Selected news coverage of

June 2003

By Victor Davis Hanson

News Articles
The Washington Times
CNSNews.com
Los Angeles Times
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Roll Call
Copley News Service

Editorials
The San Diego Union-Tribune
National Review Online
VDare.com
Townhall.com

Immigration limitation
By Robert Stacy McCain
The Washington Times, August 19, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/culture/20030818-092258-9048r.htm

California is being transformed by "massive illegal immigration," says one fifth-generation resident. In neighboring Arizona, residents have formed armed militias to patrol the Mexican border.

From Maine to Iowa to North Carolina, small-town residents are protesting what many call an "invasion" of immigrants. And some warn that terrorists are taking advantage of U.S. immigration policy.

One recent poll showed that 85 percent of Americans consider illegal immigration a "serious problem." That poll, conducted in March by Roper ASW, found that two-thirds of Americans would support reducing legal immigration to fewer than 300,000 newcomers a year, less than a third of the 1 million who came to the United States in 2002.

Immigration seems to be a concern everywhere except Washington, where — except for the 66 members of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus — neither Republicans nor Democrats appear interested in tackling the issue.

"How many people in America want to be called a racist?" Victor Davis Hanson says, when asked why politicians avoid the immigration issue. He answers his own question: "Not very many."

Being called a racist has been a new experience for Mr. Hanson in the two months since he published "Mexifornia: A State of Becoming."

A professor of classics at California State University at Fresno, Mr. Hanson is a military historian who says he reluctantly agreed to write a book about illegal immigration at the urging of his publisher.

He credits a "strange alliance" of special interests with stifling popular unrest about immigration.

"You have the power of the employers that have a lot of money — meat-packing, restaurant business, agribusiness, hotels, construction. They like to have a perennial supply of cheap labor, all the better if it's illegal and it won't be able to organize or advocate for higher wages," Mr. Hanson says in a telephone interview.

"They're in alliance with the race industry on the left, [who] want a nonassimilated constituency. You put the two together and the people in the middle get drowned out."

Mr. Hanson, who will be the featured speaker at a forum on immigration today at the National Press Club, says defenders of the status quo distort the issue.

"The way the political climate is, the issue is never illegal immigration. It's always portrayed as one is against immigration per se, or is against a particular ethnic group," he says. "So when you try to talk about the need for legal, measured immigration, it's easy to caricature you as a nativist, a protectionist or whatever."

A decade ago, U.S. immigration policy was debated widely — 59 percent of California voters approved Proposition 187, the 1994 ballot initiative that limited public benefits for illegal aliens. But both President Clinton and Congress ignored the immigration reforms proposed in 1994 by a commission.

Since then the only significant attempt to change U.S. immigration policy was a 2001 Bush administration proposal to extend amnesty to some illegal aliens from Mexico. That plan was dropped after the September 11 terrorist attacks made immigration a national-security issue.

The immigration debate often pits conservatives against conservatives. When syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin pointed out that seven of the September 11 hijackers obtained fraudulent identification with the help of illegal immigrants in Virginia, she was criticized by the Wall Street Journal, which expressed concern that new restrictions might "upend the lives of Mexican nannies in San Diego."

Such internecine politics dismay Mr. Hanson, who notes that he's a registered Democrat.

"I love California, and I think it's going to implode if somebody doesn't talk about this issue," he says. The immigration debate has spread nationwide in the past decade:

* In Iowa, many residents were outraged in 2001 after Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack proposed making the state an "immigration enterprise zone" to attract foreign workers. Fort Dodge City Council member Greg Nolting was among those signing a petition of protest, saying the governor's plan would take the "bread off our table."

* In North Carolina, protesters have staged rallies chanting "Illegals go home" and holding signs proclaiming "Now swim back." In Chatham County, the Hispanic population increased by more than 700 percent in 10 years.

* In Maine, concerns were raised last year after more than 1,000 Somali refugees moved to Lewiston (population 36,000). Many went directly onto welfare rolls. Schools were swamped with Somali children who spoke English as a second language.

"The city had to adjust quickly to this arrival of a group of people who are clearly identifiable by their race and their dress, language and religion. They arrived in a fairly large group," said Lewiston resident Douglas Hodgkin, a retired professor of political science at Bates College.

Rumors swirled that more refugees were on their way. In October, the town's mayor wrote a letter to Somali leaders, complaining: "This large number of new arrivals cannot continue without negative results for all." The Somalis responded by branding the mayor a "racist."

That's a familiar story to Mr. Hanson, whose book on California's immigration problem has met similar responses.

"People who like me say, 'Why would you do this? You're not a racist,' " says Mr. Hanson, whose Swedish ancestors settled in California's Central Valley more than a century ago. He says that if the United States "had 18 million illegal Swedes who couldn't speak English, I would be picking on Swedes."

