: uneducated and barely articulate. He’s sitting on the other side of a Plexiglas window in the Santa Ana Central Jail, talking to me over a phone. In and out of jail with dazzling regularity over the last three years, he most recently left prison on April 14; on April 21, he was arrested again on a rape charge. Born in Portland, Oregon, but raised in Mexico, Flores went to live with cousins in San Bernardino, California, at age 13 and has been traveling the Southern California gang circuit—Riverside County, Santa Ana, East L.A.—ever since. Now 20, he is slender and finely chiseled. Gang hand gestures accompany his speech like hieroglyphics. “When I saw gang members,” he says, pointing first to his eyes, then outward, “they’re like, ‘Are you down with my shit?’ ‘I’m down!’ ” I ask if he speaks English or Spanish with his gang. “You speak Chicano,” he says. “ ‘Hey, homey!’ You mostly talk English, you’ve got some good words. But the way you talk, you don’t talk good. You don’t talk like other people.”

    Flores expresses the fierce attachment to territory that is the sine qua non of gang identity. “I was like, ‘I love my neighborhood. If you don’t love my neighborhood, I’m going to **** you up.’ ” Charles Beck, captain of the LAPD’s Rampart Division, marvels at this emotion. “They all come from identical neighborhoods, identical families, and go to identical schools, and yet they hate each other with a passion.” The territorial instincts can only be compared to the Balkans, says Corporal Kevin Ruiz, a Santa Ana gang investigator. “There’s people who all they do is patrol gang boundaries. They’re like me, in a way: I’m looking for bad guys; they look for rivals.”

    “Trips” showed his love for Santa Ana’s Westside Compadres by doing “missions”—robbing bars, stealing wallets and cell phones, selling drugs—to raise money for the gang. “If a big homey told me to **** someone up, I had to,” he explains. The gang reciprocated by giving him a place to stay—when he was bringing in cash. Otherwise he lived in cars or on the street, sometimes in a hotel.

    The chance that Flores will ever become a productive member of society is slight. Routinely kicked out of high school for fighting, he lacks rudimentary skills. Like many prisoners, he claims to be reading the Bible and thanking Jesus, but such prison conversions rarely last. His personal life is troubled: “My lady, she mad at me”—not surprisingly, given his most recent rape charge—and Flores is not certain she will be waiting for him when he gets out of jail. Most likely, Flores will continue contributing to the Hispanicization of prisons in California: in 1970, Hispanics were 12 percent of the state’s population and 16 percent of new prison admits; by 1998, they were 30 percent of the California population, and 42 percent of new admits.

    Even as it reaches down to ever-younger recruits, gang culture is growing more lethal. In April, 16-year-old Valentino Arenas drove up to a courthouse in Pomona, California, and shot to death a randomly chosen California Highway Patrol officer, in the hope of gaining entry to Pomona’s 12th Street Gang. The assassination wouldn’t surprise Dennis Farrell, a Nassau County, New York, homicide detective. “We’re amazed at the openness of shootings,” he says. “When we do cases with Hispanic gangs, we often get full statements of admission, almost like they don’t see what’s the big deal.”

    The unwritten code that moderated gang violence three or four decades ago has now fallen away. “When I grew up,” says Santa Ana native and gang investigator Kevin Ruiz, “there were rules of engagement: no shooting at churches or at home. Now, no one is immune.” One of Ruiz’s colleagues on the Santa Ana police force, Mona Ruiz (no relation), spent her adolescence in Santa Ana gangs; now she tries to get kids out. “Back then,” she says, “if someone got jumped, you responded with fistfights, not guns. Guns started in the 1980s.” Earlier gangbangers even showed a certain fastidiousness of dress: “Guys used to iron their jeans for two hours,” Mona Ruiz recalls. “Then they wouldn’t sit down” to avoid marring the crease. All that changed when heroin hit, she says.

    The constant invasion of illegal aliens is worsening gang violence as well. In Phoenix, Arizona, and surrounding Maricopa County, illegal alien gangs, such as Brown Pride and Wetback Power, are growing more volatile and dangerous, according to Tom Bearup, a former sheriff’s department official and current candidate for sheriff. Even in prison, where they clash with American Hispanics, they are creating a more vicious environment.

