Well. California IS extremely wealthy. There's just a wealth disparity. But that's already been addressed.
I do believe unmitigated immigration from poor nations cause two apparent things:
1) It introduces a massive amount of people willing to work for less money than your average American. This stagnates wages which are just a product of market forces. Why pay more when you can pay less because this pool of laborers will work for less. This has always been an issue with mass immigration dating back to the 1800's. You're just not going to get around this at all, and if you artificially increase wages then all you do is expedite inflation.
2) You can't grow more land. So if you take a region, say, that originally supports 5 million people, and introduce 1 million people willing to work for less money than they inhabitants you're going to shift labor to the cheaper pool AND real estate is going to sky rocket. That's a fact. And then you start to see multiple families living at one property, homelessness, drug abuse, so on and so forth.
So, while immigration is generally a better deal for desperate people who have virtually no options in their native lands the natives either have to adapt, accept a huge decrease in their living standards, or give in to drug use, depression, whatever because they can't adapt and they don't want to work like dogs.
- Doc
You astonish me at how much common sense, self reliance, and work ethic, one can have and still vote Democrat. You've done it again.