Special to WorldTribune.com

By Sol W. Sanders

There always seemed to be the possibility that there could be a really big rumble along the San Andreas Fault and Hollywood, San Francisco’s hills and the wild northern California coast would slide into the Pacific.

The state has had its Brown-outs with two governors, father and son, and their spendthrift administrations, with other similar governments spread along the way of Junior’s present tenure.

Still, with its almost forty million people, the crumbling welfare state carries on with a quarter of the country’s illegal aliens. They don’t speak English at home nor do these undocumented seem to be bothered with U.S. citizenship much less legal residence: two-thirds have lived in the state for at least a decade.

But California’s increasingly shaky finances [a current $190 billion state budget has an estimated $1.6 billion deficit] and what appears to be a switch to a net outflow of population may be redrawing the picture of what has been.

Most of the population growth this past year came from local births, which outpaced deaths by 220,000. Although total net migration added 80,000 people, more moved out of California than in from other U.S. states.

In fact this out-migration has increasingly been the state’s middle class, taking with them the longtime admired entrepreneurial history of the state, to the benefit of welcoming Texas among California’s other Western neighbors.

Foreign immigration made up the difference between the outflow and the relatively stable total, bringing it nearer the 40 million mark, larger by far than Canada or Australia.

That these in-migrants are illegals — or undocumenteds — may explain more than anything else why California’s Democratic politicians are all for allowing even illegal felons to get a pass not only escape deportation but criminal prosecution as well. The state has enacted a sanctuary law which is supposed to protect otherwise illegal aliens in the U.S.

This has led to a free-for-all between federal officials [particularly ICE, Immigration and Custom Enforcement] and some local state and municipal authorities. This, in turn, is leading to a civil war among local and state government jurisdictions who oppose the protection of felons.

The current free for all between the federal authorities of the Trump Administration with Mayor Libby Schaaf of Oakland [its long term unemployed average of 8.52 percent] went so far as for her to warn local illegals with criminal records — some of them convicted felons — that the Feds were coming to get them.

California city and state officials as a result of all this are using California’s size — its population bigger by a third than Texas, its nearest rival — to defy federal law. Nothing quite like it judicially has been seen since the 1850s — an argument then which had to be decided in a fearfully bloody struggle, still more casualties than all our other conflicts.

The policy and legal confusion being created is hard to exaggerate. And the Trump Administration is going to be forced to take up the cudgels for federal jurisdiction. The longer the wait, the more likely the confusion will grow.

There was a time, when California was supposed to set the patterns for progressive [the old use, not the new use of the word] development in the rest of the country. [e.g., remember when no one ate their salad first] Let’s hope that is now a bygone American custom.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@twc.com), is a contributing editor for WorldTribune.com and Geostrategy-Direct.com.

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