Friday, November 17, 2023

LA RAZA BARACK OBAMA - JOE BIDEN HAS USHERED IN ENOUGH ILLEGALS OVER THE BORDER TO ELECT ME AND ALL SOROS GLOBALIST TO OFFICE

BARACK OBAMA, JOE BIDEN and ERIC HOLDER’S SABOTAGE OF HOMELAND SECURITY: The “zero tolerance” program was dismantled by Attorney General Erc Holder once it had successfully cut the transit of migrants by roughly 95 percent. Initially, officials made 140,000 arrests per year in the mid-2000s, but the northward flow dropped so much that officials only had to make 6,000 arrests in 2013, according to a 2014 letter by two pro-migration Senators, Sen. Jeff Flake and John McCain. NEIL MUNRO

It’s time to reprise a 2003 warning by Democratic former Colorado governor Dick Lamm about a “secret plan” that is destroying our country through the combined effects of unchecked immigration, the “diversity” agenda and abandoning our national principle of “out of many, one.” This lunacy must end.

. . .

https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2018/02/20/diversity-illegal-immigration-and-destroying-america/

 

 THE U.S. TAX DOLLAR SUPPORTED MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “The Race” IS NOW CALLING ITSELF UNIDOSus.

La Raza Founder – Kill the Gringos (José Angel Gutiérrez)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5_u62dhkjQ

Obama Funds the Mexican Fascist Party of LA RAZA “The Race”

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/11/23/omalley-obama-devastated-democratic-party-like-bad-forest-fire/

FIFTEEN THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW

ABOUT LA RAZA “THE RACE”

by Michelle Malkin

Only in America could critics of a group called "The Race" be labeled racists. Such is the triumph of left-wing identity chauvinists, whose aggressive activists and supine abettors have succeeded in redefining all opposition as "hate."

Both Barack Obama and John McCain will speak this week in San Diego at the annual conference of the National Council of La Raza, the Latino organization whose name is Spanish for, yes, "The Race." Can you imagine Obama and McCain paying homage to a group of white people who called themselves that? No matter. The presidential candidates and the media have legitimized "The Race" as a mainstream ethnic lobbying group and marginalized its critics as intolerant bigots. The unvarnished truth is that the group is a radical ethnic nationalist outfit that abuses your tax dollars and milks PC politics to undermine our sovereignty.

Here are 15 things you should know about "The Race":

15. "The Race" supports driver's licenses for illegal aliens.

14."The Race" demands in-state tuition discounts for illegal alien students that are not available to law-abiding U.S. citizens and law-abiding legal immigrants.

13. "The Race" vehemently opposes cooperative immigration enforcement efforts between local, state and federal authorities.

12. "The Race" opposes a secure fence on the southern border.

11. "The Race" joined the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in a failed lawsuit attempt to prevent the feds from entering immigration information into a key national crime database -- and to prevent local police officers from accessing the data.

10. "The Race" opposed the state of Oklahoma's tough immigration-enforcement-first laws, which cut off welfare to illegal aliens, put teeth in employer sanctions and strengthened local-federal cooperation and information sharing.

9. "The Race" joined other open-borders, anti-assimilationists and sued to prevent Proposition 227, California's bilingual education reform ballot initiative, from becoming law.

8. "The Race" bitterly protested common-sense voter ID provisions as an "absolute disgrace."

7. "The Race" has consistently opposed post-9/11 national security measures at every turn.

6. Former "Race" president Raul Yzaguirre, Hillary Clinton's Hispanic outreach adviser, said this: "U.S. English is to Hispanics as the Ku Klux Klan is to blacks." He was referring to U.S. English, the nation's oldest, largest citizens' action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States. "The Race" also pioneered Orwellian open-borders Newspeak and advised the Mexican government on how to lobby for illegal alien amnesty while avoiding the terms "illegal" and "amnesty."

5. "The Race" gives mainstream cover to a poisonous subset of ideological satellites, led by Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan (MEChA). The late GOP Rep. Charlie Norwood rightly characterized the organization as "a radical racist group … one of the most anti-American groups in the country, which has permeated U.S. campuses since the 1960s, and continues its push to carve a racist nation out of the American West."

4. "The Race" is currently leading a smear campaign against staunch immigration enforcement leaders and has called for TV and cable news networks to keep immigration enforcement proponents off the airwaves -- in addition to pushing for Fairness Doctrine policies to shut up their foes. The New York Times reported that current "Race" president Janet Murguia believes "hate speech" should "not be tolerated, even if such censorship were a violation of First Amendment rights."