    Upward mobility to the suburbs doesn’t necessarily break the allure of gang culture. An immigration agent reports that in the middle-class suburbs of southwest Miami, second- and third-generation Hispanic youths are perpetrating home invasions, robberies, battery, drug sales, and rape. Kevin Ruiz knows students at the University of California, Irvine who retain their gang connections. Prosecutors in formerly crime-free Ventura County, California, sought an injunction this May against the Colonia Chiques gang after homicides rocketed up; an affidavit supporting the injunction details how Chiques members terrorize the local hospital whenever one of the gang arrives with a gunshot wound. Federal law enforcement officials in Virginia are tracking with alarm the spread of gang violence from Northern Virginia west into the Shenandoah Valley and south toward Charlottesville, a trend so disturbing that they secured federal funds this May to stanch the mayhem. “This is beyond a regional problem. It is, in fact, a national problem,” said FBI assistant director Michael Mason, head of the bureau’s Washington field office.

    Open-borders apologists dismiss the Hispanic crime threat by observing that black crime rates are even higher. True, but irrelevant: the black population is not growing, whereas Hispanic immigration is reaching virtually every part of the country, sometimes radically changing local demographics. With a felony arrest rate up to triple that of whites, Hispanics can dramatically raise community crime levels.

    Many cops and youth workers blame the increase in gang appeal on the disintegration of the Hispanic family. The trends are worsening, especially for U.S.-born Hispanics. In California, 67 percent of children of U.S.-born Hispanic parents lived in an intact family in 1990; by 1999, that number had dropped to 56 percent. The percentage of Hispanic children living with a single mother in California rose from 18 percent in 1990 to 29 percent in 1999. Nationally, single-parent households constituted 25 percent of all Hispanic households with minor children in 1980; by 2000, the proportion had jumped to 34 percent.

    The trends in teen parenthood—the marker of underclass behavior—will almost certainly affect the crime and gang rate. Hispanics now outrank blacks for teen births; Mexican teens have higher birthrates than Puerto Ricans, previously the most “ghettoized” Hispanic subgroup in terms of welfare use and out-of-wedlock child-rearing. In 2002, there were 83.4 births per 1,000 Hispanic females between ages 15 and 19, compared with 66.6 among blacks, 28.5 among non-Hispanic whites, and 18.3 among Asians. Perhaps these young Hispanic mothers are giving birth as wives? Unlikely. In California, where Latina teens have the highest birthrate of teens in any state, 79 percent of teen births to U.S.-born Latinas in 1999 were to unmarried girls.

    According to the many young Hispanics I spoke to, more and more girls are getting pregnant. “This year was the worst for pregnancies,” says Liliana, an American-born senior at Manual Arts High School near downtown Los Angeles. “A lot of girls get abortions; some drop out.” Are girls ashamed when they get pregnant? I wonder. “Not at all,” Liliana responds. Among Hispanic teens, at least, if not among their parents, the stigma of single parenthood has vanished. I asked Jackie, the Guatemalan GED student at L.A.’s Belmont High, if her pregnant friends subsequently got married. She guffawed. George, an 18-year-old of Salvadoran background who was kicked out of Manual Arts six months ago for a vicious fight, estimates that most girls at the school are having sex by age 16.

    Mexican and Central American immigration to New York City is of much more recent vintage than in California, but young Mexicans in New York have quickly assimilated to underclass sexual behavior. Nineteen-year-old Ernesto Vega reports that his oldest sister dropped out of school at 17 and got pregnant the next year. “I heard her boyfriend came from Mexico to work, but he wasn’t working. He was on the street.” Ernesto says. Then the boyfriend got arrested, probably on drug charges. “He says he was arrested for doing nothing, but they don’t arrest you for doing nothing.”

    Ernesto knows three or four Mexican-American girls with babies, including a 16-year-old with two daughters. “Another just got pregnant this year,” he says. “She’s 15.” None is married. None has a GED or will go to college. As for the fathers of their children? “The boys be leaving the girls alone,” Vega says. “The boy goes away.”

    Some Hispanic parents valiantly try to impose old-fashioned consequences on teen pregnancies, but they are losing the battle. Vega’s father, a building superintendent and hardware store clerk, angrily told his pregnant daughter, according to Vega: “You gotta go live with [the boyfriend]. I now want nothing to do with you!” The boyfriend offered to take the girl into the apartment he was sharing with a female acquaintance, but she wanted her own place. Eventually, she persuaded her father to take her back, but only on the condition that she work.

