Posted on 12/01/2002 8:51:10 AM PST by RICK77
EDITORIAL A Tragedy of Two Cities Times Headlines
Los Angeles' Toilet-to-Tap Fear Factor
Los Angeles is home to multimillionaire movie execs and billionaire developers. When it comes to the overall value of its goods and services, L.A. County does better than Switzerland, Sweden or Austria. It is also the poverty capital of the nation.
To measure the widening gap between the region's haves and have-nots, the United Way of Greater Los Angeles crunched numbers from dozens of government and private studies. Its recently released report, "A Tale of Two Cities: Promise and Peril in Los Angeles County," found that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
Everyone is familiar with studies showing that wages increase with education and English fluency, but lack of formal learning is not the sole reason for the gap. The United Way study found that wages for those with the lowest level of education are actually declining.
Some industries never recovered from the recession of the early 1990s. Many high-paying aerospace jobs disappeared for good. Seven of the 10 fastest-growing occupations -- retail sales clerk, security guard and cashier among them -- pay less than $25,000 a year.
An estimated 811,000 residents work off the books as day laborers or nannies, earning substandard wages and no benefits. Almost 2 million people -- more than in any other metropolitan area -- eke out an existence on less than $18,100 a year, the federally defined poverty level for a family of four. The majority of these in the greater LA are of Latin American ancestary. The burden is even greater in this area, topped only by New York City and San Francisco in cost of living.
In a time when lack of education increasingly means a life of poverty, over 30% of county residents over 25 have never finished high school. Among the 36% who are foreign-born in L.A. County, many are immigrants from Latin American countries with very low levels of education.
The worst-case scenario is that Los Angeles becomes a city divided between ghettos and gated communities (very likely). But the United Way study also paints a city of promise, where immigrants contribute youth and vitality to the workforce and forge a multiethnic, multilingual version of Los Angeles that has strong links to an ever more global economy. The way to get from peril to promise is for all of Los Angeles to recognize the benefits of narrowing the rift between very rich and very poor, (Very Unlikely).
United Way supports literacy classes, quality child care, affordable housing and other ladders to the middle class. And a strong middle class makes the best bridge between what would otherwise be two cities doomed to isolation and fear of "the other."
If it is indeed the case that the Federal Government has exclusive constitutional authority over the regulation of immigration, and which was supposedly the basis for overturning Prop 187 in California, then why is it that individual states have passed laws that grant certain privileges to illegal aliens, such as driver's licenses and in-state tuition for college attendance? If states can't deny services to illegal aliens because immigration is exclusively a federal matter, then why can states grant special privileges to illegal aliens if immigration is exclusively a federal matter?
Did you read the liberal interpretation?
Do you believe them to be the same?
The Supreme Court won't either.
Nobody's ever challenged the liberal interpretation of the 14th Amendment in the Supreme Court.
Most people just assume that there's some law that says that all people born in the United States are automatically citizens of the United States regardless of the circumstances of their birth.
They don't bother to look it up themselves.
Does it surprise you that much?
It shouldn't. It should sound familiar.
Americans really need to travel to the border and take a very close good look around cities like Ciudad Juarez ---especially the south part of town where people are living in cardboard boxes and open latrines and really think about why we would want these conditions in the US. Also look at the crime rate of that city and ask themselves why we wouldn't limit immigration in any way. They shouldn't depend on newspaper articles or word of mouth but they should see with their own eyes what is headed our way.
Maybe next year they'll find some time to pay attention to the borders.
Every illegal alien that I apprehend is going to LA. I'll give LA 10 years before it looks exactly like a 3rd world sh*thole south of the border.
Answer:
- 20% English fluency.
- #1 murder rate in the USA.
- #1 murder rate of officers in the line of duty in the USA. Only Illinois and California come close.
- #6 rate of AIDS in the USA.
- Molotov Cocktails thrown at American servicemen and women and the terrorists released absolutely, 'Scott Free'.
In a word, Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico is proof that just giving BILLIONS of U.S. Taxpayer's Dollars and 'FREE' U.S. CITIZENSHIP to millions of people from any country, that haven't earned it, DOESN'T WORK!
Not to mention the 11 to 15 million illegal aliens in the USA and the 4 million Puerto Rican-Americans in Puerto Rico that are counting on us to pay our taxes.
It might be fun to compile the complete 'List of Leeches' (our LOL) that are sucking our treasury dry every year. ;^)
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