3. "The Race" sponsors militant ethnic nationalist charter schools subsidized by your public tax dollars (at least $8 million in federal education grants). The schools include Aztlan Academy in Tucson, Ariz., the Mexicayotl Academy in Nogales, Ariz., Academia Cesar Chavez Charter School in St. Paul, Minn., and La Academia Semillas del Pueblo in Los Angeles, whose principal inveighed: "We don't want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don't need a White water fountain … ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction."

2. "The Race" has perfected the art of the PC shakedown at taxpayer expense, pushing relentlessly to lower home loan standards for Hispanic borrowers, reaping millions in federal "mortgage counseling" grants, seeking special multimillion-dollar earmarks and partnering with banks that do business with illegal aliens.

1. "The Race" thrives on ethnic supremacy -- and the elite sheeple's unwillingness to call it what it is. As historian Victor Davis Hanson observes: "[The] organization's very nomenclature 'The National Council of La Raza' is hate speech to the core. Despite all the contortions of the group, Raza (as its Latin cognate suggests) reflects the meaning of 'race' in Spanish, not 'the people' -- and that's precisely why we don't hear of something like 'The National Council of the People,' which would not confer the buzz notion of ethnic, racial and tribal chauvinism."

The fringe is the center. The center is the fringe. Viva La Raza.

THIS FUCKER IS WORSE THAN LA RAZA AND M.E.Ch.A. MEMBER CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY GENERAL XAVIER BECERRA!

OBAMA APPOINTED Judge whose sister heads La Raza rules 130-year la against encouraging illegal immigrants is unconstitutional

 

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/judge-whose-sister-heads-la-raza-rules-130-year-law-encouraging-illegal-immigrants-unconstitutional/

Daniel Horowitz · 

 Imagine if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Rashida Tlaib got to single-handedly veto sovereignty legislation dating back to the 1880s just like a president could veto a new bill passed by Congress this session. Imagine if they could unilaterally abolish ICE and declare open borders, except, unlike a president, they wouldn’t have to stand for re-election. Well, that is exactly the situation this week with a single federal judge. Thanks to Republicans agreeing to the notion that judges – even lower court judges – have direct veto power over legislation, a foundational immigration law has just been “vetoed.”

KCUR-FM reports that on Wednesday, Judge Carlos Murguia of the U.S. District Court of Kansas ruled, based on a Ninth Circuit opinion, that 8 U.S.C. §1324, the law prohibiting someone from “encouraging” or “inducing” illegal immigration, is an unconstitutional infringement upon the First Amendment. In doing so, Murguia vacated the convictions of two illegal aliens, Jose Felipe Hernandez-Calvillo and Mauro Papalotzi, who were convicted in August 2018 by a jury for conspiring to encourage illegal aliens to remain here through employment at a drywall company in Lawrence, Kansas. Four others were originally indicted by a grand jury in 2015.

 

This law has been on the books in some form for over 130 years, and numerous federal courts have upheld convictions based on §1324. Yet one judge, who worked for an open-borders group named El Centro Inc. and whose sister Janet Murguia is president of La Raza (now called UnidosUS), suddenly thinks conspiring to harbor and encourage illegal immigration violates the First Amendment. Carlos’ sister Mary (who is an identical twin to Janet) is a federal judge on the very Ninth Circuit Court from which he drew this opinion. Judge Mary Murguia once recused herself from a trial involving pro-enforcement Sheriff Joe Arpaio because of her sister’s leadership of La Raza. Carlos should have done the same thing this week in this case, which involves a law that directly conflicts with the work with the open-borders groups his family is associated with.

Rather than rule based on the law, he decided to adopt the ruling of the Ninth Circuit (which doesn’t have jurisdiction in Kansas), which ruled last December that §1324 is “unconstitutionally overbroad” because it “criminalizes a substantial amount of protected expression.” “The court adopts (the 9th Circuit’s) analysis in full and agrees that (the law) on its face is overbroad under the First Amendment,” said Murguia in a brief bench ruling first reported by KCUR-FM.

This assertion is ridiculous, because the law clearly refers to engaging in subversive and fraudulent activities to encourage or enable actual individual aliens to remain in the country, not mere political advocacy for liberal immigration policies in the abstract. It’s like saying that someone who hates high taxes or gun control laws and advocates against them is the same as a person who actively assists tax cheats and gun felons in achieving the end goal of the criminalized behavior.

The 1952 INA (8 U.S.C. § 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv)) calls for felony prosecution for anyone who “encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law.” Subsection (V)(I) prohibits “any conspiracy to commit any of the preceding acts.” The two defendants in this case were convicted on both counts. This law passed the Senate unanimously!

