The Top 40

Can you imagine Apple or HP trying to start in California today?

They wouldn't even survive the business license acquisition process.

Keep you eye on the ex-Californians. Unless they are very different than the other economic migrants, they will flee to more successful locations and promptly set about re-creating the failure they fled.

Ask anyone in The South. Everybody from Ohio and Michigan, after a few serious sun burns, soon become experts on what we here need to do to make our cities and states much better, like Michigan and Ohio?

I'd support a Constitutional Amendment preventing recent arrivals in states from voting for some extended period, or possibly only their children can vote if they were born in the new state. These people are bound and determined to bankrupt everyone. Failure isn't always an accident, it's often earned.

Scott M -
You are dead-on. I live in Nevada. The "people" who are flocking here from Kalifornia are NOT, I repeat, NOT assimilating. They are bringing their worst ideas and habits to our state with devasting effect. They have totally reversed the cultural makeup of Nevada to a PC and abysmal nightmare.

We're pretty nervous about the ex-Californians coming to Texas and ruining it here too.

Rational thought seems to elude them.

Gov. Moonbeam has a sure-fire plan this time: increase the state sales tax and raise income taxes on the wealthiest Californians.

Scott and Terry:

I concur, although not based on actual experience. It has been true for quite some time that new arrivals from dense urban "blue" areas -- when their numbers reach a critical mass -- will begin to impose their "values" on the locals.

This is a phenomenon I call the "new wave arrivals" syndrome. It goes all the way back to colonial times, sort of. Early European settlers went partly native in many cases, but influxes of larger numbers of new settlers changed the tone. The same happened with British settlement in India.

The big difference now is that these "blue state urbies" are imposing their unwieldy values on fellow Americans when the option of "going native" ought to be relatively simple. You know, same language, usually the same skin color, and same overall heritage. But nooooooo, we have to have gun control and homeowners associations in Wyoming too!

Red-state Americans are considered (by blue-state arrivals) to be in the same category as loin-cloth wearing tribesmen in a National Geographic spread. Maybe the locals should emulate those tribesmen, and start using poison darts and stuff.

Don Rodrigo, Actual experience from the State of Vermont proves the postulate is true.

These immigrants have a brain density of lead with a Loofah brain stem.

It's like an infectious disease. The red states need to start making and enforcing their own immigration laws, or else wall off the blue states and make their residents clean up their own mess.

I think the key between good immigration and bad immigration is the ratio between immigrants and natives. If immigrants are sprinkled into a large native population the new immigrants add flavor. If you flood the natives with immigrants the area becomes more chaotic.

I think the difference between the good case and the bad case is whether the immigrants arrive in such numbers, relative to the natives, that the immigrants are largely able to maintain their culture, but in a new location. If the immigrants are below some critical level they have no choice but to operate in the native culture and perhaps preserve their private exercise of culture at home.

I've seen this theory in operation and it also works with economic status, not just ethnicity. If you put a few poor people into a more successful culture, you can see good results. If you create a poor neighborhood of sufficient size, the people in that neighborhood will cling bitterly to self-defeating habits. The Left's destruction of the almost universal striving toward upper-middle class life was like leaking poison gas into a theater. WASPS did more than their share toward the success of this culture, not to ignore their many faults. Now, even the upper classes are adopting elements of the failure culture.

Please note that our website, www.clese.org has been uaetpdd recently. The Bright Ideas curriculum has been expanded. Videos and teaching materials are now even easier to download. As before, Bright Ideas materials are free and you may download and copy them as needed.Linda Seyler, Program ManagerCoalition of Limited English Speaking Elderly (CLESE)