The conditions described below are, as the article states, increasingly common worldwide. They will generate two reactions toward the USofA (forgive my chauvinism but that really is my first concern):

• Increasing immigration pressures
• Increasing hostility, or jealousy or however you want to phrase it

The number of folks that "hate us for our freedom" is set to expand dramatically.

Published: January 18, 2004

ESTRUTURAL, Brazil — Izailde Souza, nine months pregnant with her sixth child, is a prisoner in her two-room shack. She says she is so afraid that thieves roaming the slum will steal her meager possessions that she never leaves her cramped quarters — not to look for work, go to market or walk her children to school.

The last time she remembers going out was more than a year ago, to vote for the politician who fought for her right to squat here on public land next to the city dump: José Edmar.

"He climbed on our rooftops to defend us when the police came to bulldoze our homes," she said. "He's our father here in Estrutural."

Estrutural is a sprawling slum where the shanties look like collages of scrap lumber, rusted metal and chicken wire. It is part of an illegal housing development, one that its critics say is highly organized. Vote-hungry politicians encouraged the poor to settle on public land, then provided them with a school, a clinic and other services to attract more people, environmentalists and prosecutors say.

Estrutural fits a pattern of squatter settlements across Asia and Africa, where explosive growth is expected to nearly double the population of many large cities in the next 15 years, according to the United Nations. Already, a third of the world's urban population — almost a billion people — live in slums.

The United Nations Human Settlements Program, in a report last year titled "The Challenge of Slums" described the phenomenon in the developing world, where "squatting became a large and profitable business, often carried out with the active, if clandestine, participation of politicians, policemen and privateers of all kinds."