    She now sells Yankee paraphernalia on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

    Traditional and contemporary family values continued to clash throughout the pregnancy. Although the boyfriend vanished until the birth, he showed up at Vega’s house with his whole family when the girl returned from the hospital with her newborn. “He took his three sisters and his mother; one sister took the nephews.” Vega recalls. The boyfriend’s demand: you have to decide where to live. The girl told him to take a hike. The family delegation, Vega judges, already adapting to American individualist norms, was inappropriate. “The problem was not with the families,” he says, “but between him and her.”

    In one respect, Central American immigrants break the mold of traditional American underclass behavior: they work. Even so, Mexican welfare receipt is twice as high as that of natives, in large part because Mexican-American incomes are so low, and remain low over successive generations. Disturbingly, welfare use actually rises between the second and third generation—to 31 percent of all third-generation Mexican-American households. Illegal Hispanics make liberal use of welfare, too, by putting their American-born children on public assistance: in Orange County, California, nearly twice as many Hispanic welfare cases are for children of illegal aliens as for legal families.

    More troublingly, some Hispanics combine work with gangbanging. Gang detectives in Long Island’s Suffolk County know when members of the violent Salvadoran MS-13 gang get off work from their lawn-maintenance or pizzeria jobs, and can follow them to their gang meetings. Mexican gang members in rural Pennsylvania, which saw two gang homicides in late April, also often work in landscaping and construction.

    On the final component of underclass behavior—school failure—Hispanics are in a class by themselves. No other group drops out in greater numbers. In Los Angeles, only 48 percent of Hispanic ninth-graders graduate, compared with a 56 percent citywide graduation rate and a 70 percent nationwide rate. In 2000, nearly 30 percent of Hispanics between the ages of 16 and 24 were high school dropouts nationwide, compared with about 13 percent of blacks and about 7 percent of whites.

    The constant inflow of barely literate recent Mexican arrivals unquestionably brings down Hispanic education levels. But later American-born generations don’t brighten the picture much.

    While Mexican-Americans make significant education gains between the first and second generation, adding 3.5 years of schooling, progress stalls in the next generation, economists Jeffrey Grogger and Stephen Trejo have found. Third-generation Mexican-Americans remain three times as likely to drop out of high school than whites and one and a half times as likely to drop out as blacks. They complete college at one-third the rate of whites. Mexican-Americans are assimilating not to the national schooling average, observed the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas this June, but to the dramatically lower “Hispanic average.” In educational outcomes, concluded the bank, “Ethnicity matters.”

    No one knows why this is so. Every parent I spoke to said that she wanted her children to do well in school and go to college. Yet the message is often not getting across. “Hispanic parents are the kind of parents that leave it to others,” explains an unwed Salvadoran welfare mother in Santa Ana. “We don’t get that involved.” A news director of a Southern California Spanish radio station expresses frustration at the passivity toward education and upward mobility he sees in his own family. “I tried to knock the ‘Spanglish’ accent out of my niece and get rid of that crap,” he says. “But the mother was completely nihilistic about her child. It’s going to take direct action from Americans to Americanize Hispanics.”

    Perhaps the answer to the disconnect between stated parental goals and educational outcomes lies in Hispanic culture’s traditional suspicion of education. Santa Ana police officer Mona Ruiz recounts a joke told by comedian George Lopez: “When a white person graduates, people say, ‘You did good.’ When a Mexican graduates, people say, ‘You think you’re better than us.’ ” The lure of an immediate income often proves more compelling than a four- to eight-year investment in self-improvement. New Yorker Ernesto Vega says he knows “Mexicans with papers” who drop out of high school. “They young. They say, ‘I’m going to start working, I don’t need school.’ ” But Vega has no illusions about the consequences: “Even with papers, you’re only making $300 a week as a delivery boy in restaurants, because you don’t know anything else.”

    Proponents of unregulated immigration simply ignore the growing underclass problem among later generations of Hispanics, with its attendant gang involvement and teen pregnancy. When pressed, open-borders advocates dismiss worries about the Hispanic future with their favorite comparison between Mexicans and Italians. Popularized by political analyst Michael Barone in The New Americans, the analogy goes like this: a century ago, Italian immigrants anticipated the Mexican influx, above all in their disregard for education. They dropped out of school in high numbers—yet they eventually prospered and joined the mainstream. Therefore, argue Barone and others, Mexicans will, too.