He initially resisted offers to write a book on immigration.

"Myron Magnet at City Journal had heard I lived in the Central Valley, so he asked me to write an article about immigration," recalls Mr. Hanson, who still farms his family's land near Selma, Calif. "Peter Collier at Encounter Press read the article and asked if I would expand it [into a book]. It took him a lot of persuading. It's a no-win situation."

He says U.S. policy amounts to "rolling amnesty" for illegal aliens. "They have amnesty about every five or six years, without any reform or concessions from the Mexican government," Mr. Hanson says. "That's terrible message to people waiting five years to come legally to America from other countries."

In the state's recall campaign against Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, rival candidates are largely avoiding the immigration issue, although Mr. Hanson says most Californians know it is a major cause of the state's $38 billion deficit.

"You just can't pay any longer for people to just come across the border to use health care facilities, education facilities, law enforcement, social services. People understand it's just an outlay that's no longer sustainable."

After discussing his book on dozens of radio talk shows, where he says he has been criticized from both the right and the left, Mr. Hanson says he's tired of the issue.

"I'm not bashing immigrants, but the taxpayers of California cannot continue to fund entitlements at the present level, because the state's broke," he says, likening the issue to "the 800-pound gorilla in the living room that no one wants to talk about."

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Illegal immigration turning Calif. into 'apartheid state,' expert warns
By Steve Brown
CNSNews.com, August 20, 2003
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=/Nation/archive/200308/NAT20030820a.html

California may evolve into an "apartheid state" unless major changes are made in immigration policy, a panel of immigration experts warned Tuesday.

The problems are fueled primarily by illegal immigration to California, resulting in a growing segment of the population that pays a disproportionately low percentage in taxes; uses a similarly disproportionate amount of welfare services; and increasingly lives in virtually segregated communities while working in more affluent areas of the state, the panelists said.

California State University, Fresno professor Victor Davis Hanson, a member of the panel hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) in Washington, D.C., described some central California cities that are composed entirely of recent Mexican immigrants and their families, many of whom live in "a shadow community" because of their illegal status.

"Where I live, there are towns such as Orange Cove, Mendota or Parlier, Calif., which are 100 percent composed of either people who are the first generation from Mexico and are illegal aliens, or second generation where third- and fourth-generation Mexican citizens have left," said Hanson, author of the recently published book Mexifornia: A State of Becoming.

"These are like test tube cases of what not to do," said Hanson. "You reject American integration and diversity, and you allow apartheid societies of people who basically serve more affluent people in a shadow community without legality."

Hanson predicted the issue of illegal immigration from Mexico will be raised either in the current California recall campaign or in the 2004 presidential election, saying he expects the debate will be "demagogued in a way that's going to be quite infamous before the actual elections come around."

Part of the reason the issue of illegal immigration is such a highly charged political issue is because relatively few Americans have first-hand experience with it, according to San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Joseph Perkins, who was also on the panel. Another facet of the debate centers on the supply of cheap labor, which favors an "open-border" mindset in some business quarters.

"Most of these folks have not actually seen the consequences of that policy," said Perkins. "The fact is California, the nation's most populous state, has been transformed by immigration, particularly illegal immigration."

According to Perkins, who opposes open-border policies after having supported them as an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal. "If my friends in New York who continue to advocate open borders were to have 100,000 Chinese immigrants heading into New York harbor year by year and suddenly becoming part of New York State's population... then they might feel differently."

Steve Camarota, director of research for the CIS, dismissed many of the economic theories used to support an open-border policy.

While some argue that Mexican immigration - legal or otherwise - is crucial to the economy, Camarota introduced statistical data showing that Mexican immigrants comprise nearly one-third of California's population but account for approximately 3 percent of the state's economic output.

According to Camarota, California's estimated population of more than 35.5 million people includes some 10 million Mexicans, 70 percent of who are in the state illegally and 65 percent of who have less than a high school education.

"The idea that Mexican immigration is vital to the U.S. economy is simply false," Camarota said.

Next, Camarota noted that Mexican immigrants pay significantly less in taxes compared with native Californians but use disproportionately more welfare benefits than those born in the state.

Camarota's data showed that the average taxes paid by Mexican immigrants in California amount to about $1,535 per year, while native-born Californians pay $5,600 in taxes.

While Mexican immigrants pay one-third the taxes of native Californians on average, they also consume roughly three times more welfare, Camarota said.

The CIS data showed that 41.5 percent of Mexican immigrants used "major welfare programs" like Medicaid and food stamps, while those same welfare programs were used by only 14.2 percent of native Californians.

"There's a very big difference between what Mexican immigrants are supposed to pay in taxes and what natives are supposed to pay," said Camarota. "This fact, coupled with their extremely high use of public services, means that there's a very high cost for cheap labor."

