Take in their refugees? You’ve got to be kidding! We have our own to take care of or get rid of or move around. OK, maybe technically they are not refugees. They haven’t left the country. Don’t have anywhere to go, anyway. No one standing at the border with food, water, clothes, money and transportation to wherever. Some of their buddies have left who knows to where, but there are a lot left. And, they don’t have special status because they aren’t from Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador.
They are plain old American citizens, lots of them children, of all races, colors and ethnic backgrounds. They are stuck in our ghettos in hundreds of cities across the United States for a variety of sociological reasons neither I nor few others can fully explain, justify, rationalize, or understand. Bullets whiz around them, if not every day, at least on weekends. Lots of them get killed. Five hundred will die this year in Chicago alone and it is not one of the top 10 or 20 most violent cities. Like those Central American countries, it’s not the government that’s after them. It’s their neighbors whom the government can’t control. It’s bad guys versus good guys except the good guys, which are most of them, don’t have a chance against the money, drugs, gangs and power controlled by the criminals.
Some have complained they can’t let their children out to play, or are worried that the children won’t make it back from school (or to school for that matter). Many of those schools are failures anyway. I don’t doubt that many would like to leave, to go somewhere where it is safe, where they can find a job, work, get an education, raise their children. We’re talking about towns like Detroit, Baltimore, and St. Louis which rank 24th, 36th, and 45th in homicides in cities of the world. Port Au Prince, Haiti is 49th and Valencia, Venezuela is 50th.
However, we’re also talking about Stockton, California (which is also going broke from overpaying its employes), Birmingham, Alabama, Memphis, Tennessee, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania just to name a few. We can add in Oakland, and Los Angeles, California, Oklahoma City, and Newark, New Jersey. Add your own favorite city to your list.
I’m guessing there are a lot of people who would like to escape.
Conservative columnist and commentator, George Will, noted that America should have no problem absorbing all these new Central American children crossing our border and that we should allow it and keep them here. Another conservative, Brit Hume, agrees. Will notes that there are over 3,000 counties in the US and if each took its share there’d be no problems. Liberals apparently agree because they’re the ones pushing open borders and see no problems in absorbing millions of people from all over the world. After all, Central America isn’t the only country with horrid and dangerous living conditions. I guess limiting it to children (definition, please) would help from a PR standpoint.
Of course, we should be asking where we’re sending them and into what conditions. Relatives? Living where? In dangerous ghettos? Does it look like we’ve solved our own violence, not to mention gangs and drug problems, in our own cities? Will expects an even distribution across the country. OK. What about our own inner city people trying to get out? Distribute them across the country? How about some ideas there? Going to have to be creative. President Obama proposes spending $3.7 billion to solve the immigration problem. Would that amount of dollars solve the problems in our own cities or have we already spent more than that?
Deporting willing US citizens out of the cities and into the hinterlands might be a solution. Of course there will be language and cultural barriers, but we could give them preferences. Houston absorbed thousands after Hurricane Katrina and it still stands. However, that was a city-to- city movement and I suspect that not everything has gone well. That was a crisis move. A planned, well-thought out, well-financed program might be more successful.
It is argued that an influx of foreigners, hard working, seeking an education, stimulates and rejuvenates our economy and our country. Might not the same occur if we can integrate to the broader US those millions of our own citizens who are desperate to escape poverty, crime, and unemployment but are trapped in dying and dysfunctional cities that bear a striking resemblance to the chaotic countries south of our border?
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