    But the analogy is flawed. To begin with, the magnitude of Mexican immigration renders all historical comparisons irrelevant, as Harvard historian Samuel Huntington argues in his latest book, Who Are We?. In 2000, Mexicans constituted nearly 30 percent of the foreign-born population in the U.S.; the next two largest groups were the Chinese (5 percent) and Filipinos (4 percent). By contrast, at the turn of the twentieth century, the largest immigrant group, Germans, made up only 15 percent of the foreign-born population. In 1910, Great Britain, Germany, Ireland, and Italy, in that order, sent the most migrants to the U.S.; Italians made up only 17 percent of the combined total. English-speakers made up over half the new arrivals; there was no chance that Italian would become the dominant language in any part of the country. By contrast, half of today’s immigrants speak Spanish.

    Equally important, the flow of newcomers came to an abrupt halt after World War I and did not resume until 1965. This long pause allowed the country ample opportunity to Americanize the foreign-born and their children. Today, no end is in sight to the migration from Mexico and its neighbors, which continually reinforces Mexican culture in American Hispanic communities and seems likely to do so for decades into the future.

    Contemporary Hispanic immigration also differs from the classic Ellis Island model in that the ease of cross-border travel and communication allows Mexican and Central American immigrants to keep at least one foot planted in their native land. Meanwhile, the Mexican government does everything it can to bind Mexican migrants psychologically to the home country, in order to safeguard the annual $12 billion flow of remittances. It encourages dual nationality, and Mexicans in the U.S. can now run for office in Mexico. A Yolo County, California, tomato farmer has already been elected mayor of Jerez. Not surprisingly, Mexicans and other Central Americans have the lowest rates of naturalization of all immigrants—less than 30 percent in 1990, compared with two-thirds of qualified immigrants from major European sending countries, the Philippines, and Hong Kong.

    Even Mexico’s former foreign minister, Jorge Castaneda, acknowledges the unprecedented character of Hispanic immigration. “Mexican immigration,” he wrote recently, “does have distinctive traits that do make [assimilation] difficult, if not impossible. This is . . . a matter of history.” That “history” holds that the U.S. robbed Mexico of its natural territory in the nineteenth century, as some Mexican immigrants never seem to forget. “It’s kind of scary,” says Santa Ana gang intervention officer Mona Ruiz. “I hear, ‘I was here first; this used to be Mexico. You stole it from us.’ ” Mexican-American Ruiz is herself called a “traitor” for becoming Americanized.

    While proponents of the “reconquista” of “Alta California” (as Mexican nationalists call the lost territory) are a small minority of Hispanic immigrants, a much larger proportion hold on to their Hispanic identities. Few of the American-born students I spoke to in Southern California identified themselves as “American.” Many said they were “Mexican,” “Latino,” or “Mexican-American”—usages encouraged by the multicultural dogma in the schools, a far cry from the Americanization efforts of classrooms a century ago.

    Michael Barone’s Italian-Mexican comparison also ignores the differences between the U.S. economies of 1904 and 2004. While Italian dropouts in 1904 could make their way into the middle class by working in the booming manufacturing sector or plying their existing craftsman skills, that is far more difficult today, given the decline of factory jobs and the rise of the knowledge-based economy. As the limited education of Mexican-Americans depresses their wages, their sense of being stuck in an economic backwater breeds resentment. “The second generation becomes angry with America, as they see their fathers faltering,” observes Cesar Barrios, an outreach worker for the Tepeyac Association, a social services agency for Mexicans in New York City. This resentment only increases the lure of underclass culture, with its rebellious rejection of conventional norms, according to Barrios. For this reason, he says, many young Mexicans “prefer to imitate blacks than white people.”

    The Spanish-language media, which reaches two-thirds of all Hispanics, reinforces the sense of grievance. Stories about America’s cruelties to immigrants and the country’s shocking failure to legalize illegal aliens dominate news coverage. A billboard for Los Angeles’s Spanish newspaper La Opinión conveys the usual tone: “Justice,” “Abuse,” “Deportation,” and other hot-button topics blare out in massive lettering.

    Chicago provides a cautionary tale about high levels of Hispanic immigration combined with an ever more powerful underclass ethic. During the 1990s, the Hispanic population in Chicago grew 38 percent, to 754,000, and became increasingly concentrated in the city’s barrios. Education levels and fluency in English dropped lower and lower, while serious crime, social disorder, and physical decay grew in direct proportion to the number of Spanish-speaking Latinos. After a neighborhood became more than 60 percent Latino, physical decay—including graffiti, trash-filled vacant lots, and abandoned cars—jumped disproportionately. By 2001, social pathology among Spanish-speaking Latinos was higher than for any other racial or ethnic group.

