Stockton is home to the sixth largest Hmong population in the United States.
There are 8,000 or so Hmong in the city of 320,000.
The only California cities with a larger Hmong presence are Fresno and Sacramento.
Right behind Stockton is Merced.
The United States has the largest concentration of Hmong outside of Southeast Asia.
Their presence here is a direct result of the fall of Saigon in 1975 that reverberated across Southeast Asia creating large numbers of refugees.
Based on the last detailed census, there were 260,073 Hmong in the United States with a third, or 91,029, in California.
It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.
The federal government dispersed the refugees — sometimes referred to as the boat people who set sail in the South China Sea to escape repression — somewhat proportionately across the United States.
Most ended up moving to California, specifically the Central Valley.
A 1991 Los Angeles Times article listed the reasons why: The winter weather was not as brutal, the lure of rich farmland, the fact they had family that had already settled here, and more robust welfare checks.
The last reason, if indeed it holds greater weight, should be a clarion call for those in Congress who claim to represent California to make immigration policy reform a pressing issue.
It already should be given the number of DREAMers — those brought here illegally by their parents and then educated as well as nurtured to a large degree using tax dollars — that are in limbo within the Golden State.
The DREAMer Act that provides those caught in limbo a clear path to citizenship so they become productive assets to this nation is a simple and obvious piece of the immigration puzzle that enjoys support across the political spectrum.
Yet, it is stalled because there are too many supporters that are unwilling to let the measure proceed on its own, as they want it as a piece of a specific package of immigration reform that does not have universal support.
The quandary of the DREAMers and the drag it has on our economy as their status does not allow full investment in this nation that is educating —or has educated — them is a ludicrous byproduct of the collective inability of Congress to act in a decisive manner on immigration reform whether it is legal, illegal, or those that have turned the concept of asylum into a ruse.
Not having a well thought-out immigration policy in place dooms this nation to a repeat of the Hmong experience.
To be clear, the Hmong have become a productive part of the melting pot in the Central Valley.
But it wasn’t without placing a heavy toll on local resources, especially in places like Merced County and Fresno County that were struggling with some of the highest poverty rates in the nation.
The current poverty rates are 21.5 percent for Merced County and 20.6 for Fresno County.
The first Hmong generation has been supported by welfare due to the obvious impacts of the language barrier, lack of work skills, and such.
The second generation has been markedly more successful. Even so, the median household income of the Hmong based on census data today is roughly half that of the Californian median.
Fast forward to today.
The federal government — long before the governors of Florida and Texas decided to charter buses and airplanes — had already been dispersing “asylum” seekers across the nation.
It is absolutely the right thing to do.
Border states — and especially border communities — should not bear the brunt of immigration policy failures including as it pertains to asylum — for what is a federal function.
At the same time, there needs to be safeguards in place so that the new wave of de facto refugees using asylum as the key to open the door to “temporarily legally access” the United States, don’t internally migrate within the United States after they are “placed” by the Border Patrol.
If not, the number of asylum related “refugees” is so great, if they congregate based on weather and such in certain parts of the country it could have a crushing impact on local communities.
Even if you abhor asylum refugees being forced to sleep in Chicago airports and school gyms in New York, the pain of a dysfunctional and/or ineffective federal immigration/asylum policy should not be borne only by border states.
But that is exactly what can — and likely will — happen.
The extent of the current “policies” is two-fold:
· Catch and release those back across the border who simply enter the country illegally so they can eventually beat the odds and make it into the United States undetected.
· Catch and release those into the United States who enter the country illegally, saying they are seeking asylum with a promise to appear in court perhaps a year or so down the road.
There is no mechanism in place that assures those released into the United States while awaiting asylum won’t migrate inside this nation’s borders to regions and locales they view as more alluring.
The end result could be crushing for areas that are already struggling with harsh poverty.
The first step is to stop painting the immigration crisis in stark black and white hues.
Nothing is more inflammatory than to insist people are somehow racists by opposing open borders unless it is the claim a large number of rapists, murders, hardcore gang members and free loaders constitute the flow of immigrants, legal and otherwise.
Secured borders are a reasonable concept just as are limits are on theater audience size or airplane weight occupancy limits.
As for the criminal element “sneaking in” among current immigrants, if that was a reason to shut the door on immigration in general then a lot of us with ancestors hailing from certain nations or ethnicities would not be Americans today.
Our lineage may not have murderers, gang members, and such. Rest assured, though, they were among previous waves of immigrants that includes our ancestors.
The bottom line is simple: If we don’t get our act together to put in place functional and effective immigration policies, as the years unfold there will be communities in this country that will carry a disproportionate — and likely crushing — burden.
