SO WHERE DOES THAT MIGRANT ENTITLEMENT MENTALITY COME FROM IN NEW YORK CITY?
NY Post, January 31, 2023
As if the cost alone weren’t enough to make the millions of illegal migrants brought in by Joe Biden’s open borders unpopular here, the ingratitude and entitlement mentality of these illegals now seals the deal.
According to National Review:
“More than 50 migrants camped outside the Watson Hotel in Manhattan in protest on Sunday night as the city sought to move the single male migrants to a new shelter at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal to make space for migrant families.
The new shelter holds as many as 1,000 single adult men and provides the same services the migrants had been receiving, city officials told the New York Post. The shelter is the fifth Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center to open in the city since last year.”
As for their demands, well, they let us know in this Twitter image below:
Just passing by the Watson Hotel this morning where migrants are refusing to leave to be relocated to a city shelter. The sidewalk in front looks like a tent city https://t.co/mibn2qtpWb pic.twitter.com/6KTohbABcV
— Evan Siegfried (@evansiegfried) January 30, 2023
The translation is “Permanent Housing” followed by “Cancel Rent.” Getty Images has an excellent collection of similar images worth a look here.
The New York Post noticed a funny resemblance in the migrants’ demands and left-wing NGO sloganeerings. Don’t blame the migrants, blame the lefty activists filling them with nonsense.
But there’s more to it than just leftists putting ideas into empty migrant heads. News reports say that many of the migrants refusing to move are Venezuelan, denizens of the country that was turned into a socialist dump by the late unlamented Hugo Chavez who really had a thing against private property, or paying at all for anything.
The sign featured above has a small Colombian flag and that country has significant cultural crossover with Venezuela, as well as its own newly elected Chavista president, the loathsome leftist ex-guerrilla, friend, and imitator of Chavez, Gustavo Petro.
Odds are good that these migrants demanding as beggars to be choosers of what kind of “free” housing they expect to get were infused with that entitlement mentality from the day they were born, because entitlement to housing was pretty much all they ever heard about the topic from their socialist leaders in that free press-deprived hellhole.
Let’s look at the tape:
In 2012, Venezuelanalysis, a Chavista press organ, ran this headline about Chavez’s intentions:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Has Made A Commitment That Every Venezuelan Family Must Have A Dignified Home By 2019 “Whatever It Costs”.
Money, see, is no object. Sound like New York City, which has made similar promises to migrants, in its self-proclaimed obligation to shelter every illegal entrant at taxpayer expense?
“More than 42,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City since last spring and we continue to surpass our moral obligations as we provide asylum seekers with shelter, food, health care, education, and a host of other services,” City Hall spokesperson Fabien Levy said in a statement.
Sort of. No wonder the migrants put two and two together and now call for free “permanent housing.”
It gets worse.
Over in Venezuela, the locals have been infused with a “right” to housing from the Chavista government and its shills for many years. Here are a couple of whoppers from the pro-Chavez, Chavismo-aligned press to give you the flavor:
“In Venezuela, the Right to Housing is Made Possible by the Revolution” –Orinoco Tribune, 2019
“The right to housing for working families is fully protected, in stark contrast to a past in which people were thrown out onto the street by capital with the complicity of the State”. –Resumen LatinoAmerica and the Third World, 2021
As for Chavez himself, it gets worse still. Here’s what Hugo encouraged in his quest to turn Venezuela into a socialist “sea of happiness” as he once put it:
“Chávez tackles housing crisis by urging poor to squat wealthy parts of Caracas” –The Guardian, 2011
Wearing red T-shirts from Hugo Chavez’ socialist party, and encouraged by the Venezuelan strongman himself, organized “squatters” seized 20 “unused” private properties in a suburb of Caracas in an attempt to keep angry slum dwellers from turning against him as the middle class is already doing.
“The fundamental goal of socialism is to satisfy human needs … the needs of all, equally, without privilege,” Chávez, who sent 1,600 troops to seize 47 private farms, told Venezuelans during one of his mandated national television broadcasts. –San Francisco Examiner, 2011
..and not just once, either:
“Caracas Journal; The Squatters Have Their Day, Shaking Venezuela” –New York Times, 1999
Might that call to squat from the authority in charge have influenced these Venezuelan migrants to squat at a Manhattan hotel? It certainly would be something they would be familiar with.
Here’s a famous “fruit” of Chavez’s famous call to squat:
“The tallest slum in the world: Venezuelan skyscraper made famous by TV thriller Homeland has 45 floors, a helipad and large balconies with wonderful mountain views… but is home to squatters” –Daily Mail, 2014
Predictably, Chavez blamed capitalism as justification for residents squatting on private property, and naturally, he refused to prosecute the squatters.
The Venezuelan government itself, which bills itself as Bolivarian socialist, features this pull-quote on its housing page from Hugo himself.
“The housing problem has no solution in capitalism, here we are going to solve it with socialism, and more socialism, live by living, for that the Great Housing Mission Venezuela was born.” Chavez, 2011.
So logically, the migrants’ call for free housing is not just the words of activists in their mouths, but a call to socialism, the socialist paradise that somehow didn’t happen in Venezuela. And yes, Hugo did build “free” government housing, or tried to, flinging it around like confetti.
Here’s how that worked out, by one of Venezuela’s greatest bloggers, Daniel, of Venezuela News & Views:
Photo by Daniel
In 2007, Daniel wrote:
“Because the fact of the matter is that the pent up demand for housing access, no matter how humble this one might be, is reaching dramatic proportions. And the government does not realize that no state controlled society has never been able to solve the problem.
The only societies that have come close to solve it are those which are able to provide decent jobs at decent wages, something impossible in Venezuela today as the private sector is slowly squeezed to death. And even then, such societies report squatters taking over old abandoned buildings all the time. Even if these buildings are a health hazard, such is the desperation. Venezuela does not escape this phenomena and in fact amplifies it greatly.
Traveling through Venezuela since 2004 shows a stupendous increase of “invasiones”. An “invasión” is a group of people that get together and invade some large track of land and build shacks. The idea is to force the state to either expropriate the legal owner of the land to give it to the squatters, or to force the state to give them houses somewhere else to dislodge the land.
The strategy is of course well worked out: the lands are ALWAYS close to major roads, and thus quite visible, quite the eyesores. Until 2004 some opposition governor still in office like Salas Feo or Lapi were able to stem such squats, but now that they have been replaced by “people loving” governors the situation has become catastrophic as these governors have no authority to stop such squatting organized from within chavismo itself. Below I am posting a montage I did of such an invasion in Carabobo, close from the very chavista town of Moron.”
Which tells us a lot about what the ungrateful migrants demanding free permanent housing in New York have been steeped in. The government tells them free housing is a right, and tells them to seize that free housing as a matter of right, and the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket.
That’s what they heard for years growing up– on television, on the radio, in the schools, in the streets, and that’s what destroyed their country. Now, with this migrant-staged uprising, they are taking that learned lesson into the U.S. as a matter of ‘right’ and claiming the right to “permanent” housing on top of it.
Here’s the latest from this morning’s (2/01) NY Post: Migrants Turn NYC Hotel Into Violent, Drug-Infested ‘Free-For-All’: Employee. Of course they do.
Monica Showalter is a journalist whose analyses have appeared in Forbes, the Asia Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, and American Thinker.