    There are many counterexamples that show a salutary effect of Hispanic immigration. Santa Ana, California, at 76 percent Latino the most heavily Spanish-speaking city of its size in the country, has cleaned up the seedy bars from its downtown area and replaced them with palm trees and benches, in large part thanks to a newly created business improvement district. Many homes in Santa Ana’s wealthier Mexican neighborhoods sport exuberant roses and bougainvillea in their front yards, and students I spoke to there wanted to become lawyers, architects, and medical technicians. In predominantly Mexican East Los Angeles, housing prices are soaring along with the rest of the Southern California housing market: a 1928 two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow with a lawn gone to seed was listed at $265,000 this April. And in increasingly Hispanic South Central L.A., tiny bodegas selling milk, diapers, and piñatas are replacing liquor stores.

    Yet a seemingly innocuous block in Santa Ana can host five to eight households dedicated to gangbanging or drug sales. A front yard may be relatively trash-free; inside the house, a different matter entirely, says Santa Ana cop Kevin Ruiz. “I’ve been to three houses just this week where they made a mountain of trash in the backyard or changed their baby’s diaper by throwing it over the couch. They don’t use the indoor plumbing, while letting their dogs go to the bathroom on the carpet.” Ruiz drives by the modest tract home where his Mexican father, who worked in Orange County’s farming industry, raised him in the 1950s. A car with a shattered windshield, a trailer, and minivan sit in the backyard, surrounded by piles of junk and a mattress leaning on the garage door. “My mom taught us that even if you’re poor, you should be neat,” he says, shaking his head. Fifty-year-old men are still dressing like chollos (Chicano gangsters), Ruiz says, and fathers are ordering barbers to shave their young sons bald in good gang tradition.

    Without prompting, Ruiz brings up the million-dollar question: “I don’t see assimilation,” he says. “They want to hold on [to Hispanic culture].” Ruiz thinks that today’s Mexican immigrant is a “totally different kind of person” from the past. Some come with a chip on their shoulder toward the United States, he says, which they blame for the political and economic failure of their home countries. Rather than aggressively seizing the opportunities available to them, especially in education, they have learned to play the victim card, he thinks. Ruiz advocates a much more aggressive approach. “We need to explain, ‘We’ll help you assimilate up to a certain point, but then you have to take advantage of what’s here.’ ”

    Ruiz’s observations will strike anyone who has hired eager Mexican and Central American workers as incredible. I pressed him repeatedly, insisting that Americans see Mexican immigrants as cheerful and hardworking, but he was adamant. “We’re creating an underclass,” he maintained.

    Immigration optimists, ever ready to trumpet the benefits of today’s immigration wave, have refused to acknowledge its costs. Foremost among them are skyrocketing gang crime and an expanding underclass. Until the country figures out how to reduce these costs, maintaining the current open-borders regime is folly. We should enforce our immigration laws and select immigrants on skills and likely upward mobility, not success in sneaking across the border.

    https://www.city-journal.org/html/im...gue-12801.html


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    Do Immigrants Still Nourish Cities?

    Do Immigrants Still Nourish Cities?
    Not today’s—and they drive away low-wage American workers.

    Cities
    The Social Order

    Proponents of our current immigration system often argue that we should preserve or even expand it because immigrants are essential to our cities’ health. Foreign-born workers, this argument goes, replace American-born city-dwellers who would rather live in the suburbs, and use their talent and energy to help urban neighborhoods and industries revive and thrive.

    A classic example of this reasoning was a recent New York Times article about proposed federal immigration reforms, which would give immigration priority not to the families of recent immigrants but to skilled workers. Such reforms, the article warned, might close off “the currents that have long fed the city’s mom and pop entrepreneurship . . . and the family networks that nurture and help assimilate newcomers.” Experts cited in the story argued that immigrants who arrived under the current system have been central to the city’s revival, and noted that 40 percent of the city’s population today is foreign-born.

    That argument was valid back in the 1970s and 1980s—when immigrants helped renew New York by replacing fleeing middle-class families—but it isn’t any longer, because today’s immigrants are driving away our own native-born, unskilled workers, who otherwise might want to stay and grab a piece of the economic opportunity that flourishing big cities offer.

    Remember how dramatically different a place New York was in the mid-1970s. Rising crime, a deteriorating school system, and high taxes prompted an exodus from Gotham, so that by the end of the 1970s, the city’s population had shrunk to its lowest level in decades. Reflecting that flight were shrinking property values, rising vacancies, and increasing abandonment of properties.