The forerunners to this law were the Contract Labor Law of 1885 and the 1891 Immigration Act. The 1885 law made it unlawful to “in any way assist or encourage the importation or migration of any alien” for the purpose of contract labor. Section 3 of the 1891 Immigration Act made it a felony to “assist or encourage the importation or migration of any alien by promise of employment” through advertisements.

Other circuits have long recognized this law as completely legitimate. “Harboring, within the meaning of §1324, encompasses conduct tending substantially to facilitate an alien’s remaining in the United States illegally and to prevent government authorities from detecting his unlawful presence,” wrote the Second Circuit in 1999. “Such facilitation may be attempted through a wide range of conduct.” (United States v. Kim, 193 F.3d 567, 574 (2d Cir. 1999).) The Fifth Circuit has ruled that Congress intended for §1324 to “broadly proscribe any knowing or willful conduct fairly within any of these terms that tends to substantially facilitate an alien’s remaining in the U.S. illegally.”

So how could a single judge who has a family history of open-borders activism be allowed to veto such long-standing and universal laws? The answer is that he has no such power other than what the other branches are willing to cede him.

The concern here is that this will not only protect employers who knowingly help illegal aliens get around our immigration laws, but it will also essentially legalize sanctuary cities. Throughout the county, sanctuary cities are taking active steps to thwart immigration law. We would never tolerate this for other federal laws concerning American criminals. Why should illegal aliens have special privileges?

Rather than shirking from §1324 prosecutions, Trump’s DOJ should aggressively go after sanctuary cities, especially in areas where there are saner federal judges. A judge has no power to “strike down” or veto statutes he or she believes are overly broad. If there is a case that concerns pure speech or advocacy without any conspiracy or action taken to encourage illegal immigration, then it is within the prerogative of a judge not to convict the person. That is judicial power. But judges have no ability to say that the statute can’t be applied even when an action is involved because, in their view, the text of the law might rope in speech in other cases. To believe otherwise is to concoct an entirely new level of judicial veto that our Founders explicitly rejected. This is the difference between judicial review and judicial supremacy.

Finally, it’s important to remember that this is yet another example of judges attempting to fully nullify long-standing immigration law. Some on the Right believe that Congress needs to pass new laws in order to end illegal immigration. It’s simply not true. We don’t have a law problem; we have a judicial supremacy problem. The only question is whether the other branches will give this fake power full effect.


Migrant enclaves already are at the top of the U.S. lists for bad places to  - 10 of the 50 worst places in America to live according to this list are in California, and all of them are famous for their illegal populations.             MONICA SHOWALTER

 

The costs of illegal immigration are being carefully hidden by Democrats.  MONICA SHOWALTER

What's more, Mexico generally benefits from shipping its surplus uneducated population to the states to take the pressure valve off the potential for unrest. Corrupt Mexican officials often reap "fees" from letting illegal migrants from other countries as well as their own pass through their territory. MONICA SHOWALTER

Estimates from June suggest that nearly 17 million illegal aliens now reside across the U.S., costing American taxpayers $163 billion annually. This amount, though, does not factor in the higher cost of housing, unpaid hospital bills, lower wages, and lost jobs that Americans are on the hook for as a result of illegal immigration.


GOP Report: Illegal Aliens at Southern Border Under Biden Far Exceed Annual U.S. Births

US President Joe Biden speaks during a press conference after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders' week in Woodside, California on November 15, 2023. US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping shook hands and pledged to steer their countries away from …
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/John Moore/Getty Images

Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, there have been about 6.5 million illegal aliens encountered at the United States-Mexico border, according to a report from Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee.

The report, issued by Chairman Mark Greene (R-TN), shows the number of illegal alien encounters at the southern border under Biden outpace annual U.S births, where close to four million are born every year.

“It may be a new fiscal year, but we’re still stuck in the same historic border crisis,” Green said in a statement.

Under Biden and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, 6.5 million illegal aliens have been encountered at the southern border, while nearly two million are considered “known got-aways,” those illegal aliens who are known to have successfully crossed the border undeterred by Border Patrol agents.

Experts have long asserted that millions more illegal aliens are likely to have, unknown to authorities, successfully crossed the border – a group known as “unknown got-aways.”

Altogether, about 7.8 million illegal aliens have been encountered at U.S. borders since Biden took office. Millions of those encountered at the nation’s borders have been directly released into American communities by the DHS thanks to the administration’s expansive catch and release network.

“These are catastrophic numbers across the board … I want to make this very clear to Secretary Mayorkas: Accountability is coming,” Green said.

