California confirms an untenable open borders, welfare state nightmare

California wants to be both an open borders, sanctuary state and a welfare haven of redistribution and free stuff. It will have to choose one.

The Golden State is running a significant but unstable surplus that even Gov. Gavin Newsom concedes is contingent on the nation's unprecedented economic growth and stagnating spending. Naturally Newsom, the state assembly, and the state Senate are all scrambling to outspendeach other in their various plans to pay for health insurance for illegal immigrants.

Their plans aren't just a theoretical disaster or even a plain moral one. In practice, these proposals would devastate California's already strained healthcare market and exacerbate the collapse of Medi-Cal, the state's public health insurance plan.

Newsom wants to spend nearly $100 million on covering low-income illegal immigrants from age 19 to 26. The state Senate wants to cover those illegal immigrants plus those over the age of 65. The state assembly wants to cover all illegal immigrant adults to the tune of $3.4 billion. (The state already has everyone eligible under the age of 19, citizen or not, to be covered by Medi-Cal.)

This is a bad idea on principle. Giving free stuff to illegal immigrants who fail to pay into the system confirms every worst nightmare of even the most libertarian leaning of those an inch to the right of Joe Biden. In the long run, it will likely create the untenable problem of too many people milking California's tax revenue, not enough paying in, and just enough continuing to flee the state as the budget demands further tax hikes on the states jobs creators.

But this is an abysmal idea in practice, and not in the long run, but immediately.

California already faces a shortage of doctors, in part because of of the state's generous health insurance coverage. Medicare reimbursement rates across the country run some 40% lower than that of private insurance. Medi-Cal's reimbursement rate average to about half of that of Medicare. As a result, just 6 out of every 10 doctors in the state accept Medi-Cal.

There are 1.8 million uninsured illegal immigrants in California. If the Senate proposal passes, that's lumping an extra 1.8 million into the Medi-Cal risk pool, asking the dwindling pool of doctors in the state to accept 1.8 million more patients with reimbursement rates tantamount to theft, and inevitably crowding out the millions of legal citizens already covered by Medi-Cal who will struggle even further to find doctors who will see them.

The healthcare market is already broken. Prices aren't responsive to any sort of consumer demand, and expanding the state's power as a price-setter will only exacerbate the issue and encourage existing doctors to leave the state and potential ones to choose other career fields. Given that California will face a shortage of more than 8,000 primary care physicians by 2030, this is, suffice it to say, a bit of a travesty in the making.

The countries with healthcare systems idolized by the socialist wing of the Democratic party, such as Sweden, have had to stringently tighten their borders to remain solvent. Ones that haven't, like France and Finland, have seen riots in the street or governmental collapse as the spending issue becomes untenable. You cannot have open borders and unlimited welfare. The case of California may posit an extreme, but it still follows the rule, not an exception, of a mutually exclusive dichotomy of left-wing dreams.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/california-confirms-an-untenable-open-borders-welfare-state-nightmare

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Stash Houses: A Hidden and Horrific Phenomenon on Border

Massive increases in illegal border crossings is stretching resources thin, while smugglers pack more illegal aliens into houses

BY CHARLOTTE CUTHBERTSON

May 22, 2019 Updated: May 22, 2019

EL PASO, Texas—Stash houses have been used for decades to hold humans and contraband on both sides of the southwest border, ready for transportation.

Now, along with the dramatic surge in human smuggling, there is an increase in the number of people who smugglers squeeze into stash houses, “especially since the family migration has been coming up,” said Jack Staton, special agent-in-charge of El Paso’s ICE Homeland Security Investigations.

“I’m just going to throw a random number out. Let’s say we would usually see 10 or 12. We’re now seeing houses that camp 54 people, 67 people,” he said.

In February, Staton’s team dismantled a stash house in Dexter, New Mexico, that housed 67 illegal aliens from Guatemala and Ecuador—six of whom were unaccompanied teenagers. The structure was an unfurnished, 20-foot by 20-foot wooden addition to a travel trailer.

“So there’s no room for them to even move. They did have a bathroom in there, but the bathroom didn’t work. In order to even use the restroom, they had to go outside,” Staton said on May 7. “The organization had taken their shoes off of them, so if they went outside, they wouldn’t run away because they’re just running across the desert now with no shoes on. It was pretty bad.

“That was one of the most horrific structures I’ve seen since I’ve been doing this job—and I’ve been doing border security and enforcement for over 24 years.

