Step ten is not so much a step as it is an outlook point with a few necessary formalities thrown in. It should be considered both a warning of things to come in places not already decimated by illegal immigration and an answer to the question of low consumer prices at the cost of cheap unlawful labor.
The public sector layoffs brought city government through one tough crunch, but its trademark social programs simultaneously are growing costlier and more in demand. When the next budget is written, the councillors find that they are once again standing squarely between a rock and a hard place. A few make appeals to the state and federal governments, while others search high and low for the possibilities of new taxes and firings.
Everyone's efforts are ultimately fruitless. The city has lost nearly all of its productive population, and the greatest share of those remaining there are career moochers. Even the industrious illegal aliens have decided to run as fast and far as they can. There is nothing in store for the future, and all the present has to offer are those welfare measures. The formerly solid tax base has devolved into a mound of packed wet sand losing formation with every incoming tide, and the tides grow higher on a daily basis.
The city's natives, both those who remain and those who have moved to the suburbs, wonder what contributed to their hometown's downfall the most: corporate malfeasance or political corruption and pandering. The wisest of them recognize that one goes in hand with the other. They also know that as monumental a problem as illegal immigration is, like all of history's quagmires, it is rooted in another one: the irrational expectation of a massive return on any given investment; also called greed.
Article comments
1 - roger nowosielski
A hell of a way to blame corporate or governmental corruption on illegal immigration. If that was you point behind this "series," you surely could have taken a far more direct route. Corruption needs no excuse or pretext, If not illegal immigration, it would be something else.
Your diagnosis as to the effective causes of the fall of the American society is way off. All you're looking for is excuses, something or someone to blame, whereas where you should be looking is within.
2 - Igor
If you are looking to foreign influences that corrupt US society, one would do better to ignore the 'streets', where only about 5% is foreign, and look in the 'suites' where the permissive rules of US incorporation allow foreigners to dominate the boards of the corporations that are permitted to bribe US politicians with so-called 'campaign contributions'. For example, foreigners own 60% of US oil corps, which have spectacular bribe permissions.