ILLEGALS: Not what Cd'A wants
This is a tale of two cities: One Waukegan, Ill., the city I was born and raised in; the other, Coeur d’Alene, where I now reside. Coeur d’Alene is much like Waukegan was until the mid-80s — a nice place to grow up and raise kids in. It was a lake city with plenty of parks and activities for children during the summer breaks, trick or treating in the fall, and ice skating and sledding in the winter. The crime rate was low and people knew their neighbors.
Within a span of five to 10 years, Hispanic illegal immigrants flooded that poor city. What does it look like now? The downtown, which was built around the late 1800s to early 1910, has the same store fronts it has had for 100 years, but most of the signs are not in English. Gang members are present throughout the high schools and junior highs.
When I was in high school, the dean was the authority figure. Now, the schools are staffed with police officers and security units. The crime rate has risen also. Buildings and the lake front is vandalized with graffiti and trash. The murder, rapes and robberies have reached high levels.
I had purchased a house for $120,000, and my property taxes were $2,200. I lived in the house for a little more than five years and my taxes only jumped up $300. I sold the house and checked back on it five years later. The taxes on it had jumped up to $6,000 a year!
Why, you may ask? Many established families moved and elders passed on. Hispanics purchased these houses and moved two or three families into each house that was intended for single family use. Many of these were illegal family members that sent their multiple children into the school system, while paying tax on one property. This broke the school system, hence, the constant rise in property taxes. The house next to me was a two bedroom ranch with an unfurnished concrete basement. One family moved in, and then had two other families join them, occupying all levels. I counted six adults and five children in that two bedroom house. For the last three and a half years I was there, I would sit outside and feel I was in a foreign country, never hearing English.
I got out. I have since been back for one visit. The houses are still there — the house I grew up in, my wife’s childhood home, and my friend’s homes. Sadly, the gutters are falling off, they look run down, and junk and toys are strewn all over the yards resembling a dump. This is how they choose to live. How did it get this way so fast?
When the first waves of illegal immigrants hit, the churches set up Spanish-speaking chapels. The schools catered to their special needs to the point of ignoring the needs of the English-speaking students. If any of you think it is compassionate to let one group of people come here in such numbers, overwhelm your city and destroy your culture and way of life that you love, replacing it with a foreign one, then you are an idiot. This is not compassion, it is stupidity!
If any of you think that this could not happen in Coeur d’Alene, you are dead wrong! I bet if you went back in a time machine and told the people of Waukegan what their city would become, they would say you were crazy, that it couldn’t happen there. It did, and it can.
JOE GERARDS
Coeur d’Alene