Chris Powell: Build housing without sprawl; are schools sanctuaries for illegals?
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Supposedly there was going to be a special session of the Connecticut General Assembly in the fall to arrange a compromise on the housing legislation passed by liberal Democratic legislators during this year's regular session but vetoed by Gov. Ned Lamont. Fall is here but neither the governor nor the legislature has issued such a call. It's not clear what's happening.
But in a commentary the other day the Yankee Institute's Meghan Portfolio argued that a special session would not be good for democracy. “Special sessions often operate in the shadows," she wrote. “Bills frequently don't appear until the very day of the vote, sometimes only hours before. Towns, taxpayers, and even rank-and-file legislators are left in the dark. This isn't policymaking. It's ambush politics."
Indeed, special-session legislation can get written by a few leaders without public participation and review. Only after its enactment are the “rats’’ in the legislation discovered -- provisions that never would have been approved if adequately publicized.
Connecticut's housing shortage is an urgent problem, the biggest factor in the state's outrageously high cost of living. But the thrust of the vetoed legislation -- reducing the obstructive influence of suburban zoning and imposing more rent control -- was never going to get much housing built quickly. Mainly the legislation would have let liberals feel better about themselves even as it made them hypocrites on environmental protection.
Many towns that have used zoning to exclude the middle and lower classes don't have the infrastructure necessary for higher-density housing -- water, sewer, and electrical systems, wide roads, and school capacity.
Of course their exclusive zoning was meant to keep things that way. But tearing up the countryside with more suburban sprawl to spite the bigoted snobs will have more disadvantages than it's worth when there is a much faster and more efficient way to build housing.
Connecticut's cities and inner suburbs are full of abandoned industrial property, decrepit tenements, and vacant or half-empty shopping centers. Many are eyesores. Additionally, much office space in the cities is vacant. All these properties are already served by the necessary infrastructure and redeveloping it as housing would do no environmental damage. Most of their neighbors might be glad if something shiny and new replaced the eyesores.
This is where Connecticut's urgent housing effort should concentrate, and that effort should be managed by a state housing development board, empowered to condemn decrepit or underused properties, take others by eminent domain, and option the properties to developers for market-rate housing, with the options withdrawn if developers fail to make quick progress.
A state whose leaders seem to think that the state government has enough money to buy the Connecticut Sun WNBA basketball team, when the state already has two nationally ranked public university teams, should have no trouble finding the money to build thousands of units of housing in a hurry. Or the state could skip the basketball team purchase and just build the housing instead.
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Governor Lamont is right to want federal immigration agents to stop wearing masks and to start wearing badges and clothing identifying them as government agents when they make arrests. Masked and unidentified and looking like gangsters, the agents invite getting shot or stabbed by their targets or bystanders. Connecticut U.S. Rep. John B. Larson has introduced legislation in Congress to stop the gangsterism.
But the governor recently went far beyond the sensible. He held a press conference with school superintendents to discourage immigration agents from making arrests at schools, though there seem to have been no such arrests in Connecticut. The governor said he wants everyone to “feel safe" in school.
Why should people “feel safe" anywhere in the country if their presence is illegal? Why should immigration law not apply inside a school? If, as the governor, state Atty. Gen. William Tong, and many state legislators keep insisting -- that Connecticut is not a “sanctuary state" -- what would the governor make schools if not a sanctuary?
Of course journalists spared the governor the trouble of explaining. When obvious questions are politically incorrect, they can't be asked.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: How many more illegal immigrants can Conn. afford?
A map of U.S. states colored by their policy on “sanctuary cities” for illegal aliens. States in red have banned sanctuary cities statewide. States in blue are pro-sanctuary states.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut’s state government seems to think that illegal immigration isn’t a problem here, just -- maybe -- in other states. The other day state officials gathered with advocates of illegal immigration at the state Capitol to congratulate themselves on what a Connecticut Mirror report called the “explosive” demand for state insurance coverage for illegal immigrant children.
When this insurance, which is much like federal Medicaid insurance, was extended to illegal immigrant children age 12 and younger in January 2023, the state Department of Social Services estimated that about 4,000 children would be enrolled. But enrollees now exceed 11,000.
Now pregnant illegal immigrants qualify for this insurance as well and can continue it for a year after childbirth.
While it has not been publicized, children born to illegal immigrants in Connecticut also qualify for state government’s touted “baby bonds” program, in which the children are to receive as much as $24,000 in state money upon turning 18 -- money to be used for higher education, starting a business, buying a home or saving for retirement. The office of state Treasurer Erick Russell, which manages the program, lied to this writer to conceal the eligibility of the children of illegal immigrants but told the truth to a state legislator.
The deputy commissioner of the Social Services Department, Peter Hadler, gave the Mirror an absurd comment about the state’s medical insurance for illegal immigrant kids and pregnant illegal immigrants.
