Super-Amnesty Will Turn Every City Into Detroit
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
After another bloody weekend in Chicago, Mayor
Rahm Emanuel branded the shootings unacceptable and
the city’s top cop demanded more gun control laws.
Chicago’s murder rate has actually dropped since
concealed carry became legal. Emanuel’s lawsuits
over his illegal gun control laws have left the
already struggling city deep in the hole and forced
to cover the NRA’s million dollars in legal bills.
Concealed
carry paid off over that bloody weekend when a vet
carrying a gun returned fire stopping a massacre
before it happened. The original shooter ended up in
the hospital, but nobody ended up in the morgue,
which kept the death toll for the weekend down to
fourteen.
Fourteen isn’t pretty, but it’s better than twenty
or thirty.
Chicago’s murder rate in 1992 was double what it is
today. The death rate was at 33.7 out of 100,000
which meant that you had a pretty good chance of
being shot in Chicago. Today it’s down to 15 out of
100,000, which is small comfort to those ending up
in the morgue, but it gives everyone else much
better odds of surviving to see what ingenious ways
the next corrupt mayoral administration will use to
rip off the city.
Back in 1992, the cops also blamed guns for the
murder rate. But it wasn’t the guns that were
killing people. It was the gangs. Now the murder
rate is down, but the number of shootings is up. To
Chicago’s police boss, that’s a problem, as if it
makes a difference to the deceased whether he’s
shot, stabbed or dropped in the water wearing cement
overshoes. But fighting guns is easier than fighting
crime.
The gun obsession is one of the few things that cops
and leftists have in common. It’s the last
politically acceptable form of prohibitionism in a
society that enthusiastically legalizes drugs, even
if possessing crack cocaine is statistically much
more likely to lead you to kill a man, than
possessing a gun will.
Every shooting spree bypasses the obvious problem
with calls for more gun laws and something for the
youth to do over the weekend that doesn’t involve
shooting up the local housing project. This weekend,
Rahm Emanuel took on the problem of funding more
teen centers while Chicago’s top cop blustered about
more gun laws. And then having successfully talked
around the issue, they all went home.
The left loves root causes more than it loves red
shirts and black bandanas, a fashion choice that it
shares with some of the gangs responsible for most
of the shootings.
America’s gun violence problem is urban. It’s
localized in Democratic enclaves. And it overlaps
neatly with its corrupt political machines. It has
nothing to do with the NRA and a great deal to do
with the party of social engineering, the welfare
state and gun bans.
And illegal immigration.
Homicide rates overlap with unemployment rates,
especially when accounting for the demographic
populations of young minority men who are
statistically more likely to kill or be killed.
92% of black male teens in Chicago don’t have a job.
In Detroit, 50% of black men are unemployed. It’s
not that there aren’t any jobs, but the entry level
jobs have been mostly going to immigrants.
The Center for Immigration Studies found that
under Obama two-thirds of jobs went to immigrants,
both legal and illegal. Throw in a massive illegal
alien amnesty and the rush of illegal aliens into
the country will turn the employment figures of
every city into Detroit and Chicago.
The black male unemployment rate in New York was at
33%. And the murder rate in New York is
significantly lower than in Detroit or Chicago. But
how long will that last if the unemployment rate in
New York rises above 50%? Before long the marginal
gangs will swell to monstrous sizes controlling
entire neighborhoods. Anyone who can will flee and
the city will once again become what it was.
The same process will take place in most major
American cities.
The United States of America does not have a
shortage of workers. It has a shortage of jobs. The
irresponsible immigration policy has created a
surplus of workers. Illegal alien amnesty will make
that surplus much worse. Legalize twelve million
illegal aliens and another twelve million will come.
Those who can’t find jobs, will find gangs. Those
who lose jobs to them will also find gangs.
The gangs will fight each other for control of
entire neighborhoods and the crime wave will set
America back decades.
After the 1986 amnesty, the number of murders, which
had begun to fall in the early eighties, rose again.
They did not return to a pre-amnesty level until
1997. Rapes have only recently returned to a
pre-amnesty level. Now the progress we’ve made is
about to be undone all over again.
In 1986, murder rates suddenly rose mysteriously in
major cities. The New York Times described the crime
rates as being the highest since the 1970s.
In Chicago, murders increased by 20%. In New York
they increased by 20%. The cities rushed to crack
down on guns while insisting that they were
mystified by the drastic increase.
The guns weren’t the problem. The illegal alien
amnesty which had created a magnet was. Illegal
aliens with fake documents headed in hoping to take
advantage of amnesty. Later newly legalized
immigrants invited their family members to join
them. Even before the amnesty took effect, crime
rates spiked.
Amnesty
advocates claim that immigrants aren’t taking jobs
from Americans because they are more likely to be
employed at the lower and higher ends of the
marketplace. And that’s half true. What it really
means is that they displace trained technical
workers at the high end of the marketplace. That
leads to a further erosion of the native middle
class, but it doesn’t directly lead to gang
violence.
At the lower end of the marketplace, they not only
displace workers, but they displace the workers that
might have been. Teenagers who would have started
working regular jobs instead roam around aimlessly.
The lost entry level jobs are substituted with
crime. Neighborhoods fall apart and gang violence
increases as gang members compete for turf in the
new drug marketplace. And the rest is crime
statistics and children taken to morgues in cities
that can barely keep the lights on.
If we want to repeat the same cycle again,
Super-Amnesty, an amnesty several times bigger than
the one in 1986, will make it happen. Entire cities
will fall into gang violence. Their economies will
collapse and that will have a ripple effect on their
suburbs and on entire states.
America will be a more dangerous and poorer place.
And the politicians will talk some more about
banning guns and about building more teen centers
for the youth to hang out in between shootings.