We need a term for what I’ve mentally been dubbing “corporate gentrification”, or the phenomena of the rapid death of small independent business combined with their replacement with sterile corporate “boxes”. You know these boxes. You’ve probably been inside one. They pop up all over town. Brick-shaped, devoid of character, sucking the souls out of communities. Brick-shaped chain restaurants, brick-shaped chain vape shops, brick-shaped chain yoga studios. ET. CETERA. They’re nightmarish, an abyssal, soulless box. A corporate corpse that communities are supposed to just accept, do business with, download their “apps”, and pretend that local businesses don’t matter. Suddenly, these box businesses are everywhere. They line our streets, invade our space, demolishing legacy structures to make way for their commercial rectangles, buildings that amount to social pollution, shapes and colors that negatively affect the psyches and spirits of those forced to look at them on a daily basis.

The Scarface Hotel in Miami is a CVS now. Underwhelming. pic.twitter.com/yUsDJ4QRtC

— Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 (@jacksonhinklle) November 20, 2023

Aw just like how the Army incinerated Pat Tillman’s uniform out of respect https://t.co/OUvGzURoFv

— Eyes Left (@EyesLeftPod) November 30, 2023

This staggering number is up from 31 million foreign-born citizens as shown in the US census in the year 2000. In 1990 that number was just 19.8 million.

I don’t object to immigrant citizens at all, but I do object to how they enter, and how they behave once they’re here. Forcing immigrants to abide by certain rules means that, on the whole, decent people will immigrate. But make our immigration system into a dysfunctional international joke, and people who are not decent will flood our Southern border, taking the place of decent families who follow the rules.