
International Gangsters in the Land of the Government Plantation
In 2015, I presented Lawrence, Massachusetts, as a cautionary tale of the government-plantation economic model. Just as industrialists once attempted to draw in foreign labor to the “company town” because it was less expensive, the local government is turning the city into a “government town,” whose main source of income is transfer payments from outside to pay for government services.
Consequently, this recent Boston Globe article caught my eye:
The federal government’s relentless assault on the feared MS-13 street gang in Greater Boston continued this week, with two members of the violent outfit admitting to their roles in the 2015 slaying of a 16-year-old boy in Lawrence, authorities said.
True, immigrant gangs are nothing new to the United States, and homegrown gangs certainly exist. Still, tracing the arrival of an international criminal enterprise is a necessary task, and one needn’t indulge too much in speculation to propose that using immigration to bolster the population in need of government services leaves a region vulnerable to this sort of invasion.