American Homelessness Indicts Elite Heartlessness

I wonder how the owners and controllers of Main Stream Media feel when they know in their bankers' hearts that their intransigence on the issue of patriotic immigration reform is precipitating Page One stories such as appeared in the Washington Post on Presidents' Day: "Homelessness: The Family Portrait: Across Region, Economy Pulls Rug From Under More and More 2-Parent Households, by Chris L. Jenkins, February 16, 2009

Probably not much—or they would change their positions and get with the vast majority of us American citizens who know the pinch, feel the pain and see the connection between homelessness and the unceasing importation of more legal and illegal aliens by the power elites who control our "play for pay" Congress.

This is the very same Congress claiming its stimulus bill will provide 4 million jobs, while allowing the importation of 138,000 legal aliens on work visas every month and arguing that illegal aliens should get benefits. The same bunch who failed in the stimulus bill to extend E-verify beyond March 6^th, although it allows employers to establish rapidly the legality of new employment applicants with a 99% accurate computer data base at the US government. Why wasn't it extended? Because the multinational companies who own our government said, "No!"

You think you live in a democracy? Don't be silly.

The powerful page one Post report launches with pictures into an increasingly familiar sad story.

 "Robert Polight leaned over an electric pot in a corner of Room 27 at the Breezeway Motel, stirring the sauce for his family's favorite dinner: spaghetti. He strained the noodles in the room's cramped bathroom sink.

His wife, Joshalyn James, had just finished slicing sausage on the coffee table and was busy cleaning up after him. Son Jake, 6, quietly played a video game, and daughter Haira,12, giggled on the phone."

We are caught up in this spiral from relative prosperity as we learn more.

"Dinnertime, even under these circumstances, has given the family a sense of stability since it became homeless.

"Fairfax County pays $65 a night for the family to stay at the 1950s-era motel in Fairfax City while it waits for space to open in a county shelter. The family was evicted from a rented townhouse in Spotsylvania after Polight lost his warehouse job and he and James couldn't make ends meet on her salary as a medical assistant.

"After a month at a relative's house, two nights in the couple's six-year-old Toyota and three nights in an emergency shelter, the family has tried to make a home in the drafty motel room, with its chipped, faded furniture and peeling paint. The family's belongings, packed in garbage bags, sit in a corner.

"It's a long fall from the comfortable life the family had when Polight and James were making about $60,000 a year."

Are you sad and empathetic yet? Me too. And remember, these are not panhandling losers, single parent drug addicts, these are people like so many of us, going paycheck to paycheck, unable to save as prices stayed expensive for housing, food and gasoline.

I won't recite all the excruciating travails of this couple and their various moves to try to meet their working needs and the educational chances of betterment for their children. But I applaud the writer of this article for telling us at the gut level the fact of where this economy is now and how it is likely to get far worse.

The article cites

 …"a study [PDF] to be released tomorrow by the Richmond-based research groups Commonwealth Institute and Voices for Virginia's Children concludes that if the national unemployment rate reaches 9 percent by the fall, as many as 218,000 Virginians might drop below the poverty line, including 73,000 children. A similar analysis by the Maryland Budget and Tax Policy Institute estimated that Maryland could see as many as 189,000 people slip below the poverty line.

"Statistics on the total number of homeless people in the Washington region won't be available until the spring, but shelters in Prince William, Arlington and Fairfax counties have reported increases in the number of two-parent families. Advocates in Prince George's County and officials in Montgomery County report more homeless families but not a marked increase in homeless two-parent households.

"The increases are most pronounced in those counties hit hardest by the housing crisis. In Prince William, officials said, 26 percent of 290 families that had stayed in two county shelters since July 1 were headed by two parents. In fiscal 2008, two-parent households accounted for 17 percent of about 384 families that stayed in those shelters.

" 'They are a regular part of the types of families we are seeing now,' said Cheri Villa, executive director of Serve, a Manassas area shelter and social services agency. She said the agency has seen more 'intact' families halfway through this fiscal year than it did last year. That doesn't include families that the agency turns away when the shelter is out of beds, she said.

" 'We could be talking about many, many more," she said.' "

So what do we do?

Keep screaming, Folks. We are importing poverty—both because the immigrants themselves are poor, and because they displace and depress the wages and displace native-born Americans who do things like work in warehouses. (But immigration's impact is reaching everyone).

This government is not one which will stop this vicious practice of importing slaves to take jobs from all of us—not just working people such as Robert Polight and Joshalyn James.

It will keep eating upwards and downwards into the lives of every single America citizen—unless it is thrown out of office.

Donald A. Collins [email him], is a freelance writer living in Washington DC and a former long time member of the board of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. His views are his own.