Freedom Folks: Behind the Super city's glitz and glitter

Source: ocala.com

I don't do this much but this piece is so good I'm pasting the whole thing...

In case you missed it, today is Super Bowl Sunday, which brings the lamentable end of football season with a clash between the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts in Miami, the Sunshine State's capital of surf, sun and sin.

The NFL Network has been running a great series on the history of the Super Bowl called "America's Game," which will be played today in a city that, some say, no longer resembles America.

Back in November, Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado, a leading critic of immigration policy, said Miami exemplified how "the nature of America can be changed by uncontrolled immigration," the Miami Herald reported.

"You just pick it up and take it and move it someplace. You would never know you're in the United States of America," Tancredo said. "You would certainly say you're in a Third World country."

The left, predictably, blasted Tancredo as a Know-Nothing racist. But the right was also critical. Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami said her "friend" Tancredo was "flat out wrong," the Herald reported. The congresswoman said in Miami "people have the opportunity to meet folks from across the globe and honor different cultures."

I'm not sure how that refutes Tancredo's point, but the U.S. Census Bureau, in showing how the two Midwestern Super Bowl cities, and not the teams, match up demographically, reinforced his argument with a few tidbits in a Jan. 22 press release. It seems:

30 percent of Chicago residents 25 or older hold a bachelor's degree or higher, while 78 percent had at least graduated high school; in Indianapolis, it was 27 percent and 84 percent, which reflected exactly the national rates. In Miami, 20 percent of people are college educated, while 63 percent had completed high school;

37 percent of Chicagoans age 5 or older speak a language other than English at home; in Indy, 10 percent. Across the U.S., the average was 19 percent. In Miami, try a whopping 79 percent;

People in Indianapolis and Chicago earn about the same in a year, $41,578 vs. $41,015, respectively. The national average runs $46,242. The average income in Miami: $25,211;

In Chicago (the nation's third biggest city), the average home costs $245,000 with an average mortgage of $1,678 a month; the average home in Indianapolis (the 12th largest) costs $117,900, while the average mortgage is $1,074 a month. The national figure in each category was $167,500 and $1,295, respectively. In Miami (the 45th biggest city), the average home price is $248,500, while the average monthly mortgage is $1,522.

I'm no sociologist, and admittedly this is only a partial glimpse of a complex demographic situation. But these numbers suggest that Miami, relative to the rest of the nation, contains a largely poor, under-educated populace that is sharply divided between rich and poor and devoid of a middle class and barely speaks English.

The data might describe West Virginia as well, but the numbers also lend support to Tancredo's argument.

But consider a couple of nuggets unveiled by Tancredo, who sniped back at his critics with a Jan. 13 opinion column in the Herald.

He noted the rate of violent crime in Miami is triple the national average, while the murder rate was 2.5 times as great. He also quoted the U.S. Department of Justice, which labeled South Florida the "public corruption capital of the nation," as almost 600 people were prosecuted on corruption charges between 1996 and 2005. I'm really envious of that. Rampant, relentless malfeasance by the government stooges there has made Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen a millionaire author.

In his Herald piece, Tancredo added that since 2002 "a net of 151,000 Miami residents, most of them middle class, have left Miami," which is in a county with a 51 percent foreign-born population, the highest in America. On TV today, the setting will depict the city as glitzy, glamorous, exotic and sexy. Yet behind the cameras, as the numbers indicate, Miami is violent, corrupt, poor and, in many respects, alien to the rest of America.

Ocalans need to pay attention. That's because those fleeing Miami's crime and costs in that great exodus Tancredo mentioned are headed for here.