Huh? How do you expect poor and unemployed people attending training programs (without pay, presumably) to pay for the transportation and childcare costs that their participation in the programs will require?
They can afford to cross streets by themselves and wipe their butts by themselves, dude. Transportation and child care, on the other hand, cost serious money, by the standards of a poor person.
I don’t know. How about they walk if it is close enough or take a bus? How about taking part time jobs to supplement the housing subsidy and welfare that they are currently receiving? How about pooling with neighbors (other evacuees) and providing child care coverage for each other? They have a common need and can look out for each other, taking turns with one group watching the kids while another goes to classes and then switching off?
I’d lay you good odds that a lot of the evacuee children are school age. Training classes can be provided to coincide with public school schedules so there would be no need for before and after school placements.
If you really are desperate for transportation, set up training classes in public school classrooms (libraries, conference rooms, auditoriums, lunch rooms, gyms, etc) and put the trainees on school buses. It would require the hiring of additional buses but would get them there. The cost could be partially offset by charging the attendees a nominal fee (public bus service costs about $1 for one way. Charging $2 per day is not out of line).
Why should I have to think of ideas for them? Why can’t they think for themselves? Why can’t they solve their own problems? It has been over a year and they are no closer to standing on their own feet than when they had to leave NOLA. Refugees have come to this country with their belongings in shopping bags and have struggled but made a place fore themselves. Illegal aliens come across our borders all the time and find ways to survive. These people can do it too.
No apology neccessary. I’m sorry if anyone took my emoticon seriously. I thought it would be a subtle and amusing response given my user name. Afterall, no true Dutchman would have taken your post seriously. 
What you describe is exactly the subsidized (or partly subsidized) transportation for unemployed participants in job training programs that Lissa was saying would be needed.
That would be great, indeed. Everybody would absolutely love it if all catastrophe victims and other poor/disadvantaged/unemployed people would just solve their own problems without any outside help.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the way real life works on this planet. Some people make it completely on their own; a lot more people imagine they’re making it completely on their own because they ignore the various kinds of subsidies and advantages they’re receiving (as per my earlier posts about tax deductions); and some people just don’t make it at all without some substantial help.
Of course, we can’t afford to lavish unlimited help on everybody who seems to need it, and all decisions about where to draw the line are necessarily going to be arbitrary. But I don’t see the point of swallowing the camel of relocation assistance and housing assistance and training programs, etc., and suddenly straining at the gnat of transportation and daycare subsidies for participants in training programs.
If we don’t want to spend taxpayer money to try to solve a particular social problem, then let’s not. But if we are going to spend the money, let’s at least spend enough to make the attempted solution effective. It would just be stupid to spend money on job training programs for poor and unskilled unemployed people that most of them aren’t even able to attend because they can’t afford the necessary transportation and childcare costs.
Sure, some refugees and migrants survive and succeed in the US (and a lot of them do get significant help from government social services along the way, of course). That’s nice, and very admirable, but it doesn’t help us figure out what to do about the other people who aren’t succeeding.
In addition, the refugees and immigrants are nearly always coming in to situations where there is a network in place to help them, even if it is simply the refugees and immigrants from the same country who got here earlier. When we have situations where the first refugees are entring the country from another location, they often encounter the same sort of failure and despair that the relocated people from New Orleans have encountered until some community or government agency steps up to give them that first boost–and no refugee community has ever had 700,000 families landing on one city, before.
My bold.
Sometimes some people reveal, in so many words, “I don’t know what poor means.”
In 1907, Ellis Island had over 1 million immigrants processed with over 11000 in one day. Back then there weren’t government support systems such as welfare, social security, medicare, job training and so on. You stepped off the boat and, if you were lucky enough to already have family here you had a place to stay. If not, you tried to find your way. People struggled, fought and were persecuted and isolated. But they somehow managed to take whatever jobs they could find, no matter how menial or demeaning, found any kind of housing they could afford, no matter how meager it was, and found ways to survive and succeed. They got around on foot, no one gave them rides.
Are you trying to say that those uneducated, non-English speaking masses were able to survive in a whole new country and culture, but Americans who have been displaced to another city are somehow less capable? Did they suddenly lose the ability to speak the language? Did they lose whatever work skills they used to possess and now must subsist on handouts? If they suddenly have reverted to a level where they must be taken care of completely and have everything handed to them including housing, food, medicine, schooling and transportation, then it doen’t say much for the citizenry of NOLA.
There may be a couple of valid points buried in this; it looked like it.
