I can not speak for Diane, but she has noted the growth of Mexicans at the food bank in her area. Take it at face value, please.

On the other hand, small and medium sized towns are under economic stress. This is a combination of factors which I touched on in my post above. When you add the weight of immigrants to the stressed social welfare system, things get worse at a geometrical rate.

Sorry your anger has lead you to call the concerns of your fellow interested posters “nonsense.”

Dianne Wrote:
“Regarding the comment by #12 above about food pantry requests in suburban America, he’s right that the people requesting services didn’t need them 10 years ago, but the reason is those people weren’t here 10 years ago. The increase in our food pantry requests are almost exclusively due to Mexicans moving to the area.”

WRONG!!!

It’s white folks too…A lot of white folks in fact. Probably your neighbors. People of all stripes are catching hell. It’s not all due to Mexicans. (I can’t believe i’m even responding to this nonsense).

Try to let go of your biases and emotions long enough to read up on how food pantries nationwide are struggling…and how hunger is hitting Suburban/rural America…. (Including many White folks!!! Not just Mexicans).

Several informative programs are available for you to listen to.
Check the public radio series about hunger…
http://mirroronamerica.blogspot.com/2006/01/discussion-about-need-for-living-wages.html

Read through the Second Harvest Site…
http://www.secondharvest.org/

I read your blog every day and this is the first time I’ve commented.

I wanted to comment on this sentence…

Stop the show “busts” and deport!

Here’s my beef, the whole deportation thing is a bill of goods we’ve been sold. So a person comes here rapes a couple of kids and gets kicked out, and then walks right back over the border that pregnant women and kids stroll over every day and buys a new identity and takes up where he left off.

What is the object of this exercise? I suppose it made more of a difference when people were crossing an ocean to get here, but I can’t help wondering if we need a whole new deal when the primary sending country is right next door?

Your thoughts?

Considering the mighty economic changes that took place in the 1970′s and 1990′s, I cannot fathom the changes that will take place in the next 20-30 years.

“They’re just trying to make a better life.” “They’re just trying to feed their families.” These are two common mantras used to excuse illegal aliens who have broken not only our immigration laws, but our tax, identity theft, and social security …

In the late 1800′s thousands of towns grew up at points where railroads came together. Those towns became shipping points and commercial centers for the vast network of surrounding family farms. Soon, many of those towns became manufacturing towns because they had a surplus of labor that was ready, willing and able to mold, shape and assemble things that were then shipped out on the railroads.

We all know that the railroads have been largely replaced by the interstates and trucking. But also the labor pools have changed over time as well. In the 1900′s there was a mass migration of poor, Southern blacks. Immigrants from all over the world poured in.

Sometime in the early 1970′s, the US went from being a powerful manufacturing economy to being a service economy. Manufacturers moved around the country trying to find labor and local governments that were friendly to them.

After NAFTA, many manufacturers tried out Mexico. It was not a productive move for most, but it did help the Mexican employment picture. Then, China got into wooing industry in an unprecedented way. Since the middle 1990′s, every manufacturing country in the world has lost huge numbers of jobs to China. This includes Mexico. (A peasant farmer in China has only around $20 a year in “disposable” income. Otherwise, he trades and grows for his needs. State socialism hardly reaches him.)

We love the cheap goods that come out of China and into our stores. What do you pay at TJ Maxx for quality goods?

Now we have a large pool of people who have few service sector skills. And we scream about Wal-Mart which is a huge employer of unskilled labor.

Meanwhile, the building industry is booming. Considering that most people in the building industry are really in the service sector, that is where most of the low-skill labor jobs go. And it is Mexicans, primarily, who have turned out to carry shingles and chop tree roots.

The Midwest towns that are still economically depressed do not enjoy this building growth. Their tax bases have stagnated or eroded. Too many people have turned to drugs. Drugs need to be manufactured, moved and sold just like any other commodity. It is no surprise that where there is a vibrant market and limited deterrence that the drug market would flourish.

Where to enter the “cause and effect” of all this to place blame is impossible.

The illegal immigration issue needs to have the crystal clear leadership stated by Colin Powell in the first Gulf War when he said we would corner the snake and “cut off it’s head.” And we need to mean it.

Illegal immigration is a significant part of the problem, but the economic problems visited on many small towns by the global economy will have to be worked out within the towns themselves. Some towns will continue to wither while others will find ways to revitalize. Those who stagnate while putting more and more citizens on the dole will be speeding up the death of their communities. It is a truth of nature that eventually too many parasites will strangle the host.

This is nothing new. This has been the case for at least the past 15 years.

And regarding MS-13…. Latin Gangs (alone) DO NOT account for the increase in violent crimes in the Midwest. That’s misinformation.

[I certainly didn't mean to imply that MS-13 ALONE accounts for the increase, and a reasonable person wouldn't read such a claim into the post. I err on the side of assuming most readers are intelligent, not slow types who need every detail explained. This is where linking to sources comes in handy. - Admin]

The Midwest/suburban and rural America is being hit by three forces at the same time.

#1. Jobs leaving these small, mid sized and rural areas…such as manufacturing, etc… causes ripple affects for already fragile economies… When a factory closes…. small businesses that made revenue from that factory begin to close… and jobs become more scarce. This contributes to all sorts of underground economies.

Food pantry requests in suburban America are at an all-time high…. from people who didn’t need such services 10 years ago. People in these areas are under pressure (the same pressure that people in urban areas have been under for decades) to feed themselves and their families… this makes them more prone to get involved in activities that they wouldn’t ordinarily get involved in.

#2. Meth & other drugs are devastating communities in the Midwest. Meth today is the suburban and rural version of what Crack was for urban America in the 1980′s.

#3. Tight budgets for local and State governments over the past few years has put a strain on Police services. Some States/Counties have had to cut programs. Things like community policing and Federal funding for extra cops on the street has pretty much suffered because of the budget crisis after 9/11. Just about every State had to slash spending.

– And as far as immigration…. this is one of the few things that I agree with La Shawn on (generally agree anyway). lol

Take a look at this report… only a few blogs covered this story…and none covered it like I did. It sort of went under the radar.

Watch the video. The American public (the masses) didn’t see this of course.

http://mirroronamerica.blogspot.com/2006/04/former-immigration-security-director.html

My wife Dolores’s parents were slaves of the Nazis in Poland, and settled in Buffalo NY.
They spoke broken English, and lived in the Polish neighborhood. Citizenship had no meaning to them.

She worked at a laundry for nearly 40 years and sent Dolores to Catholic High School.

Around 1990, Dolores discovered that her mother had Alzheimers, so brought her to Lubbock TX. For a while, she got around OK, despite a lack of memory.

She became more difficult to manage. She could not qualify for Medicaid because the “Welfare Reform” of 1996 took away benefits for LEGAL ALIENS. I kid you not. This was what our Republican Congress did to people who came her legally and worked their whole life.

Finally, after several years of arm twisting, and an about face by Congress, they restored benefits.

Shameful. Some poor Vietnamese lady, who had taken in a child fathered by an American soldier (outcast in Vietnam) lost her housing and other benefits. A woman who had rescued this child was treated as an outcast.

This performance by Congress was shameful. These people were “in the shadows” because they were “over the hill” and couldn’t vote, and didn’t have the social skills to deal with such nonsense. Yet we readily give the same and more benefits to able bodied, lazy Americans who DO havew the social skils to go to the Welfare office and apply for benefits.

Bill Harrill