L.A.: End of the American Dream?

As the sayings go, as Los Angeles goes, so goes California; and as California goes, so goes the nation. If the deterioration of the Left Coast’s multicultural paradises is permitted to continue apace, all of America will soon look just like them.

For the past 15 years or so, radical multiculturalists have gleefully predicted that by the year 2050, whites will be a minority in America. Actually, with the 80 percent increase in illegal immigration since Pres. Bush’s December, 2003 announcement of his amnesty proposal, whites could be a minority as soon as 2030. In Los Angeles, they already are.

At present, L.A. is only 29.7% non-Hispanic white. (And only 10.9% black; the black middle class is engaging in “black flight.”) Only 59.1% of its residents were born in America, an increasing proportion of whom are the “anchor babies” of young Mexican women, who entered the U.S. illegally for the sole purpose of giving birth, in order to exploit social services.

The Los Angeles public schools are dominated by students who do not speak English, and who increasingly come from families that are illiterate even in Spanish. The majority of these families do not contribute to the tax base, while making incredible demands on social services. And as statistician Ed Rubenstein has shown, even legal immigrants make much higher demands on social services than do American-born citizens. According to the National Research Council, already in 1997, immigrants cost every native-born California household $1,174. And the explosion in violent crime besetting both the city and the state, is fueled by immigration.

According to the California Attorney General’s report, Gangs 2000, “The Department of Justice estimates there could be as many as 175,000 to 200,000 criminal street gang members in California.” The LAPD has a backlog of 8,000 unsolved murders.

LAPD Chief William Bratton’s response to his city’s crime problem is to cry poverty, help gang recruiters, and handcuff his own officers.

The City of Los Angeles is broke, as is the state of California, a condition that owes much to immigration. In the run-up to the October, 2003 recall election, VDARE.com’s Ed Rubenstein estimated that $8 billion of the state’s $38 billion deficit was the direct cost of education, health care, incarceration and social services for immigrants.

The LAPD’s efforts fighting crime by illegal aliens have been arrested by Special Order 40, which forbids officers from asking people about their immigration status until after they’ve been charged with a felony, and a sanctuary policy, in violation of federal law, which forbids municipal employees from cooperating with federal authorities regarding illegal aliens. Repealing S.O. 40 would permit the police to round up known illegal alien gang members, before they commit (even more) violent crimes. The politically ambitious Chief Bratton’s response to those Los Angelenos who want S.O. 40 repealed is, “If you don’t like it, leave the state.” (Bratton, a Massachusetts native, only came to California to run the LAPD.)

As S.O. 40 was enacted by the LAPD in 1979, Bratton is merely the latest of a series of chiefs who have acted as gang-enablers, but things are many orders of magnitude worse than they were in 1979.

In “The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave,” in the Winter, 2004 issue of City Journal, Heather Mac Donald wrote,

[Sanctuary] laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so irresistible that police officials shrink from even mentioning the illegal-alien crime wave. “We can’t even talk about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a predominantly Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].” Neither captain would speak for attribution.

In 1999, the LAPD’s Rampart division suffered a scandal. Unarmed suspects had been shot or beaten, and some gang members framed for crimes. Profiling the department in terms of the mythic “racist,” white model, the Los Angeles Times led the liberal media in hyping the limited scandal as reflecting on the entire force. In reality, however, led by Det. Rafael Perez, the bad cops of Rampart were minorities, and the scandal was the result not of white racism, but of “diversity.” Like many big-city departments, the LAPD had been routinely hiring undesirable minority applicants.

In November, 2000, Mayor Richard Riordan signed a consent decree granting a five-year, federal takeover of the LAPD. Between S.O. 40 and the consent decree, don’t expect the LAPD to cut down on its backlog of 8,000 unsolved murders any time soon.

But the LAPD is a well-oiled machine, compared to the Golden State’s system of public education. Once considered the nation’s best, today, it is a shambles. Liberal journalists such as Nicholas Lemann, in his book, The Big Test, insinuate that white racism is to blame, but in fact the opposite is true. Legally speaking, California has been improving since the mid-1990s. In 1996, state voters passed Prop. 209, which outlawed the use of race or ethnicity in hiring or admitting applicants to the state university systems, or in the letting of university contracts. In 1998, California voters passed Prop. 227, which dismantled California’s system of bilingual education.

Early statistics from the schools were heartening, but the progress stopped. That is because the flood of illegal immigrants has since increased, supporting linguistic ghettoes, because the illegals are hostile to education and assimilation, and because immigrant-dominated schools have increasingly been taken over by Mexican gangs.

In “The Immigrant Gang Plague,” in the summer, 2004 City Journal, Heather Mac Donald reports that “Gang fights in some of L.A.’s regular [not-for-delinquent] high schools draw such crowds that youthful pickpockets have a field day working the spectators and participants,” stealing pagers and cell phones.

On August 12, 2003, K. Lloyd Billingsley of the Pacific Research Institute wrote in National Review Online of “California’s Education Quagmire,” where “even the best students read poorly,” and go on to require remedial education—itself a pedagogically worthless boondoggle—in college.

According to the National Assessment for Educational Progress, a paltry 21 percent of California’s fourth-grade students score at or above or the proficiency level.