Estimates from June suggest that nearly 17 million illegal aliens now reside across the U.S., costing American taxpayers $163 billion annually. This amount, though, does not factor in the higher cost of housing, unpaid hospital bills, lower wages, and lost jobs that Americans are on the hook for as a result of illegal immigration.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here

Migrant enclaves already are at the top of the U.S. lists for bad places to  - 10 of the 50 worst places in America to live according to this list are in California, and all of them are famous for their illegal populations.             MONICA SHOWALTER

 

HAVE YOU EVER HEARD BIDEN, OR ANY DEM SAY THE WORD ‘HOMELESS’??? BUT YOU SURE HAVE HEARD THEM SAY ‘AMNESTY’. GIVE OUR ILLEGALS MUCHO MAS MORE!

LOS ANGELES UNBELIEVABLE OUT OF CONTROL HOMELESS SLUMS | HOMELESS CRISIS IN AMERICA

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQHKygOupwg

 

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes (CALIFORNIA?).  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.”               Karen McQuillan 

 

VIDEO: MEX GANG MURDER MAN IN HIS TRUCK! GRAPHIC!


'Should we even be standing here?' Rob Schmitt goes on shocking Los Angeles ride-along

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVfqSgtwDpQ

 

CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES NO. 2, NUMBER ON IS INLAND EMPIRE, ALSO LIST S.F.

AVOID THESE CITIES (7 WORST in America)

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De_atmpPgC0

Migrant enclaves already are at the top of the U.S. lists for bad places to  - 10 of the 50 worst places in America to live according to this list are in California, and all of them are famous for their illegal populations.  

MONICA SHOWALTER

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DEMOCRAT PARTY? 


I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms, are hostile to people of faith and spirituality, demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and above all, dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.              TULSI GABBARD


Pelosi, through her holdings in local restaurants and vineyards, is reputed to be one of the largest employers of illegal labor in Northern California. 

"Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the twin nutters of Congress, were certain they could beat Trump at his own game, but have made fools of themselves, as usual.  The stand-off is not over but with each passing day, the Democrats reveal more of their anti-American, pro-illegal immigration agenda.  Conservatives have been sounding the alarm for years: Democrats do not care about American  citizens!"                                                                      PATRICIA McCARTHY

THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S NAFTA INVASION TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. Is it working???

There is also an impact on wages.

If impoverished migrants agree to work for less than minimum wages without benefits, the working-class citizens either suffers job redundancy or depression in wages. If they work under the table and send their untaxed remittances home, communities go underdeveloped and get a run-down look.

 RAJAN LAAD

When some among the migrants commit violent crimes -- through car break-ins, burglaries, vandalism, fentanyl dealing, identity theft, strongarm robberies, rapes, and other violent crimes, it is the working class citizen who suffers. At times, they pay with their lives.   By Rajan Laad

The costs of illegal immigration are being carefully hidden by Democrats.  MONICA SHOWALTER

What's more, Mexico generally benefits from shipping its surplus uneducated population to the states to take the pressure valve off the potential for unrest. Corrupt Mexican officials often reap "fees" from letting illegal migrants from other countries as well as their own pass through their territory. MONICA SHOWALTER

Last month, a thrice-deported illegal immigrant with a long history

of violent crime stabbed five people, killing two, John Paulson, 45,

and Kimberly Susan Fial, 55, at the Grace Baptist Church in San

Jose.                                                             DAVE SEMINARA

Releasing to the streets gang members eligible for deportation is nothing new in Santa Clara County. ICE published a report in 2018 detailing that 142 gang members whom the agency was seeking to deport during a nine-month period in 2017 were released by local law enforcement rather than being transferred to federal custody; Santa Clara County led the nation, releasing 22 gang members. DAVE SEMINARA

As reported by Breitbart Texas, the arrest of migrants with existing criminal records has risen more than 350 percent since 2020. According to CBP, the number of migrants who have criminal convictions for Homicide and Manslaughter rose from 3 encounters in 2020 to more than 60 in 2022. More than 120 migrants with homicide or manslaughter convictions have been encountered since January 2021 — compared to 11 during the Trump era. The increase reflects those convicted of prior offenses committed in the United States.

Joe Biden and other Democrats have spent the last four years repeating the mantra “no one is above the law.” Yet Biden has advocated policies that would, as the San Francisco Chronicle recently noted, effectively make the United States a sanctuary country. 

Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California

A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million (BLOG: THE NUMBER IS CLOSER TO 15 MILLION ILLEAGLS). The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion (DATED: NOW ABOUT $35 BILLION YEARLY AND THAT IS ON THE STATE LEVEL ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE) on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. 

Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.

"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan." 
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.

 

Richard Vogel/AP Photo

Stephen Eide

The Encampment State

 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-encampment-state

 

 

Billions in spending have failed to solve California’s massive—and worsening—homelessness crisis.

/ Read here

Special Issue 2023: Can California Be Golden Again?

 

 

 

 

Ask the average Californian his take on homelessness, and he’ll say that it’s gotten much worse. Back in the early 2000s, a visitor to Los Angeles’s Skid Row or San Francisco’s Tenderloin would have witnessed scenes of misery that seemed scarcely capable of further deterioration. Intense reaction against street conditions back then gave rise, in many California cities, to campaigns to end homelessness, prompting billions in new spending. But no California city ended homelessness; the average Californian’s impression is correct. According to the best data available, homelessness in California grew during the 2010s and is still growing.

It has also spread. Governments once aspired to contain homelessness-related disorder within the boundaries of forlorn neighborhoods like Skid Row and the Tenderloin. But containment strategies are now just as discredited as the goal of ending homelessness. Tents are everywhere: the suburbs, the beaches, riverbeds, beneath overpasses, urban parks, median strips, nature preserves, and sidewalks surrounding City Halls. The crisis’s dispersion has caused regional tensions, with neighboring communities trading accusations of dumping their homelessness problems on one another. To sort out inter-municipal disputes, and those between city and county governments, state government has had to step in. Since taking office in 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom has often identified homelessness as his top priority—another measure of the issue’s magnitude. Most states view homelessness as a local problem.

Public concern has intensified in response to the gruesome details that give twenty-first- century homelessness such a menacing character and that give California such a dystopian reputation in connection with it. In San Diego from 2016 to 2018, a homeless-encampment-related outbreak of hepatitis A infected hundreds, 20 fatally. In the early months of Covid-19, Los Angeles contracted with a portable restroom company to facilitate better hygiene among the street population. One employee of that firm was impaled in the hand by a syringe when cleaning out a handwashing station near a needle exchange. In April 2021, a dog was burned alive in Venice by a fire likely set by a member of that community’s unsheltered population. In January 2022, a dog attacked a security guard at the San Francisco Public Library when the guard tried to use Narcan to revive the dog’s owner, who had overdosed. This past December, a San Francisco toddler overdosed on fentanyl, after coming into contact with it while playing in a park. A June 2018 column in the San Francisco Chronicle titled “Homeless Camp Pushes SF Neighborhood to the Edge” related how a two-and-a-half-year-old had “invented a game called ‘jumping over the poop’” and that “[a]nother kid across the street collected syringe caps and floated them down the stream of dirty gutter water for fun.”

Social media have been crucial in advancing progressive causes such as Black Lives Matter, but they have pushed in the opposite direction with homelessness. The notion that homeless Californians are just down-on-their-luck cases has been undermined by viral videos such as Michael Shellenberger’s interviews with street addicts. In one, posted in February 2022, “Ben” reckoned that less than 10 percent of San Francisco’s street homeless are from the city originally and that the majority have an addiction, and he explained how he supports his own habit through petty crime. A video posted on July 8, 2022, by a San Francisco–based Twitter user showed schoolchildren exiting a bus in the city’s South of Market neighborhood into what looked like a junkie zombie apocalypse. Californians understand that rents in their state are punishingly expensive and that some people who might have found housing elsewhere have wound up living on the street here. But why do they have to live on the street like that?

Homelessness hardens the heart. In a crisis jurisdiction, one cannot use streets and sidewalks without passing by—and thus ignoring—the obvious suffering of one’s fellow man. But the homelessness story in California today is not one of neglect. Policymakers have been trying to help, but their programs have yet to make much headway.

All three levels of government—city, county, and state—have recently expanded outlays on homelessness, much of it flowing through specialized agencies, such as the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing ($670 million FY22 budget) and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority ($800 million FY22 budget). In fiscal 2022, state government spent over $7 billion on homelessness programs. The public has directly authorized more spending on homelessness and low-income housing through several recent ballot initiatives: Alameda County’s Measure A1 (2016); Santa Clara County’s Measure A (2016); Los Angeles City’s Proposition HHH (2016); Los Angeles County’s Measure H; the statewide No Place Like Home (2018); San Francisco’s Proposition C (2018); and Los Angeles City’s Proposition ULA (2022).