However, there are several reasons why it it is not on all fours with today:
[ul][li]People could live within walking distance of their employment at that time. Today, such locations are (a) slums, (b) gentrified and expensive, or (c) converted to one-purpose non-residential uses.[/li][li]There was far less automation and technologically-advanced equipment at that time, hence a far larger percentage of jobs that were either unskilled labor or jobs which would apply skills learned in the Old Country.[/li][li]Corporations were interested in hiring employees to work at their factories, mines, etc., rather than outsourcing to other countries.[/li][li]The regulatory environment in which the companies operated was far different; the wage scale was far different. While this is no argument to going back to Lochnerian standards, from an economic perspective it means that the private sector mining, manufacturing, and production industries are not going to absorb today the labor market that their predecessors did 100 years ago.[/li][*]Probably a good dozen other reasons in addition to the above; that’s contrasts that came to mind quickly.[/ul]
Well I would put my money on an immigrant than a poor native-born American any day. It takes a certain ‘entreprenuerial’ spirit to leave the country of your birth and move to a place that has a higher cost of living. And that entreprenuerial spirit does well in our country. That is why you see African and afro-caribbean immigrants doing better than blacks at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.
I’m not saying that our current welfare system is right, but you seem to have a very black and white view of the world. “In theory” there should be no poor people. No jobs in your area, move. One job isn’t paying enough, get two. Two jobs not enough, go to night school so you can get a single great paying job. Easy, right? And if it’s easy, than anyone who does not do it is deserving of contempt
In my world, poor people have a hard time getting a job. Some don’t know the first thing about writing a resume. Some don’t understand the etiquette of dressing up as well as sending a thank you note after an interview. The poor people I know have to pay more for everything. They pay higher interest rates on car notes. Some can’t open a bank account and they have to go to a check-cashing place and have a small percentage taken out of an already small check. They can’t apply for any job that states you have to have reliable transportation, because they take the bus or drive a beater. You and I can have the utilities turned on with a simple phone call, they have to make a large deposit. They can’t get jobs that do credit checks, because even if they could do the job and would not be poor with the job, are penalized for having had financial troubles in the past. In my world having a long period of unemployment, makes employers uncomfortable about hiring you.
In addition to Poly’s observations, my initial point regarding having a same-community network still stands. The Italians and Jews who stepped off the boats in 1907 had multiple places to go in the five boroughs (plus New Jersey) to find people speaking the same languages the moment they got off the island. Poles generally had destinations in (and often train tickets to) Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Serbo-Croatioans and Slovenians had communities in Cleveland, Italians in most major Great Lakes cities, Norwegians in Minnesota, Germans in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Texas, and most Great lakes cities.
In addition, there were millions of factory jobs calling for unskilled labor. As people saved money from jobs in the New York/New Jersey region, they used that money to buy tickets to move to the factories of the Great Lakes region, the mines of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan, Minnesota, and Colorado, and the farmland across the Great Plains. And each family who moved West opened up one or more factory positions at the points where the immigrants were landing. And, as Poly noted, the factories were generally built in the middle of the neighborhoods from which they drew their workers while street railways and subways provided a network of transportation that was intended to take people to and from work. Current freeway systems are designed to do the same thing, but the destinations are much farther apart and require the possession of a car. (New Orleans, prior to Katrina, had a higher percentage of people who did not own cars than did New York, meaning that the dispossessed are very unlikely to have transportation.)
Beyond that, while immigrants lacked the Federal safety net (such as it is) that currently exists, local governments and private agencies spent enormous sums on settlement houses and similar establishments that were intended to bring immigrants into the mainstream as quickly as possible. It is interesting that you picked 1907 for your figures: USES [U.S. Employment Service] established as Division of Information in the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Department of Commerce and Labor, by the Immigration Act (34 Stat. 909), February 20, 1907, to distribute immigrants throughout the United States.
If Houston was still an oil boom town, those 700,000 families might have been swallowed up in the prosperity and jobs of the region. I have yet to see evidence from the Houston Chronicle that there are 700,000+ jobs available in Houston.
Again, I have no problem with anyone initiating efforts to get the NOLA displaced persons on the road to self-sufficiency. I object to the false claim that everyone who has suffered, previously, did the same for themselves with no help. It is simply not true.
But hey, those imigrants back in the 1600’s or so just came over, killed the people living here, and then staked out claims to land and farmed. Why cant these lazy people from New Orleans do the same thing. Lots of land for the taking in Houston, i’ve been there.
First, they need to build a fort…
1907 was a differant world as wel…