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Aside from the March Madness
that continued into
April, all anyone seems to want to talk about these days is
immigration. Salida and Chaffee County have been growing in
recent years, and this is not a result of a rising birth
rate. We have been getting plenty of immigrants, and truth
be told, it can be hard to adjust to them.
For one thing, there are language problems. They do not
speak as we do. Few of them know a widowmaker jack
from a come-along,
or even a mule
from a
burro.
If you refer to my beater,
they think you're
talking about a kitchen tool rather than your vehicle. And
when they speak, we have trouble understanding that a
Blackberry
is an electronic device rather than
something to eat.
Then there's the culinary problem. Before the immigrants
came, you could sit down in a diner and order a cup of
coffee.
But now there are dozens of ways to order
coffee, none of them simple. When I hit my afternoon slump
and just want some liquid caffeine because a siesta would
be inconvenient, I do not want to have to ponder espresso,
cappuccino or mocha latte. Yet the immigrants have forced
such decisions on us.
Further, it used to be simple to order meat and
potatoes
as in burger and fries
or sausage
and hash browns
or sirloin and baked.
Now those
items are a small portion of the menu if they're there at
all. The immigrants have encouraged our eateries to offer
organic muffins for breakfast, garden-fresh salads for
lunch and braised boneless free-range skinless chicken
breasts for dinner. Immigration has made it hard to find
real food here, because these people insist on keeping
their bizarre culture after moving to our country.
My teacher friends tell me that the immigrants have made
their work harder. In the pre-immigration days, parents
were pleased if their offspring learned to read, write and
handle numbers. Since this wave of immigration began,
teachers are supposed to worry about fostering
individual self-esteem
and implanting holistic
refusal skills.
They have also messed up the local housing market. When they buy in town, they bid up prices so that local workers can no longer afford local housing. When the immigrants build in the countryside, they construct gated ghettos where they become isolated from our mainstream society, and presumably attempt to maintain the customs and culture of their homelands rather than learn to assimilate with us.
The effects don't stop there. The last time I needed a
plumber, he explained that he was getting out of the repair
end of the business. I can work on clean, new
construction for $50 an hour,
he explained, or crawl
around in the cramped grungy cellars in the old part of
town for half that. Which would you rather do?
Thus do the immigrants burden the local economy, by forcing long-time residents to pay more, not just for plumbers, but also for carpenters, glaziers, masons, roofers, electricians, auto mechanics and computer technicians.
Immigrants also cost us as taxpayers. Several studies have demonstrated that the immigrants' rural developments provide only about 70 cents in tax revenue for every dollar they cost in public services -- road maintenance and plowing, ambulance service, fire protection, sheriff's patrols and the like. And yet the federal government, which refuses to halt this costly immigration, offers precious little assistance to our strapped local governments. Local taxpayers get stuck with the tab.
And politically, there isn't much we can do about it. Every time the county tries to pass a new master plan, designed to discourage the immigrant enclaves and encourage the immigrants to live in town and participate in our society, the powerful immigrant-support bloc of developers and real-estate agents manages to defeat it.
Granted, these immigrants really haven't taken jobs away from locals. Since about 1980, there haven't been any jobs here to take. But there are certainly times when I, and some of my friends, wish that our government would do something about the growing problem of suburban immigration into rural Colorado.
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