California's battle with U.S. immigration law

Having lived in California for most of my entire life, with the exception of living on the East Coast until the age of 6, I think that I can speak with some clarity as to the problems within the Golden State.

Up until 10 years ago I resided in the California, but because of social and economic situations I decided to move to Big Sky Country and I have not looked back since.

California today is a divided state in the sense that there are the high-tech communities around the Bay Area and the extremely wealthy in various areas around the state, including Hollywood. Then there are the rural and agricultural areas within the state that truly supply about two-thirds of all the agricultural products we consume. The San Joaquin and the Coachella Valley are truly the Bread Basket of America and they are now in jeopardy because of California environmental regulations and water restrictions.

What has happened to California isn’t something that happened over night; it is something that has been 30 years in the making. Overwhelmingly, California is a Democratic state because of the huge populations within certain given areas, Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego just to mention a few. As a result of these huge liberal Democratic populations in these compressed areas, numerous state laws and regulations have been passed and have turned a “blind eye” to federal immigration law. As a result, the state is now mired in a liberal La-La-Land and the blue-collar working-class Democrats are leaving the state at a rate of about 10,000 a month. A number of my high-school classmates have left the state for Texas and other states over the course of 30 years to set up their business in a better working environment.

The open border policies under Clinton, Bush and Obama have allowed millions of illegal aliens to enter into the United States, and the largest potion have settled in California. As a result of this influx of cheap labor into California, thousands of uneducated and low-skilled Americans have been pushed out of their jobs and are forced to move elsewhere or seek state and federal assistance from their respective governments. As a result of this economic shift, California now has the lowest quality of lifestyle and the highest population now on welfare. In the city of Los Angeles alone, there are over 58,000 people living on the streets and receiving some sort of assistance from the local authorities, and San Francisco is not far behind with all its illegals and homeless on the streets.

The vast majority of the state legislature is now “Hispanic” and has bent over backwards to accommodate those who have snuck into our country and now receive welfare, Social Security and even a driver’s license which automatically registers them on the voting rolls of the state, for you are not required to show a birth certificate of citizenship. Chicago is doing the same thing with their illegals and furnishing them with an I.D., which in turn will allow them to vote.

So with a lot of working-class people leaving the state, the Democratic Party has had to come up with a new class of voters in order to remain in power. This shift in demographics has now come in direct conflict with the Trump administration because of the number of illegals and criminal illegal elements within the state.

California has now become a country within a country,and yet it wants federal assistance to help run their “country” from the very country to which they are opposed. It is estimated that there are about 880,000 criminal elements within the state of California alone, and the episode of the Oakland Mayor warning them about federal raids doesn’t help the situation at all.

The DACA situation is a completely different matter, but to the Democratic Party, immigration and DACA are one and the same, and couple that with La Raza, which wants open borders, and a constitutional showdown is now in place and it won’t involve the 9th Circuit Court, but the Supreme Court of the United States.

We need in this country an agricultural workforce and that is a problem that has been over looked since the 1950s when a guest worker program was put in place. But it was destroyed by the very people who wanted the program to start with, for they exploited the workers and eventually the program was halted because of corruption. That program needs to be addressed again, with a common-sense approach that is a benefit to all. We cannot bring into the country entire families and expect to house these people, feed them and send their kids to school and benefit from that. But at the same time, we cannot allow MS-13, Nuestra Familia or the Mexican Mafia to roam our streets any more than we can afford to import any more maids, janitors or hamburger flippers to do these low-skilled tasks.

The biggest problem to all of this is the bureaucracy that is the federal government. We have since 1960, when congressional retirements were put in place, a class of professional politicians who have turned Washington, D.C., into their own personal Old Folks Retirement Home, complete with perks and benefits that you and I can only dream about.

Until we change the agenda of who is going to run this country, with the sole idea that the American people come first, we will continue to flounder from one crisis to another.

Garvey is a resident of Kalispell.