Friday, August 22, 2008

Commissioner Cara Jennings is Pro-Growth

You know, I am not particularly a fan of Lou Dobbs. I try to avoid his "news" show on CNN - he comes off as strident, over-bearing and obsesses on the immigration issue to a fault. However, this morning, I woke early from my sleep - my mind was racing on this, that and the other, so I turned on the TV. As I surfed the channels, I caught the tail-end of his broadcast. I shared that portion earlier today here that related to discussion on population growth. The discussion surrounded the projection that population in the United States will be increasing at such a rate that for every two people here currently, there will be one additional person within a generation. Much of that growth is due to immigration and the descendants of immigration.

With that as a background, a friend of mine stumbled across this letter to the editor of the San Diego Union newspaper. It was from no other than our own Commissioner Jennings. Here is the letter:

Essentially, this letter acts as a billboard highway sign for all those looking to immigrate to the United States. It proclaims that an elected City Commissioner will be the champion of your cause if you follow her to Lake Worth, Florida. These actions contribute to population growth around the world and in our own city. So, in many ways, Commissioner Cara Jennings is the most pro-growth elected official we have.

As a freshman in college, I took a class called "Spaceship Earth" and it delved into issues that were emerging then - scarcity of natural resources and energy, global warming, destruction of the ozone layer, deforestation, water and air pollution, etc. Once you pealed all the layers of the onion away, the core cause to all of our environmental problems was over-population. This is again reflected in the exchange on CNN that I shared with you.

Now, we can expect population growth in our region and we can plan appropriately for it. We can position the city strategically so that we consist of a diverse population of all income groups living harmoniously next to each other in all parts of the city. Or, according to the Commissioner Jennings "plan", we can import a population dependent on social, educational, health and municipal services into our city and house them in conditions that are only slightly better than the conditions that they left - maybe. In the process, creating more of a disparity of incomes and the distortions in quality of life factors that creates, eventually draining every financial resource available to local, state and federal governments.

As far as the violence described in our Commissioner's letter, it is deplorable and should not be tolerated. We need to come to a way to control immigration that is humane and work on economic development/human rights issues in the native countries from where our undocumented population comes. We need to start taking care of our own resident population without draining resources accommodating new populations.

I am glad that the District #2 seat is finally up for election. Now the people can have a say through the ballot box about the kind of tactics used by this Commissioner to further her aims. And do we really know her and her group's end goal? Let's hope we don't get to find out by electing this Commissioner to another term in office.

This is coming from someone who voted for Commissioner Jennings the first time around. Fool me once...