Billingsley noted that educrats demanded more money as the solution to California’s educational meltdown, yet per-student spending had been increased by 29% over the previous ten years, after adjusting for inflation.

In 2003, state officials postponed using the state’s high school exit exam, in spite of having dumbed it down to a tenth-grade level, and given students multiple opportunities to pass it. So many seniors would still have been left back, that the state graduated failing students, rather than face a PR and race-political nightmare.

California state higher education officials aid and abet illegal aliens, by permitting them to attend state colleges at in-state tuition rates, while discriminating against out-of-state American citizens, and flout California’s outlawing of affirmative action.

In opposition to the assimilation pedagogy of yore, California’s public schools teach Hispanic students to be hostile to America. Later, in addition to California state colleges’ standard, treasonous curriculum, immigrant students have their imaginary grievances reinforced via the Nazi-style racism imposed by Mexican nationalist groups such as La Raza and chicano studies departments.

Life in southern California has become intolerable for most middle-class Americans. Property costs have skyrocketed for families seeking homes within increasingly scarce, non-violent public school districts, or who send their children to expensive private schools. And Americans don’t dare get sick. When taxpaying Southern Californians with paid medical insurance have emergencies, they often must drive from hospital to hospital. The ERs are full of non-paying, uninsured illegals receiving non-emergency care. Reporters speak vaguely of hospital “financial crunches” whose roots in illegal immigration they assiduously avoid discussing.

And as fifth-generation Californian Victor Davis Hanson wrote in his book, Mexifornia, illegals have destroyed once-flourishing communities, while legal immigrant-dominated public agencies refuse to serve native-born Americans. As Peter Brimelow, the author of Alien Nation, wrote in a review of Mexifornia,

In the last three decades, [Hanson’s] close-knit hometown has been literally overwhelmed by illegal immigration. It has tripled in size and is now, he says, “somewhere between 60 and 90 percent Hispanic” . . . In 1970, Selma’s population, including exotic rural California strains like Sikhs, Japanese, and Armenians, was melting-potting peacefully into one unilingual-English community. Today, Hanson says “he rarely hears English spoken” in his neighborhood . . ..

In essence, the frontier has returned to Selma—but far bloodier. The first victims are Mexican illegals themselves. . . the physical safety of Hanson’s own farming family is regularly threatened by drug dealers, gang members and other trespassers. All farm equipment not locked up is stolen. The rural mailbox system that has been in use for nearly a century is now breaking down because everything put there is routinely looted . . . Trash is constantly dumped on his land, although city garbage pickup is cheap. Cars, unlicensed and uninsured, are repeatedly crashed into his vines, doing costly damage, by drunken Mexicans who promptly vanish. . .. “Nineteenth century ailments”—adult whooping cough, hepatitis, tetanus—have been brought back to California by illegal immigrants no longer subject to Ellis Island-type health checks, along with extraordinary rates of venereal disease. Interactions with local government become a “disaster” as no-one on either side of the counter speaks English. The Mexican woman who runs a stoplight and hits his daughter’s car is let off by the Mexican-American cop—after he gets her phone number.

The Republican Party leadership supports illegal immigration, because it sees in it an endless supply of cheap labor. In October, 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger won California’s recall election for governor, based on his promise to repeal SB60, signed by his predecessor, Gray Davis, which (illegally) granted drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens. While Schwarzenegger repealed SB60, he has ever since sought to do an end-run around his own promise.

Meanwhile, on June 8, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which lacks the courage to face the county’s real problems, voted to remove the cross from the county seal.

GOP leaders can afford buffers between their families and the state’s multicultural misery. The state party ignores the continuing impoverishment of the white American working class, as the influx of illegals, who work for lower wages without benefits and without taxes being withheld: 1. Depresses wages for American citizens; 2. Leads to illegals (and legal immigrants, too) taking over workplaces and running off those Americans who are willing to work for low wages; and 3. Further erodes the tax base.

The Democrat Party supports the minority underclasses, because it sees them as foot soldiers in the multicultural revolution. Los Angeles and California are multicultural nightmares in which skyrocketing demands on taxpayer-citizens collide with a collapsing tax base.

Rather than exposing the terrible reality of life in L.A., the media repeat 1960s Marxist canards. In a June 1 propaganda program on Los Angeles, ABC News’ Peter Jennings approvingly presented a civil rights attorney who maintained that police officers in the slums are an “occupying army.” Jennings himself condemned the LAPD for exhibiting insufficient “compassion” towards homicidal gangbangers.

In “The Immigrant Gang Plague,” Heather Mac Donald notes that beyond California, things are no better: “Hispanic school dropout rates and teen birthrates are now the highest in the nation. Gang crime is exploding nationally—rising 50 percent from 1999 to 2002—driven by the march of Hispanic immigration east and north across the country.” Meanwhile, as Mac Donald wrote last winter, “millions of illegal aliens work, shop, travel, and commit crimes in plain view, utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the immigration law.”

In the real world, Americans are fleeing L.A., and fleeing California. But in today’s Reconquista reality, it is increasingly all of America that is under occupation. Where will Americans find sanctuary?