Most homelessness spending in California goes toward giving people a place to sleep. This can be done on a short-term, intermediate-term, or permanent basis, and accompanied, or unaccompanied, by programmatic goals like sobriety and employment. Permanent supportive housing is the form of housing that progressive advocates for the homeless favor most. It provides a subsidized private apartment, whose occupant can stay there as long as he likes, provided he abides by the terms of the lease. The program is “supportive” insofar as the unit is linked somehow to social services, but with no expectation that tenants use those services or pursue sobriety or employment. Permanent supportive housing is not optimal for nondisabled individuals capable of something more than lifetime dependency; other disadvantages are its high per-unit costs, which have topped $800,000, and the glacial pace of development. The program’s main advantages are that some people unquestionably need it, and it’s reasonably likely to keep people housed and off the street, at least for a few years.

“In San Diego, a homeless-encampment-related outbreak of hepatitis A infected hundreds, 20 fatally.”

At the other end of the housing spectrum stands shelter. Unlike permanent supportive housing, shelter is short-term and provides minimal privacy. Accommodations are shared, often in a dorm-style setting. Shelter’s advantages are that it’s easier to launch in bulk than permanent supportive housing (or any other form of affordable housing) and, compared with living on the streets, people are safer and warmer in shelter. Providing shelter, at least to some degree, is a legal requirement for any city that wants to restrict sleeping in public. The disadvantages of shelter are that it’s temporary and that, however much government spends on it, some street homeless will keep opting for the freer, if more hazardous, unsheltered life. The weather, often overlooked in homelessness discussions, makes shelter less of a pressing need in famously temperate California.

In between shelter and permanent supportive housing are so-called transitional housing programs. The traditional understanding of transitional housing was a place where someone could stay on an interim basis—and a place that was sobriety- and/or employment-oriented. The idea was to stabilize people so that, when they finally landed a private apartment, their tenancy would go more smoothly than if they had moved in directly off the street. Progressives have long disliked transitional housing for its reputation for paternalism and because it’s not permanent. Of late, support for something like transitional housing has revived in California, as policymakers have scrambled for a program that’s more attractive to the street homeless themselves than shelter and easier to build than permanent supportive housing. Some tiny-home programs—small villages of units around 100 square feet, built out of shipping containers or through a prefab/modular construction process—operate like transitional housing. In contrast with traditional transitional housing, new tiny-home programs generally don’t enforce robust behavioral expectations, which remain rare in California homelessness programs.

A village of tiny homes—units of about 100 square feet (TED SOQUI/SIPA USA/AP PHOTO)

Why have billions of dollars in homelessness funding achieved so little? Some blame Housing First, a philosophy that calls for solving homelessness through permanent housing and prohibits the use of any requirements, such as sobriety or participation in services, as a condition of receiving housing benefits. This philosophy stood behind various local-level campaigns to end homelessness. Sacramento lawmakers made Housing First a requirement of state-funded programs in 2016 (SB 1380). Housing First’s reach has an important cultural dimension. Support for it runs deep among homelessness professionals—academics who specialize in the subject, as well as the leadership and staff of government agencies and prominent service providers such as People Assisting the Homeless, public law firms like the ACLU of Southern California, and advocacy groups like the San Francisco Coalition for the Homeless.

Housing First’s reputation has taken a hit, though, from Los Angeles’s experience with Proposition HHH, a ballot initiative passed in fall 2016, with a “yes” vote of over three-fourths. The measure authorized $1.2 billion in bond funding for permanent supportive housing, mostly. But, as documented in a series of scathing reports by former Los Angeles City controller Ron Galperin, it took three years to open the first units backed by HHH funds, and, by February 2022, only about 1,100 units were operating, a rate “wholly inadequate in the context of the ongoing homelessness emergency.” Galperin also criticized the program’s costs, which average above $500,000 per unit. The HHH experience is not unrepresentative. A June 2022 Los Angeles Times analysis found several examples of subsidized housing programs exceeding $1 million per unit.

The old wisdom on Housing First is that it’s the most practical solution to homelessness, far simpler and cheaper than any alternative. But experienced politicians, such as Newsom and Sacramento mayor Darrell Steinberg (a former leader of the state senate), have become aware of Housing First’s gross impracticalities. Here’s how a progressive Housing Firster imagines success: an encampment emerges, community members object to it as a public nuisance, and government promptly provides the dozens or hundreds of inhabitants of this encampment with their own subsidized private apartments. Experienced politicians know that things will never work like that.

