Beautiful Losers

A Patriots’ revolt against illegal immigration is underway in the New York Area town of Farmingville. Local activists under the leadership of the Sachem Quality of Life Council are sponsoring a conference August 4-5. The heroic Glenn Spencer of LA-based American Patrol will be there. George W. Bush will not, but who cares? 

By William Frohnhoefer

Also by William Froenhoefer: New York’s Other Economy

Back in the early 1980s "deinstitutionalization" became the new watchword of public policy regarding the welfare of the mentally ill. Liberals began to advocate their release onto the city streets. The reasoning: years of institutionalization had greatly impaired the self-esteem of these socially-challenged souls. The only way for them to feel empowered would be to abruptly remove them from sanitariums, give them a few bucks of pin money and remind them to take their medication regularly.

And so, quite predictably, an army of homeless descended upon American cities.

Compassion soon gave way to a new condition known as “compassion fatigue”–the condition suffered by those who had been aggressively panhandled or even threatened by foul-smelling, deranged vagrants. At about this time, homelessness was transformed from an opportunity for almsgiving into An Important Cause. Inevitably, we were subjected to frenzied newscasts about the Growing Crisis and were introduced to some new homeless celebrities like Billie Boggs and Mitchell Snyder. The ranks of America’s newest special interest group were soon swelled by untreated patients from the Horrifying Crack Epidemic. By the mid-1980s homelessness was competing with racism and AIDS at the top of The New York Times Hot 100.

Homelessness provides an instructive historical lesson. It was treated rhetorically by the mainstream media as if it was an unstoppable force of nature. In reality, it was an eminently foreseeable consequence of a laughably flawed public policy. Nevertheless, homelessness was portrayed as a problem so enormous and all-encompassing that all of us would need to permanently readjust our lives, mores and incomes to accommodate the demands of homeless advocacy groups.

Those changes were pretty drastic in New York City, for example. Laws against loitering and vagrancy were no longer enforced. People began to take for granted that every third car on the subway was a makeshift home and sometimes lavatory for bums. Public restrooms ceased to exist: they had been converted into impromptu emergency housing. Crews of vagabonds pushing stolen grocery carts descended on quiet residential neighborhoods rummaging through homeowners’ trash for redeemable soda cans (another public policy triumph!) and leaving non-can refuse strewn through the streets. Public parks in which women and children once felt free to play and relax were now too intimidating to visit even by daylight.

Progressive activists, “community leaders” and politicians threw up their hands. The problem was unsolvable - it could only be monitored and treated, not cured. More homeless shelters were needed. More taxes were needed to subsidize low-income housing and rent control programs. People needed to modify their own behavior to suit the needs and difficulties of the homeless.

Fast-forward 15 years to suburban America in 2001. New challenges to the enforcement of loitering and vagrancy laws are emerging. As New York Newsday recently reported, communities like Farmingville on New York’s Long Island are experiencing a new wave of unwelcome strangers. They are roving crowds of Third World immigrants who work illegally as day laborers on construction sites throughout the greater New York metropolitan area.

This is how the operation works: a contractor or site foreman who is looking for a few extra pairs of hands for that day’s work will drive up to a gathering of a few dozen of these illegals. He will negotiate an hourly wage for that day and select a few men. The lucky ones hop in the van or pickup truck and go off to work. This process may be repeated several times. The unlucky ones hang around for several hours hoping for a straggler–at perhaps eleven o’clock or noon they call it a day and return to a nearby one-family row house which has been illegally converted into a flop joint with a few dozen rented mattresses or cots. If they don’t feel like going back just yet, they’ll hang out in the neighborhood conversing loudly and drinking malta or beer for a little longer.

Around 16,000 people live in Farmingville, according to the article, and perhaps 1,000 illegals throng its streets early every weekday morning. Residents aren’t particularly pleased by having dozens of loud young men hanging around in front of their houses for hours each day. They aren’t particularly thrilled by the empty sandwich wrappers, cigarette butts, beverage bottles and urine on their front lawns, either.

All the elements active in the homelessness crisis of the 1980s are at work here.

The first is the characterization of the problem as an inevitable force of nature. Tom Suozzi, the mayor of nearby Glen Cove is quoted as saying: "These [illegals] are not going to go away. We don’t have the power to ask someone for a green card."

As we all know, our illegal immigration problem is not an inevitable act of God, but a quite avoidable consequence of wrongheaded legislation. The helpless Mr. Suozzi is obviously being disingenuous about the larger phenomenon: his protestations are laughable. Does the city of Glen Cove lack the power to arrest someone for not having proper vehicle registration, Mr. Suozzi? How about driving or even walking around with an open container of alcohol? Or owning an unlicensed firearm?

I imagine that widespread violations of this sort from lifelong residents of Glen Cove would inspire Mr. Suozzi to use his full authority as Glen Cove’s municipal executive. But when an army of illegal aliens is creating a public nuisance, his hands are inexplicably tied.

Another similarity to the Great Homeless Crisis of 1986: the portrayal of the offending parties, in this case individuals who are creating a public nuisance while violating federal law, as "victims."

Thus the Newsday article was written from the vantage point of Israel Arvizu, a 20-year-old vagrant with a wife and child in Hidalgo, Mexico. He claims to have been assaulted by two men with a shovel last year. Newsday did not inform us of what provocation Mr. Arvizu offered to his alleged assailants, but dwells fulsomely on his plight. No mention is made of the fact that Sr. Arvizu would have been well out of the reach of any nativist spade if he had decided not to enter the US illegally.

We, of course, do not hear the stories of the people who have endured months of littering and urination on their lawns - or from the family of a Farmingville woman who was apparently mowed down by a drunken illegal alien motorist last July. Sr. Arvizu is the victim of bigotry and (sniff!) hatred–a wrong crying out to be solved through appropriate legislation. Our dead American pedestrian was simply a victim of a natural force–like a poor soul snatched by a tornado.

Finally, like the Great Homeless Crisis, we are expected simply to adjust our lives to the whims and mores of our unwelcome new guests. And, just as we were expected to put up with the sometimes-violent eccentricities of a small army of drug-addled psychotics, so we are expected to show the same graceful self-hatred in the face of our newest difficulty.

One instructive aspect of the Great Homeless Crisis, however, retains its value. A new city administration immediately began to crack down on crimes like indecent exposure, loitering, public urination, soliciting, and drug use. The homeless were rehospitalized or arrested.

As this process developed, some of the homeless advocacy propaganda began to become stale and routinely contradicted by the facts. “Homeless people are just like everyone else. It could happen to anyone tomorrow” we were told time and time again. As it turned out, the vast majority of homeless were either mentally ill or minority men with criminal records between the ages of 17 and 40–demonstrating the homeless community’s shocking refusal to embrace diversity.

Proactive policing and “profiling” made New York City much safer and less unpleasantly aromatic than it was before. Despite the fulminations of illegal immigration advocates and enablers, history’s lesson is clear: what stupid public policy has done, intelligent public policy can undo.

But until that realization begins to dawn, we will be led down the primrose path by the apologists of illegal immigration and its weak-willed fellow travelers, the sort of people who were marchers in a procession held for Sr. Arvizu, a scene he describes (through a translator) as follows: "One by one, the Americans began walking alongside us. There are some beautiful people here."

Or some beautiful losers.