* I have relatives in an affluent West Los Angeles neighborhood. Twenty-five years ago, Halloween was a significant neighborhood event, with regular trick-or-treating, Halloween parties, and the like. According to my relatives, this year, they had exactly one trick-or-treater the entire night. Prime neighborhoods in the area are graying as people hang on to their houses until they die (California’s Proposition 13, which caps increases on property taxes until the house is sold, is a big factor), and few households can afford both children and a house in these neighborhoods.
* The Roma are typical of a small tribe of low-trust people who have grafted onto a larger, high-trust society for sustenance. This has occurred throughout world history. Unfortunately for them, because of their natural sociopathy/low-trust tendencies make it impossible for them to run their own nation. When such people do get ahold of their own nation, the nation quickly falls into internal squabbling/strife/civil war as the various low-trust members stab each other in the back and ally with foreigners over their own countrymen.
* If you want to take this full-circle to the California example, you can. You have two very different models of immigration, exemplified well by the Bay Area versus LA. In the Bay Area, the tech industry draws (relatively) high-education/high-skilled people mostly from East or South Asia. There are issues with this type of immigration, in particular that they’re effectively indentured servants of the companies sponsoring their visas and they keep wages down for native workers doing the same work. But well educated and skilled people with an incentive to keep a steady job and not rock the boat make for relatively placid immigrants.
Los Angeles is the alternative. There, yes, you have a continual stream of Latin-American illegal immigration feeding the local labor economy. Problematic in a few respects, but hardly the worst category of immigrants you can find locally. That distinction belongs very much to immigrants from low-trust societies in the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Central Asia, and (to a lesser extent) some parts of South and East Asia. The “Silk Road people,” as I call them. You find these folks very well represented in dodgy and often questionably-legal small businesses, if not running outright scams or involved in organized and white-collar crime. Many of them have figured out how to rig the game to a tee – a perverse version of the immigrant success story – insinuating themselves in apparently legitimate activities like charitable organizations and politics, and making use of ethnic affinity links to find victims as well as co-conspirators (e.g., shady professionals in various fields, like lawyers, doctors, or real estate brokers who are in positions to facilitate various fraudulent schemes).
* We lived in Southern California as a family in the mid-1980s and returned again in the 1990s. By the late 1990s, I thought we were living in Mexico. By 1996, we were refugees en route to Oklahoma. California wasn’t safe for adults or children. I felt my choice was either to buy a gun or leave; we left.
Our take was the the social contract in California was breaking down — wide-spread crime as the “have nots” looted the “have” communities at night, violent gangs with shootouts and carjackings, and extremely low-performing PC schools proselytizing multiculturalism, feminism, and other relativist anarchy. My perception was that the schools were psychologically damaging the kids, not educating them. Our recourse was private schools.
Almost every gringo we knew at the time was plotting an exit strategy. Those who did leave fueled real estate bubbles in Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, and Colorado as people realized they could sell their four-bedroom ranchers in LA for “mcmansions” outside the state and still put a couple of hundred grand in the bank.
California — a safe environment for raising children? You’ve got to be kidding! We still have family there. We avoid visiting on their turf. We encourage them to fly and “Great Flyover” and visit us on the East Coast.
