White Collar Homelessness and Immigration

Shannon Moriarity writes at Change.org:

As unemployment becomes worse, community-based organizations are noticing a change in their clientele. Shelters are seeing clients who are more representative of the newly unemployed. Here`s what one non-profit, Partnering for Change, reported on their blog just last week:

In recent months we`ve noticed a change in the needs of our program feeding homeless children. I`ve mentioned, there are over 11,000 elementary age children in Orange County, CA who are homeless. They are homeless for different reasons. But here`s a scenario you wouldn`t think would take place:

Two able body parents in their early 30`s. He has a 4 year college degree in marketing, she went to a technical school in information technology. Both are smart with a willingness to work. They have 3 kids, ages 8, 5 and 2. But guess what, they are both unemployed….for 9 months now.

This of course has been going on for a while. During the height of the H-1b craze in 2003, Oregon and Washington were near the top of US state in terms of families at serious risk of not having enough food. A friend of mine talked to the manager of one of the larger private charities in Oregon who saidthat he had experienced a dramatic shift in composition of who needed his services. I think we are seeing what starts on the West Coast moving into the rest of the country a few years later.

Several of the comments in the article on White Collar homelessness deal with immigration. What I see is a fundamental problem:we are dealing with a situation in which the major economic authorities have become so politicized that they have no more intellectual credibility than a late night real estate infomercial. The reporting of the facts in this situation are left to bloggers and institutions that have minimal funding or voice.

In a lot of ways, the situation really could get worse for American citizens than the Great Depression I. During the Great Depression I, immigration restriction was already largely in place-which is one reason why stimulus measures could at least contain the race to the bottom a little bit. During Great Depression II, the United States lacks even intellectually honest political or intellectual leadership to analyze the situation.