Fools' Gold: Mass Immigration in the Golden State

January 15th, 2008 at 09:38pm Mike McGarry 214

Fools' Gold: Mass Immigration in the Golden State  

As California goes, so will go Colorado and the Nation

                                   By Mike McGarry                 

There’s no need to speculate on just how continued mass immigration will shape Colorado’s and America’s future; we only need look to the immigration laboratory, California, to get the answers.      

In 1970, California had a population of about 20 million.  It is now a huge 38 million, larger than most countries of the world’s, and it will be a gargantuan 62 million by 2050—if the U. S. government insists on forcing mass immigration onto an already overpopulated America. Virtually 100 percent of California’s explosive growth is a result of immigration, legal and illegal.

In general, each person added to the population means an acre of land is urbanized and degraded—destroyed. California’s Central Valley, a breadbasket of the country and the world, is expected to be 50 percent bulldozed within 25 years to accommodate overimmigration.

A besieged California farmer recently featured on the CBS Evening News looked into the camera and rhetorically and plaintively asked, “Don’t you realize we will need to feed folks in 50, 75 years. (The American Farmland Trust reports we have degraded and urbanized nearly 39 million acres of US farmland since 1970 to facilitate population growth. We now are importing 15 to 20 percent of fruits and vegetables we otherwise would have grown at home.) 

Because of unprecedented mass immigration, Californians must now build a new elementary school 365 days a year, in perpetuity, to support immigrating numbers creating future China-like densities. It’s no wonder California’s school system, once the pride of the nation, is now the educational nightmare of the nation.

On the energy front, things couldn’t be worse. Already suffering brownouts every summer, Californians should look forward to ongoing blackouts. A large number of mercury-spewing coal-fired power plants to accommodate California’s rampant but unnecessary growth has been on the drawing board for several years.

So maybe it’s good new, that California’s $14.5 billion intractable budget crisis (Watch) of ‘staggering proportions” is keeping those plants from being built. It is also causing a “blood bath” of slashes in critical funding, including slashes in aid to education and to senior citizens, and it is forcing early release of convicts from California's prosons.  Governor Swartznegger attributes the budget meltdown to, among other fanciful causes, the housing slump, never daring to mention the fact of the untenable human pile-on that is California.  

On the water front, because so much of California is essentially desert, the state depends  on the runoff from snow pack for its lifeblood. In spite of the relatively bountiful snow this year to date, the ongoing drought in the West portents an ongoing crisis for California, all while hundreds of thousands of thristy new arrivals annually enter through California’s ports.

If California is the immigration laboratory, Los Angeles county is the petre dish. Los Angeles county is the most sprawled out county in the country, never mind that per capita land consumption in LA has been reduced. Immigration-driven overpopulation has created the sprawl for which  LA county is now infamous.       

While immigration-driven hospital and emergency room closing and bankruptcies are found throughout California, Los Angeles is greatly overrepresented in that telling trend.         
And according to Santa Clara radio station KHBM, “Statistics from the Department of Public Social Services reveal that illegal aliens and their families in Los Angeles County collected over $37 million in welfare and food stamp allocations in November 2007 – up $3 million. Twenty five percent of the all welfare and food stamps benefits is going directly to the children (Anchor Babies) of illegal aliens. Illegals collected over $20 million in welfare assistance for November 2007 and over $16 million in monthly food stamp allocations for a projected annual cost of $444 million.” 
 

LA county supervisor Mike Antonovich has been watching this craziness develop for years. “This new formation shows an alarming increase in the devastating impact Illegal immigration continues to have on Los Angeles County taxpayers,” he said.  “With $220 million for public safety, $400 million for healthcare, and $444 million in welfare allocations, the total cost for illegal immigrants to County taxpayers far exceeds $1 billion a year – not including the millions of dollars for education."

Reporting on the “dysfunctional” Los Angeles Unified School District, the Washington Post wrote: "To accommodate a surging population, composed overwhelming of children of recent immigrants, the beleaguered school district is going to have to build a new school every two weeks just to keep up."  Large, student race riots, not educated graduates, are now what distinguishes LA’s high school system. 

Alien crime in Los Angeles is frightening. According to attorney Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute, “No one knows for certain the percentage of illegals in gangs, thanks in large part to sanctuary laws themselves. But various estimates exist. A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18^th 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.  It 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.”

Additional figures supplied by McDonald are downright scary: The L.A. County Sheriff reported in 2000 that 23% of inmates in county jails were deportable, according to the New York Times.  In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide were illegal alien suspects. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) were for illegal aliens.

Telephone the Los Angeles city hall and you will first be greeted in Spanish—only then you will be given the option for English.  More than 50 percent of the LA’s population is illiterate (can’t read a bus schedule) in English, and a majority of those are illiterate in their native languages.

The Los Angeles Daily News reported that LA’s “underground cash economy (thanks to illegal immigration) is expanding rapidly, eroding the work force and sapping an estimated $2 billion a year from city, state and federal coffers, according to a key finding in a major regional report….”

Several years ago at town meetings in Colorado, then-Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell glibly and correctly said it is not immigrants but interstate migration, especially from California, causing Colorado’s population explosion. The senator was both right and wrong .

Californians made up a full 30 percent of interstate migrants relocating to Colorado. Currently, while California’s population growth rate continues charging upward, hundreds of thousands of California’s natives are leaving that state because of stressful social conditions and environmental and quality-of-life degradations created by mass immigration.

Brenda Walker lives in Northern California and is a long-time observer and writer of the results of mass-immigration on California. She will be interview today, Wednesday, January 16, on KNFO's Con Games 106.1FM, in the 9:00AM hour. Here articles appear at www.VDARE.com. Brenda is the proprietor of the websites LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost.org. A story in itself, Brenda is a member of SUSPS, the Young Turks inside the Sierra Club who challenged the Club’s refusal to reestablish U.S. population stabilization as a top priority of the Club.       
  

Entry Filed under: Environment, Food, Education, Immigration, Aspen, Colorado, Crime, The West