Heather Mac Donald writes: California’s cradle-to-grave welfare subsidies for illegal aliens and its widespread sanctuary policies have made the state a magnet for border-crossing migrants. That longstanding encouragement of immigration lawlessness has bred a sense of entitlement. The illegal-alien riots serve as an object lesson in Broken Windows theory: tolerate lawlessness in one sphere of activity, and you will cultivate it in another.
California’s Democratic officials and sanctuary activists take it as a given that ICE has no right to make immigration arrests at or around workplaces—which is where the Friday enforcement actions took place. This no-workplace enforcement principle, made up out of thin air, is just a site-specific variant of a broader rule that the open-borders lobby has willed into existence: the government may not create anxiety in illegal aliens.
For decades, the mainstream media has denounced any hint of enforcement in the interior of the country because the mere possibility of being picked up by ICE, however remote, was making the illegal-alien “community” “fearful.” Apparently, there is not just an entitlement not to be deported once you cross the border illegally but also an entitlement to be free from any concern that you might be deported. Since, therefore, ICE’s enforcement efforts were illegitimate—notwithstanding that agents acted pursuant to judicial warrants—radical resistance to those efforts was necessary.
California is also ground zero for the toleration of crime and disorder. Vagrants rule the streets in many parts of Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and other cities. Three of the country’s most influential pro-decriminalization, anti-incarceration district attorneys—Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, George Gascón in Los Angeles, and Pamela Price in Oakland—presided in California until recent electoral defeats. Southern California is the home of street takeovers—whereby large groups commandeer major intersections to race cars, often followed by looting of nearby convenience stores. The use of SUVs to ram into luxury stores and bodegas alike in order to clear out the merchandise seemed to originate in California after the George Floyd race riots, as did follow-home robberies, whereby thieves spot Rolex and other fine jewelry-wearers at restaurants and follow them home to assault them.
So when Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass says, as she did on MSNBC on Tuesday morning, “I’m going to do everything I can to keep Angelenos safe, no matter how they came here,” when California governor Gavin Newsom says in a fundraising appeal on Tuesday morning: “Keeping Californians safe has always been our number one priority,” many Californians will chortle bitterly. Of course, to be fair to Bass, her solicitude was directed to the city’s large illegal-alien population, not to its law-abiding citizens, in the same way that Bass and her fellow government officials direct their primary concern to the state’s homeless population and criminals, not to taxpaying, hardworking residents.
