Driving along VanOwen last night, between Kester and Woodman, it was amazing to see how crowded it was: there were people on the streets, tons of traffic, a car accident with police and ambulences. There were teeming taco stands, and the busy corner of Van Nuys and VanOwen, with riders waiting for the MTA bus to arrive.
Along the street are those two and three story apartment buildings, with balconies full of furniture, laundry, bicycles, toys, boxes. Like the NYC fire escapes from the early part of the last century, VanOwen’s outdoor ledges are part of the living area in these overcrowded slums and a place to breathe in the hot, smoggy air on a summer evening.
I wondered how many of these people were here illegally, and if even asking the question begs a racist response? Yes, there is no reason in the world that the United States should allow people to just come in here and start a life without regard for our laws. But there probaly isn’t an immigrant here who doesn’t think that his life and situation is justification for escaping to Los Angeles.
Van Nuys has changed in remarkable ways from 1945 until 2007. What were once orange and walnut groves became new housing and hopes for returning veterans and their families. They worked at GM or at the Van Nuys Airport and those kids grew up and moved away.
Now we are poorer and more crowded, but still they pour into Van Nuys, in search of a better life…but testing the ability of our society and our nation to devise a way to control what is a flood of unimaginable proportions. What is the price of freedom and are we paying too high a price for it?
Here in Van Nuys 
Thanks anonymous #1. And I couldn’t agree more that political willingness to solve the issue is what’s been missing.. For me it’s not an issue of conservative or liberal or republican etc., just security and plain old following the rules..
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They care little or not at all for aesthetics
That description unfortunately also applies to a lot of the people who’ve been residents of Los Angeles through the eons. I say that because, astonishingly enough, the key points raised in this report…………http://cityplanning.lacity.org/Code_Studies/Other/LincolnCDOSlideshowwebformat.pdf…………rarely got much or any attention or interest from those in academia, the media, government, local architecture or real-estate firms, neighborhood committees or elsewhere. The result is you can go through decades of articles printed in the Los Angeles Times and find little or no mention of the specific aesthetic gaffes, much less specific solutions to them, cited in the recent Planning Department’s document. And that’s not because what is true of Lincoln Boulevard is not true of so much of the city in general.
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Aimee, you just took the words out of my mouth. You said it all, perfect! The greatest problems may have the simplest solutions. Political willingness to solve the issue is what has been missed in this situation.
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The supposed freedom of anyone to enter any one of our borders or ports illegally costs legal citizens our security, clearly. This supposed freedom to scoff the law is also linked closely to a mindset of what some would call political correctness, in which defenders of the lawbreakers will accuse defenders of the law of being somehow racist, so that the defenders of the law are put on the defensive, and the lawbreakers can temporarily assuage their guilty consciences.
Of course, being in favor of stronger security at our borders and ports has absolutely nothing to do with “race” (whatever that means: there is only one human race) or color or nationality. It has only to do with following existing law. Playing the race card is an act of desperation on the part of those who cannot otherwise their illegal actions. By the way, it’s not the person who is illegal, it is their action of immigrating illegally that is illegal.
That said, I have been to other countries, including third world countries, and I have seen first hand the motivations for why anyone in a third world country would want to escape and begin a new life in the US. The fact that illegal immigrants are pouring in is a symptom of many things: the imbalance of quality of life between the US and other countries, the vulnerability of our borders, the need for faster citizenship processes. But, we have immigration laws and the laws that are currently on the books must be followed currently.
Citizenship needs to be easier to attain, for those who have not yet immigrated illegally. Example: I worked with someone who won a lottery to emigrate with his wife and child from Romania to the US in 1999. A lottery. And this man played by the rule. The fact that there needed to be a lottery tells me that if the backlog for processing people, who have not yet arrived, into citizens is so long that you need a lottery to let people in legally, then the process ought to be streamlined and significantly and immediately.
I am not against immigration. I am not against immigrants. I am against those who do it illegally, regardless of their motivation, and those that break the law as it is now ought to be dealt with as such, now. The law applies to all without regard to skin color or nationality. The level of difficulty ought to be equal for anyone to become a legal citizen at the border, whether it’s a light-skinned Anglophone, a darker-skinned Middle Easterner, a brown-skinned Mexican, or a purple-skinned citizen of planet Zork. (You get the point.)
So, you can call me many things: legalist, advocate of legal citizenship, politically incorrect perhaps, but you will NOT call me a racist.
My bottom line:
Welcome to America, one and all, just do it legally! And lawmakers, would you please make it easier for these poor folks to do it the right way!
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Andrew,
Most of the people of the world care more about making ends meet. They care little or not at all for aesthetics or about having nasty-looking furniture-cramped balconies (which I find abhorrent).
I agree with your suggestion that we may be paying too high a price for this wave of immigration.
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