Hey guys and welcome to Normally, the podcast with Normalish Takes for When the News Gets Weird.

I'm Mary Catherine Ham. And I'm Carol Markowitz. And we are so excited to have you with us.

We kind of feel like we're just getting our feet under us with normally, but we kind of hit the ground running. There's a lot of people who downloaded the first episode of the podcast. Very nice. So all you normies who are here listening, we appreciate you and the

almost Normies. We're glad to have you with us on this journey. Well said,

MK, I love it. Yeah, we're so happy to have you all. We're going to get right into it. Today, we're going to talk about a Wall Street Journal article about how homelessness numbers are way way up. The Wall Street Journal reports that in

2023 we had the highest number since the time that the government

started reporting this data in 2007 and that this number is going up because of homeless migrants.

The Wall Street Journal writes,

migrants bust by Texas to Chicago and Denver

contributed to the latest increases when they land in shelters there.

Migrants have arrived in significant numbers in shelters there.

Migrants have arrived in significant numbers in New York,

which has long had, of course, a legal right to shelter,

swelling numbers, and last year's count.

Now, they add, the latest homeless counts were largely done in January just

after the US set a record for illegal border crossing. This is really personal and annoying to me.

I am an immigrant and it's insane to me that we allow this illegal immigration

problem to fester and that it ends up hitting our streets in

the number of homeless people who live on you know intense on our blocks.

I came to this country as a refugee from the Soviet Union in the late 1970s and part of the

process was that somebody had to vouch for our family that we would not be a drain on public

funds and the idea that you get to America and you say,

...