The New White

Occasionally people say to me, “Dr. Wes, how do you feel about all these illegal immigrants coming to America, taking American jobs away, and making so many of us real American citizens unemployed and causing us to be homeless?”

At times like that I like to always begin with a DISCLAIMER: None of the opinions expressed by me, Dr. Wes Browning, ever reflect the views of Real Change, the views of homeless people in general, or those of any other actual person, living or dead. In fact the views expressed by Dr. Wes Browning may not even be his own, owing to the fact that this is Adventures in Irony (look it up), not Adventures in Wes’ Final Answers Dished Out Clear and Easy for the Sake of the Irony-Impaired.

That said, the premise of the question is a crock. Illegal immigration can’t be blamed for the current high rate of homelessness. In fact illegal immigration is not a problem at all. Ask me how I know that! Go ahead; ask me!

I’ll pretend you just did ask me. The ultimate consideration is what’s the effect of all immigration, illegal or otherwise. And what matters there is the total percentage of foreign-born residents in the US resident population as a whole. That measures the potential social impact of immigration.

“So what’s the per capita of foreigners among us, and what are we going to do about it, because it’s getting to be way too much, isn’t it, Wes?”

No it’s not! The Census Bureau works out the per capita foreign-born rate, and it’s NOT too much! The current rate is near 10%, which is high compared to its all-time low of 5% in 1970, but less than what it has been almost every year this country was in existence prior to WWII.

In fact, from 1860 to 1930, the foreign-born rate was generally in the vicinity of 13%. And those were the Good Old Days, when we had family values and no hippies!

The only time in history when the American rate of foreign-borns was high enough to have a serious impact was before we became a country. True, around about 1607 and continuing for some years after, a huge surge in illegal immigration resulted in our languages being replaced by a foreign language (English), but nothing that serious is happening now.

I think it helps to understand the problem of illegal immigration and its impact on homelessness to compare it to the problem of illegal drinking in Saudi Arabia and the impact that has on the price of gasoline in Omaha, Nebraska: zip.

Or compare it to the Drug War.

In 1873 there was no heroin addiction in this country, even though heroin was completely legal. That’s because it didn’t exist yet. In 1874, it was made in a lab and called diacetylmorphine, but it still wasn’t a big problem. Heroin addiction started to be a social problem after the Bayer Company came out with what they called Bayer Heroin Cough Syrup in 1898, giving us the name. Twenty-five years later it was estimated that 0.2% of all Americans were heroin addicts, and heroin use became illegal. So today your heroin addiction isn’t just a health problem, it’s illegal, just like a lot of immigration. It became illegal because legislators made it illegal.

So you could ask, what role do today’s illegal heroin addictions play in creating our country’s increasing homeless problem? And the answer would be, FORGET ILLEGALITY, look at the overall rate of heroin addiction. After 8 decades of laws against it, it’s still only around .2 or .3 percent. So that can’t explain the homelessness, can it?

Consider those opinions as fodder for further discussions.

One last note, for you history buffs out there: George Bush has decreed that the Star Spangled Banner should be in English. He obviously didn’t know that in 1919 our very own US government issued its own Spanish translation, for educational purposes. Isn’t history fun?