The SoCal Third World slums the Los Angeles Times helped create

The Los Angeles Times offers "The Southland's hidden Third World slums" about trailer parks in California's Coachella Valley (home of Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, and other cities). We're told that one of the parks was dumping raw sewage into the Salton Sea, others have flowing sewage behind the trailers, many residents go without heat and even electricity, and, in short, three pages of horrors for we First Worlders. We're told:

The tenants are almost entirely Latino farm or construction workers. Many are in the United States legally, but plenty are not.

If all the illegal aliens in the parks left tomorrow, the conditions of those who are legal residents would improve due to market forces.

The bottom line in this matter is that those responsible for these parks are those who profit from employing their residents, and the enablers of those people. The Los Angeles Times fits squarely into the last category, excusing illegal immigration every chance they get. Sure, the L.A. Times (and almost all Democratic leaders) might want to help them out a bit by building them a community center or otherwise fluffing their pillows, but the last thing they want is for all that cheap labor to leave the country. It's a sweet deal for them: they get ethnic power, combined with cheap, compliant labor, combined with the warm feeling they get from writing stories like this to show how humanitarian and caring they are. But, they aren't willing to do anything about the root cause of the problems they complain about.

Immigration2007a · Mon, 03/26/2007 - 13:17 · · Importance: 1