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Here in California immigrants, legal and illegal, have taken over entire classes of work, including food services, dry wall workers, all manual labor construction jobs, landscaping work, pipe laying, brick masons and others, depressing overall wages in the process.

Michael Barone has written an interesting article, DEMOGRAPHY IS DESTINY: The Realignment of America--The native-born are leaving "hip" cities for the heartland. This is what he said about California:

"Start with the Coastal Megalopolises: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago (on the coast of Lake Michigan), Miami, Washington and Boston. Here is a pattern you don't find in other big cities: Americans moving out and immigrants moving in, in very large numbers, with low overall population growth. Los Angeles, defined by the Census Bureau as Los Angeles and Orange Counties, had a domestic outflow of 6% of 2000 population in six years--balanced by an immigrant inflow of 6%. The numbers are the same for these eight metro areas as a whole.

There are some variations. New York had a domestic outflow of 8% and an immigrant inflow of 6%; San Francisco a whopping domestic outflow of 10% (the bursting of the tech bubble hurt) and an immigrant inflow of 7%. Miami and Washington had domestic outflows of only 2%, overshadowed by immigrant inflows of 8% and 5%, respectively."

This is something few would have predicted 20 years ago. Americans are now moving out of, not into, coastal California and South Florida, and in very large numbers they're moving out of our largest metro areas. They're fleeing hip Boston and San Francisco, and after eight decades of moving to Washington they're moving out. The domestic outflow from these metro areas is 3.9 million people, 650,000 a year. High housing costs, high taxes, a distaste in some cases for the burgeoning immigrant populations--these are driving many Americans elsewhere.

The result is that these Coastal Megalopolises are increasingly a two-tiered society, with large affluent populations happily contemplating (at least until recently) their rapidly rising housing values, and a large, mostly immigrant working class working at low wages and struggling to move up the economic ladder. The economic divide in New York and Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo.

Democratic politicians like to decry what they describe as a widening economic gap in the nation. But the part of the nation where it is widening most visibly is their home turf, the place where they win their biggest margins (these metro areas voted 61% for John Kerry) and where, in exquisitely decorated Park Avenue apartments and Beverly Hills mansions with immigrant servants passing the hors d'oeuvres, they raise most of their money.

The bad news for them is that the Coastal Megalopolises grew only 4% in 2000-06, while the nation grew 6%. Coastal Megalopolitan states--New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois--are projected to lose five House seats in the 2010 Census, while California, which has gained seats in every census since it was admitted to the Union in 1850, is projected to pick up none."

Non-Hispanic whites are fleeing California in huge numbers. They are being replace by immigrants, legal and illegal. One in four residents of California is foreign born.

As usual, you have provided very interesting and insightful information, kabar. The effect of US immigration policy, regardless of new or future legislation, will soon result in the federal government being rendered largely impotent in this area. America will continue to Balkanize until Uncle Sugar will simply be shouldered aside by leadership at the state, county, etc. level in regions where the will to survive is strong enough. Conditions in the less capable regions will be reflective of those existing in the countries that are now prime sources of illegal immigrants.

Those Americans with the means of producing necessities, on personal or larger scales, will be in the best position to weather the backlash that must certainly come from the activities of socialist and exploitative politicians who are selling the American culture down the river for votes and cheap labor.

There was a time when I believed that the nation, as a whole, was healthy enough to eventually prevent this disaster; but, as many have stated today, how can one have any faith in a political approach that now seeks to remedy the basic failure to enforce law by merely passing more laws? The ridiculous has truly become the sublime.