Housing Firsters believe in devoting maximum resources to permanent supportive housing, but if one scans the landscape of California homelessness programs, one finds many examples of funding going toward other priorities. In this year’s budget, state government will devote hundreds of millions of dollars to dismantling encampments; an August 2022 press release put out by Governor Newsom celebrated how “California Clears More than 1,250 Homeless Encampments in 12 Months” and featured pictures of the governor himself participating in cleanups. The federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2018 Martin v. Boise decision prohibited cities from banning or tightly regulating camping in public unless they have provided their unsheltered population with an alternative to street-sleeping. Progressive advocates hailed Martin v. Boise, but it has led to more investment in shelters, which advocates see as a counterproductive diversion of resources.

The qualifications that California has had to put on its commitment to Housing First have resulted in strategic incoherence. What’s going on is neither orthodox Housing First nor some alternative philosophy that has replaced it. The reason: political conditions aren’t yet ripe for a full sea change on homelessness in California. Notwithstanding all the public outcry, the crisis has had only modest political repercussions. Beginning in the early 2000s, the once-mighty California GOP began an inexorable decline into irrelevance. The intensification of the state’s homelessness crisis, under Democratic rule, has done nothing to reverse that development. The attempted recall of Newsom in 2021 was more about homelessness than any other issue, but he handily defeated the effort. One recall candidate was Kevin Faulconer, Republican mayor of San Diego during the 2010s, who managed to reduce homelessness in his city at a time when it was getting worse everywhere else in the state. Yet, despite a compelling record on the issue of the day, he ran third among the contenders to replace Newsom, and far behind Newsom himself. Newsom coasted to reelection in 2022. Much like his predecessor Jerry Brown, Newsom has become a skilled practitioner of the politics of co-optation, throwing the occasional jab at far-left ideologues as a way of preserving the status quo.

At the local level, San Francisco seems better positioned to make progress on homelessness than Los Angeles. Stirrings of sanity in the City by the Bay include an August 2022 property-tax revolt among small-business owners in the Castro, fed up with disorder, and the success of two centrists (Joel Engardio and Matt Dorsey) in closely fought races for supervisor this past November. Most notably, voters recalled progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin in June 2022 and elected his more law-and-order-oriented successor, Brooke Jenkins, first appointed by Mayor London Breed, in November 2022. Though big changes should not be expected in San Francisco—Mayor Breed is another consummate co-opter—progressive hopes are on pause for now.

Los Angeles is in a darker place. Last year, two incumbent city councilmembers, Gil Cedillo and Mitch O’Farrell, both liberal Democrats, lost reelection bids to challengers endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America–Los Angeles and who campaigned on platforms of more accommodation toward encampments. Voters also turned out Sheriff Alex Villanueva, one of the last Southern California elected officials with a law-and-order brand and who had served, in county politics, as a vital counter against the irresponsible “defund the police” agenda of the Board of Supervisors. Lastly, Angelenos voted “yes” on Proposition ULA, thus authorizing higher taxes for more low-income housing and belying the notion that HHH’s disappointing legacy has somehow made the public ready to “starve the beast.” Los Angeles appears poised to become more progressive on homelessness and street disorder in the 2020s than it was in the 2010s.

California is host to half the country’s unsheltered population. Over the last decade, many encampments have taken on massive scale and acquired proper names: Ross Camp in Santa Cruz (about 200 people, dismantled in 2019); Echo Park Lake and the Venice Boardwalk in Los Angeles (200 people each, dismantled in 2021); in San Jose, the Jungle (300; 2014) and an even larger camp near the airport (500; 2022); Division Street in San Francisco (350; 2016); Wood Street in Oakland (200; 2022); Palco Marsh in Eureka (300; 2016); the Santa Ana Riverbed (“Skid River”) in Orange County (1,000; 2018); and the Joe Rodota Trail in Sonoma County (300; 2020). Scale attracts a criminal element and increases all manner of risks: infectious-disease outbreaks caused by deficient sanitation and hygiene, fires that threaten not only lives but also nearby energy and transportation infrastructure (most fires that the Los Angeles Fire Department responds to are homelessness-related), sexual assault, overdoses, and so on. The experience of public housing taught Americans about the hazards of concentrating poverty, but the average encampment is host to a far more troubled population than even the most derelict housing project.

A more common sight than the brand-name tent cities set up in parks or outside central business districts are smaller groups of tents, spread throughout dense urban areas. These lead to just as much public outcry because it doesn’t take many tents to diminish residents’ and businesses’ quality of life. No one, even if poor or mentally ill, should be allowed to take public property for his own private use via do-it-yourself eminent domain. Encampment cleanups are the democratic thing to do. Left-wing critics criticize them as a futile exercise in Whac-A-Mole that just shifts the problem around. But in the world of homelessness, success is relative. Building housing has not proved effective. Between 2015 and 2020, California expanded the number of permanent supportive housing units in the state by almost one-third (15,700), while the unsheltered count grew by 50 percent (40,000). Even if all that housing didn’t reduce homelessness, advocates argue, it prevented it from getting a lot worse. By the same token, however, cleanup proponents can argue that, absent enforcement, California would have on its hands even larger encampments—and in more places.