    But amid the gloom, newcomers flooded into the United States, thanks to 1965 legislation that sparked far more immigration than anyone anticipated. Many headed for struggling cities like New York, where they could find inexpensive housing and an economy that, while foundering, still offered enough opportunity to gain a foothold in America—and a chance at a far better life than available back home. The immigrants repaid the city by bolstering many neighborhoods and by rolling up their sleeves, creating new businesses or staffing existing ones.

    That wave of the 1970s and 1980s was the start of what’s now called the Second Great Immigration. Wave after wave followed it, totaling some 45 million people (as many as 4 million coming to New York), a growing proportion of them unskilled and lacking even high school educations. And they keep coming, about 1.8 million immigrants annually—legal and illegal, permanent and temporary—more than 100,000 of them to New York.

    The city they reach today, very different from the New York of the 1970s, is the product of several decades of reform that have reversed some of that era’s problems and made Gotham shine again. Property values are soaring, vacancies are lower, and abandoned buildings are a smaller problem than is finding vacant land for new construction. Other cities that are traditional immigrant magnets, notably Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, have seen similar improvements.

    Yet all of these locales are still plagued by high levels of out-migration—that is, by a continued flow of native-born residents out of town. And many of those leaving today are the very people who compete directly with today’s unskilled immigrants in the workforce. Demographer William Frey’s 2002 analysis of the migration patterns in four
    immigrant-magnet cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco—concluded that the highest rates of out-migration occur among adults without high school educations, exactly the demographic profile of most immigrants entering those cities.

    More recent domestic migration data, from the 2005 American Community Survey, also suggest a great migration of the unskilled out of immigrant-saturated cities. The ACS data show that those without high school educations, those who are unemployed, and those who work in industries heavily populated by immigrants are far more likely to be on the move than the average American.

    No doubt part of the explanation for such migration is the impact of unskilled immigrant workers on blacks and native-born Hispanics, disproportionately represented in cities. A study by immigration’s leading economist, Harvard’s George Borjas, calculates that immigration has reduced the wages of blacks and lowered the black employment rate in America. Blacks themselves see the link between their employment struggles and immigration. A Pew Research Center poll found that 58 percent of blacks in Chicago believe that illegal immigrants take jobs and housing from U.S. citizens.

    The media in most big cities simply ignore such studies. A recent New York Times story on Gotham’s black population, which is declining for the first time since the Civil War, speculated at length about the reasons for the drop-off but said nothing about immigration, despite the compelling evidence that it accounts for at least some of the flight out of New York.

    Given what we now know about low-wage immigration and cities, one could write a story about the influence of proposed changes in U.S. immigration policy on New York—or Chicago, or Los Angeles—quite different from the one peddled in the press. This story would suggest that a new, skills-based immigration system would relieve some of the pressure that the city’s native-born, low-wage workers regularly face and might slow their move out of the city; that the entry of more skilled workers could benefit the knowledge-based economy of New York; and that the arrival of more workers with higher education levels and better language skills would encourage faster economic and cultural assimilation and put less demand on the city’s social services, used increasingly by legal and illegal immigrants.

    For New Yorkers—who continue to be fed the myth of the essential immigrant—that might be a startling story to read.

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  4. #4
    Senior Member posylady's Avatar
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    Jul 2006
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    This week a friends nephew was found thrown under a bridge dead of a Heroin overdose. I did some research and found this:

    http://www.countyhealthrankings.org/...ctors/138/data

    Now my question is where is all this heroin coming from I heard the word Mexico.
    Now I understand it is hard to catch some of the dealers but why are there no big heroin bust? Why?
    I have heard of none only small amounts of heroin and other drugs.
    I have also heard locally that the police officers are supplying heroin in my county in N.C. I heard this by a addict that witnessed it.
    not sure how reliable. But something seems strange and star/ting to make me wonder. Hundreds of people dying everyday across the country and no big bust, it does not make since. No one talks about it, no one turns anyone in? This has been going on a while now a couple of years and still little drugs here and there are reported. How is it getting here?
    With heroin of this amount there has to be slip ups and people should be getting caught and talking. They are kind of making our law enforcement look pretty stupid. Could it be a lot of law enforcement and all the way up to Washington are getting rich at the expense of our families being torn apart? The boarder wall needs to go up and Mexican cartels and gangs need to be gone from our country. But I have a feeling this goes deeper as it is all across our country it is an epidemic and it needs to be stopped with clinics and places for these addicts to go.
    Last edited by posylady; 02-14-2017 at 07:32 PM.

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