Immigration isn’t a problem, it’s a positive for America. That doesn’t hold for massive illegal immigration coupled with chain migration. That will make us into a Third World country with one-party rule. A perfect example of that can be seen in Hazelton, Pennsylvania.
Without an orderly, closely supervised system of immigration, we will all look like Hazelton. Immigration needs to be organized and at a pace that allows for assimilation.
A lengthy piece in the City Journal describes the dramatic changes that turned Hazelton into a non-American city.
Once a historic town of European immigrants, it has since become a Dominican stronghold of legal and illegal immigrants who will not assimilate.
It was once ethnically diverse with Christian and Jewish communities and a 1% Hispanic community. It’s no longer diverse and the changes took place almost overnight due to the massive influx boosted greatly by chain migration.
The new Americans segregate themselves. They do not assimilate. The author writes:
Dominicans started moving to New York City in the 1960s, fleeing the Dominican Republic’s political upheaval and mass poverty, just as Congress passed the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, a major policy reform that unleashed family-based chain migration in the United States. Mass chain migration resulted in Dominicans becoming Gotham’s second-largest Hispanic group by 1992.
Many moved to northern Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, which transformed into a Dominican outpost, with bodegas, Pentecostal congregations, restaurants, and cab fleets bearing a Dominican cultural stamp. The Dominican New Yorkers tended to isolate themselves in the neighborhood, preserving their island culture with the aid of modern communications.
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A 2002 SUNY Albany study on Hispanic residential patterns found that, compared with other Hispanic immigrant groups, Dominicans had higher levels of residential segregation. The “average Dominican,” the report noted, “lives in a neighborhood where only one of eight residents is a non-Hispanic white.” Doubtless as a partial consequence of its isolation, the Dominican community has lower levels of income and higher unemployment, and receives public assistance to a greater degree, than other Hispanic groups.
The Washington Heights area they took over is still very depressed.
Hazelton represented the American Dream to the new legal and illegal immigrants:
Hazleton’s low crime rate, affordable housing, stable schools, idyllic neighborhoods, and proximity to New York made it a perfect choice for relocation. In 1990, just 249 Hispanics lived in Hazleton, making up 1 percent of the city’s residents. But the earliest New York transplants loved their new home. “Most people in New York City think life in Pennsylvania as we’re living it is a dream,” a new resident told the Hazleton Standard-Speaker in 1991. “I can sit down in my house, open my door, watch TV to 10 or 11 at night. I don’t have to worry about someone walking in shooting me, ripping me off.”
Another Hispanic transplant said that Hazleton should prepare for mass migration. “People of Hazleton have to realize we are going to keep pouring in,” he told the Standard-Speaker. “If not they have to learn we are just as free as they are. They can’t deny us anything. They have to start dealing with us. If they don’t deal with us, push has come to shove, and we’ll deal with them like in New York City.” After the towers fell, Dominican migrants began arriving en masse.
Pour in they did and Hazelton can’t keep up. It’s the reason Trump took Hazelton by 77 percent after almost 30 years under Democrat rule:
The texture of Hazleton life changed seemingly overnight. Vinyl banners with loud graphics soon came to dominate the facades of sober nineteenth-century retail buildings. Pentecostal and evangelical congregations now fill former Catholic and Protestant churches. Blocks of duplex homes, uniformly encased with aluminum siding, crowd with families living in Section 8 housing or in subdivided rental units. Satellite dishes adorn these properties, providing access to Spanish-language television stations. Elegant mansions, once owned by coal operators and merchants, have fallen into structural decay because of absentee landlords’ neglect.
The demographic composition of the Hazleton Area School District has grown steadily more Hispanic. In 2007, the district was 28 percent Hispanic and 69 percent non-Hispanic white. As of 2014, the district was 45 percent Hispanic and 51 percent non-Hispanic white.
In recent years, Dominican parents living in New York have commonly signed over custody of their children to relatives or friends in Hazleton so that the children can go to better schools. But Hazleton’s budget can’t keep pace with all the new arrivals, many of whom need special services.
A district that had need for only one ESL teacher in the 1990s, for example, now has 2,298 English-language learners, nearly 20 percent of its student body; more than half the student body today live in low-income households.
By 2017, the school district—encompassing over 250 square miles of southern Luzerne County, northern Schuylkill County, and western Carbon County—faced a $6 million deficit, in part driven by the demographic change. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s School Performance Profile data, the school district generally scores low in academics. The high school, for example, registered a failing 57.2 academic score for the 2016–17 school year.
Beautiful, financially sound Hazelton is now a depressed area with ineffective schools, rampant crime, gangs, and fleeing whites.
According to the article: The Standard-Speaker called Hazleton a “city under siege.” A New York Times Magazine profile of Hazleton’s heroin epidemic described the city’s Alter Street neighborhood as an “overt drug market linked to crime and decay.”
The town wasn’t prepared for unchecked immigration, massive immigration, an invasion if you will. Once you allow chain migration, there is no way to monitor who is coming into the country and the reasons they are coming. There is no assimilation.
Under Barack Obama, immigration no longer sought assimilation. Citizens were told to welcome diverse foreigners and alter their culture to meet everyone else’s. They called it diversity and inclusiveness.
Diversity — defined the way the leftists want it defined — is not inclusion, it’s isolation and exclusion. The word means the opposite of what its definition implies. What unites Americans and makes us who we are is the assimilation of traditional American values.
The politicians have let us down and won’t do a thing about it. They will not work together. Too many Republicans are not really Republicans and Democrats are becoming Socialists.
Peggy Noonan wrote, “You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you.”
That sums it up well.
Read the story at City Journal. It’s a lesson Americans need to learn.
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