Homelessness is a housing problem in the sense that low-income Californians face a dire shortage of rental units within their means. Efforts to create more subsidized housing—both through mainstream affordable-housing programs and supportive-housing efforts targeted to the currently homeless—will continue. But in the short and intermediate terms, subsidized housing must be coupled with other approaches if California is to make any headway in managing homelessness.

Policymakers should keep expanding intermediate-length transitional programs as an alternative to both permanent supportive housing and traditional shelter. The next logical step in this expansion should be more sobriety-oriented homelessness programs, which remain overly stigmatized in California’s Housing First culture. More sober housing programs would provide homelessness policy in California with some desperately needed success stories. Sober programs also have a reputation as safer than programs with a laxer attitude toward whether tenants are using drugs or alcohol. Unsheltered homeless often cite unsafe conditions in shelters as one reason that they stay on the streets. To the extent that that complaint is sincere, sober programs can respond to it. They can also help repair “burned bridges” with friends and family. Someone who sticks with a program that has behavioral requirements sends an objective signal to former friends and family that he has changed. More “inclusive” Housing First–style programs cannot do that.

Above all, on housing, policymakers should try to stop the bleeding. They must make a determined effort to preserve what few low-rent (even if low-quality) housing options remain. Examples include board-and-care homes for the mentally disabled and SROs in San Diego, both of which have been declining during the recent era of rising homelessness.

Other specific steps should be pursued as well—including the repeal of SB 1380, California’s Housing First law, which it does not need. Some people are best served by permanent supportive housing or other “low barrier” programs, but many others are not, and this second cohort is now being neglected by state policies. Without SB 1380, many avenues would remain to pursue funding for permanent supportive housing, including ballot initiatives and city- and county-funded programs. In the homelessness context, California spends too much time debating process and administration. Often, what passes for a robust exchange is little more than city versus county versus state blame-gaming. Public officials should spend more time debating philosophy; taking up SB 1380’s repeal would be one way to pursue that end.

“Shutting down open-air drug markets in hot spots may make it easier to coax tent-dwellers to accept services.”

Another step would be to pursue creative litigation. Democracy suffers when courts, instead of elected politicians, make policy. But when faced with one-party rule and aggressive public-interest law groups, asking centrists and conservatives not to pursue policy aims via litigation looks like a request for unilateral disarmament. The LA Alliance on Human Rights is a private organization that, through the courts, has constructively pressured city and county government to expand both shelter and enforcement in Los Angeles. If nothing else, pro-public-order litigation may force the eventual involvement of the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify the still-disputed parameters of encampment enforcement. (In late 2019, the Court declined to hear an appeal on Martin v. Boise.)

Finally, the criminal-justice system’s role in homelessness policy needs to be reaffirmed. Questions about law enforcement and homelessness tend to focus narrowly on camping regulations, but a larger context exists. Over the past ten to 15 years, California has pursued an increasingly progressive agenda on criminal justice. Examples include the passage of Prop. 47 in 2014 and the ongoing push to close Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles, which would slash capacity in that county’s jail system by about 25 percent. It cannot be a coincidence that California’s criminal-justice-reform era has coincided with, per popular impression, the worsening of the homelessness crisis. More enforcement of all laws would help site new housing programs. A commitment to expanded, targeted enforcement around a new shelter or supportive housing facility would neutralize neighborhood concerns about disorder far more effectively than simply admonishing people to trust in social and health systems long notorious for their failures. Shutting down open-air drug markets in homelessness hot spots like the Tenderloin would improve conditions and may well make it easier to coax some tent-dwellers to accept services. This would require directing police to get more involved in social problems than many California Democrats now consider appropriate. But social work and police work should not be viewed as mutually exclusive.

California’s homelessness crisis may not have led to a political revolution, but it has engendered great distrust of government. The homeless themselves, as well as residents and business owners, have endured years of dashed hopes. Under-promising and over-delivering now seem like the most prudent course for government to take, but popular impatience requires at least some wins in the near term, such as the reclamation of trails and parks for public use. Good intentions long ago ceased to suffice. Enforcement actions will continue to be criticized as shortsighted. But excessive faith in solutions that proponents insisted would succeed has led to a legacy of broken promises and cynicism.

Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of Homelessness in America.

 

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