Often, those who are smuggled across the border need to then be smuggled around the highway checkpoint about 70 miles north, in Brooks County, especially as many are heading to Houston, San Antonio, or Dallas.

“So they’ll take them from those stash houses and they’ll run them up, as close as they can get to the checkpoint. And then they take them across in the ranch lands or they’ll put them in tractor trailers to try to smuggle them through the checkpoint,” Guerra said.

“These organizations … they don’t treat them as humans. They don’t see them as humans, they see them as a commodity. And they don’t have any respect for human life. They put them in the back of these 18 wheelers and of course with our weather down here, we’ve had some instances where they don’t make it to their final destination.”

On May 15, Border Patrol agents at a checkpoint near Laredo, Texas, discovered a semi-trailer with 120 illegal aliens locked in the back, according to Customs and Border Protection. The aliens included 11 juveniles from Honduras and Guatemala and 109 adults from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, and Mexico….

https://m.theepochtimes.com/stash-houses-a-hidden-and-horrific-phenomenon-on-border_2932642.html

Children in Social Services System Most at Risk of Being Sex Trafficked

BY PETR SVAB

May 22, 2019 Updated: May 22, 2019

Among children reported as likely victims of child sex trafficking upon running away from home, most have one thing in common—they were supposed to be looked after by the government.

In 2014, some 10,000 endangered runaway children were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a nonprofit that serves as a clearinghouse for reports on missing children. Nearly 1,700 of them were likely victims of sex trafficking and of those, 68 percent were in the care of social services when they went missing, be it a group home, a government facility, or foster care.

While these sobering statistics have been reported for years by the NCMEC, more recent data suggests that the problem is even more acute.

In 2017, nearly 25,000 runaways reported to NCMEC and nearly 3,600 were likely victims of sex trafficking. Of those, 88 percent came from the social services system.

In fact, children in the social services system are the group with the highest prevalence of child sex trafficking, said Robert Lowery, NCMEC’s vice president who heads its missing children division.

The real scope of the problem almost certainly goes beyond NCMEC’s data. The FBI reported over 420,000 missing children in 2018, while Lowery said the actual number of missing children could be as high as 1.3 million a year.

While most of the missing children are found, return on their own, or weren’t missing to begin with, there still appears to be a strong link between child sex trafficking and the social services system.

In 2013, 60 percent of child sex trafficking victims recovered as part of an FBI raid in 70 cities had “some familiarity with or involvement with either group homes or the foster care system,” said NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson in 2013.

In 2012, Connecticut Department of Children and Families reported (pdf) that of 88 child victims of sex trafficking it identified, 86 had been “involved with child welfare services in some manner,” many of whom were “victimized while in foster care or residential placement.”

The question follows, why?

Stripped of Family

Over 440,000 children were in the social services system as of September 2017. Only in a minority of cases were the reasons for removing the children from their families grim circumstances, such as physical abuse (12 percent), parent incarceration (7 percent), or a parent’s death (1 percent). The most common reasons for the removals were neglect (62 percent) and drug abuse by one or both parents (36 percent).

Parental drug abuse can be as simple as failing a single voluntary drug test. Neglect can mean as little as missing homeschooling paperwork, or even letting a child eat sweets before dinner.

While Lowery stressed that social workers are trying to do a “thankless job” as best they can, they have considerable power to have a child removed from his or her family based on minimal evidence. While the system differs from state to state, a social worker generally only needs to write an affidavit alleging neglect and, with no further evidence, obtain a removal order from a family court judge.

There have been cases where workers have fabricated evidence, twisted facts, or were even engaged in trafficking the children they were supposed to protect.

Once the child is in the system, it can be exceedingly difficult for the parents to get their child back.

Sometimes, social workers would form an impression of the family early on and “try to fit the evidence” to that impression, said Kevin Hickey, an Arkansas attorney with experience in foster system cases, in 2017. “So if they don’t like you or they think you’re a bad parent, you’re in for a long haul.”

As The Epoch Times previously reported, the system appears set up to incentivize workers to remove children, not necessarily to help families rehabilitate

https://m.theepochtimes.com/children-in-social-services-system-most-at-risk-of-being-sex-trafficked_2933128.html

>>6565811

This has got to be stopped, government agencies and laws contributing to this. I remember the GA senator that got killed along with her husband for revealing what child protective services and courts were doing