Word: backlashers
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...national arms race to criminalize homelessness," says Madeleine Stoner, a professor of social work at the University of Southern California. "People are beginning to fear for their safety." Concurs Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, the man charged by the Clinton Administration with devising a solution: "A backlash is growing. What I believed was an almost universal compassion has today given way to an impatience, a frustration, an anger toward the homeless...
...shelters after 90 days and rescind the city's unique, state-imposed decree to provide emergency shelter for anyone who asks for it. Generosity is clearly ebbing. Soup kitchens and food banks across the country report a drop in donations by as much as 40% this Thanksgiving. Sometimes the backlash expresses itself in ugly ways. Last month a homeless man in San Francisco was critically injured when attackers doused him with rubbing alcohol and set him ablaze...
...taxpayers. With no less conviction, others contend that immigrants and their children evade taxes and overburden local welfare, health and education systems. To compound the confusion, many Americans believe -- wrongly -- that more foreigners enter the country illegally than do legally. As the doubts grow, so does the potential for backlash. Polls show that almost two-thirds of Americans favor new laws to cut back on all immigrants and asylum seekers -- legal as well as illegal. Though immigration is often regarded as a single issue, some distinctions are important...
Immigration backlash is particularly strong in New York, Florida, Texas and, most of all, California, which officials say contains more than half of all the illegal immigrants in the country. As the frequent bellwether of national changes, the state has already caught a low-grade fever from this issue. Governor Pete Wilson has won majority support for a proposed constitutional amendment that would prevent children born in the U.S. of illegal immigrants from automatically becoming citizens. Californians, more than most Americans, complain about special treatment for immigrants. TIME's poll indicates that 51% of Californians favor cutting off health benefits...
Because most Americans are themselves descendants of immigrants, there has traditionally been a laissez-faire attitude toward all forms of immigration. While there is a growing backlash against stereotypical nonwhite illegals -- the Mexican wetback, the smuggled Chinese -- one group for which undocumented status is generally just a temporary inconvenience is the Irish. Thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1990, which included a liberal green-card lottery pushed through by Irish-American politicians, thousands of Irish have been legalized. Most of the estimated 37,000 illegal Irish in the U.S. who have not yet won a green card...