“Sometimes,” Hadler said, “there is trepidation on the part, especially of non-citizens, to participate in government programs. The good news is that that has not proven to be a barrier, and people are enrolling at strong rates and they’re seeking this out.”
Reluctance to claim government benefits? Maybe there was some back when the United States enforced its immigration law and immigrants were expected to cover their own expenses, but there is no reluctance today. Under the Biden administration and Democratic state administrations, illegal immigrants are qualifying not just for free medical insurance but also housing and monthly stipends.
There continues to be much agitation at the state Capitol to extend state medical insurance to all illegal immigrants in the state, though there are concerns about cost. It probably won’t happen during the current session of the General Assembly, since Gov. Ned Lamont is reluctant to give up the “fiscal guardrails” keeping order in state government's finances.
At the rally at the Capitol a spokesman for the coalition seeking to extend state medical insurance to all illegal immigrants in Connecticut said: “Health care is a fundamental human right, and no one should be denied access based on immigration status.”
But anyone can be treated without charge in a public hospital emergency room in the state, and is entering the United States illegally and living in Connecticut a fundamental human right too?
The advocates of extending state medical insurance to all illegal immigrants seem to think so. They seem to think there should be no controls to ensure that immigration can be assimilated without overwhelming public resources -- housing, medical care and insurance, and education -- and without sparking ethnic conflict and jeopardizing national security and the democratic and secular culture.
With its disastrous shortage of housing and long decline of its public education, Connecticut especially should have awakened to the danger by now.
While the campaign to subsidize illegal immigration dresses itself in righteousness and goodness, it devalues citizenship. It would increase dependence on government, enlarge the constituencies of the Democratic Party, increase the number of Democratic-dominated legislative districts, and drain the private sector. It would make the country ungovernable.
If what I see as the Biden administration’s open-borders policy continues and Connecticut continues its own subsidies for illegal immigration and continues its own nullification of federal immigration law, in a year or two the state easily could double its population of illegal immigrants, now estimated at 113,000. Millions of people in troubled and impoverished places like Guatemala, Venezuela, and most of Africa perceive the grand invitation. How many more does Connecticut want? How many more can it afford?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Schools shouldn't condone walkouts for gun control
See commentary on immigration below.
Nearly anything that gets their noses out of their cellphones and video games and into the wider world may be welcome, but there is a big problem with the high school walkouts being planned by students around the country to show support for more restrictions on guns.
The problem is that the students are required to be in school during the school day, not out protesting -- that the country is paying for them to be in school, that schools will suffer financial losses from the lost time, which will have to be made up if education is not to be sacrificed (teachers are not going to volunteer to give up their pay for the teaching time lost to a walkout), and that schools should not take sides in politics.
Of course there's no need for students to take time out from school to hold political rallies and otherwise get involved in politics. There is plenty of time for that after school during the week and on weekends. Indeed, by settling on a walkout during the school day rather than a rally after school or on a weekend, students seem to figure that they will draw more fellow students to their cause precisely by creating an opportunity to cut or disrupt classes.
That's part of what made the Vietnam War protests so popular at colleges during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many colleges were so intimidated by the student disruptions that they not only canceled classes but awarded course credits to students who never earned them.
Will high school administrations condone and excuse the planned walkouts or will they impose normal discipline on students who cut or disrupt classes? Schools that condone or excuse the walkouts will be politicizing themselves. They also will be obliging themselves to do the same for all sorts of causes they may not want to approve.
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NULLIFIERS WANT NO ENFORCEMENT: Federal immigration agents are being criticized for arresting illegal immigrants at the state courthouses in Stamford and New Haven as the illegals show up to answer for criminal charges pending against them. This tactic is said to interfere with the administration of justice, scaring people away from courthouses. Connecticut Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers last year asked the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Homeland Security Department not to do things this way.
But courthouses may be the best places to apprehend certain illegal immigrants, especially those in trouble with the criminal law, and complaints about the practice presume that federal immigration law simply should not be enforced, even though ordinarily federal law takes precedence over state law. That is, such complaints are another form of advocacy of nullification of federal law.
Illegal immigrants aren't supposed to be in the country in the first place. If their criminal cases are effectively terminated by deportation, state government will avoid a lot of expense.
This does not mean that the country's immigration problem should not be addressed humanely through new laws that give a chance of legal residency and eventually citizenship to illegal immigrants, especially those illegal immigrants who long have been living decently and productively in the country and those who were brought here as children, people who as a practical matter have no other home.
But most advocates of illegal immigrants seem not to want any immigration law enforcement at all. They seem to want the country's borders erased, which would be dissolution of the country.
Every day from Connecticut to California advocates of illegal immigrants denounce as "white supremacists" anyone who calls for restoring ordinary controls on immigration and ordinary security at the borders. Attempting political intimidation, these advocates for illegal immigrants are damaging their own cause.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn., and a frequent contributor of New England Diary.