While the panelists illustrated the encroaching problems and their causes, few detailed solutions were offered.

"What should we do? I think most people support immigration, we want immigration, and it always enriches the culture. But we want it in California under legal auspices," said Hanson.

Hanson said it would require "legal, measured immigration." However, he emphasized that "something" must be done to protect the borders.

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Undermining American workers
Record numbers of illegal immigrants are pulling wages down for the poor
and pushing taxes higher
By Fred Dickey
Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-immigration29jul20.story

The perils of illegal immigration rattle around in the attic of public policy like a troubled spirit. We pretend not to hear the dragging chains because we don't know how to silence them, but the ghosts will endure, especially in California. Because the nation can't control its borders, the number of illegal immigrants grows by an estimated half-million each year. They come because we invite them with lax law enforcement and menial jobs. Their presence makes our own poor more destitute, creating a Third World chaos in the California economy that we are only beginning to understand.

Patricia Morena has no time for a philosophical discussion on unauthorized immigration. She lives with it, or tries to. She's a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, and a motel maid in Chula Vista, six miles north of the border. She's short and heavyset, and dresses with care in tasteful thrift shop. She earns $300 before taxes, when she's fortunate enough to have a five-day week. She's a single mom with three children, all stuffed into a ratty little one-bedroom apartment. The eldest, an 18-year-old boy, has taken to stealing; she thinks it's because he's always been poor.

Sitting in the pale yellow kitchen light, she looks resigned rather than angry. She has the fear of anyone who's 39, broke and tired: being replaced. If she didn't have to compete with unauthorized workers in the cheap motels that cluster just north of the border, she thinks, she could lift her wages from $7.50 per hour to maybe $10 and bargain for some health insurance.

But she won't ask for a raise. "If I ask for money, the bosses say, 'I can get a young girl who is faster and cheaper,' " she says. "The bosses have power over illegals. They know they're afraid and not going to ask for overtime, even though I know the law says they should get it." So Morena remains mired, one of 32.9 million people the U.S. Census Bureau says lived in poverty in 2001.

The 1996 welfare reform act was pitched as a means for poor people to elevate themselves through work. President Clinton said at the time that the act was "to give them a chance to share in the prosperity and the promise that most of our people are enjoying today."

Well, seven years later, Morena is still poor. Although she never studied economics, she has learned a fundamental economic truth: The only leverage unskilled workers have is scarcity of labor. Morena can't work her way up the economic ladder because the bottom rungs have been broken off by the weight of millions of new illegal workers. The census bureau says the number of illegal immigrants in the country doubled in the 1990s, from 3.5 million to 7 million, the largest such increase in the nation's history. So Morena soldiers on at $7.50 an hour, living with a reality that the late Cesar Chavez, champion of the farm worker, understood back in the 1960s. Chavez, says David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian from Stanford University, advocated limited immigration to protect the wage levels of the Chicano workers he struggled to unionize. Without such restrictions, demand for labor would fall, and with it the pressure to pay higher wages.

The people who traditionally benefit from the Patricia Morenas and other low-paid workers are farther up the economic ladder—businesses, industries and homeowners. For them, stagnant low wages mean they can hire maids, farm laborers, seamstresses, roofers and carpet cleaners for about the same wages as they paid a quarter-century ago. That helps industries grow cheap lettuce and make down-market shirts. It frees up enough money for homeowners to afford those sports cars whose price tripled even as the cost of getting their lawn mowed stayed the same.

Yet the relentless flow of illegal labor is now changing life for Californians on those higher rungs too.

Apart from the proliferation of workers standing on street corners waiting for jobs, it's difficult to see that migration from Mexico into California during the past two decades is on a scale that astonishes even those who specialize in making sense out of human patterns. One such expert is Victor Davis Hanson, a professor of classics at Cal State Fresno and the author of "Mexifornia," a recent book that reveals the extent of the changing culture and demographics of California. He says that no immigration in American history even remotely compares to the one underway along the southwest border, which, incidentally, is the longest that has ever separated First- and Third World countries.

Today, nearly half of California's residents are immigrants or the children of immigrants, and the state's population is projected to increase by 52%, to 49 million, between 2000 and 2025. An estimated 950,000 Mexicans without papers live in the five-county Greater Los Angeles area, says Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Urban Institute public policy center in Washington, D.C. They are mostly nested in communities of the 2.4 million Mexican-born migrants. Statewide, there are 1.6 million undocumented Mexicans, and 4.8 million in the country, Passel says. They make up more than half of the 8.5-million-plus undocumented persons of all nationalities.

The image of migrants popularized by their advocates is of work-tough campesinos who cross the border spitting on their hands and eagerly looking for shovels. That is true to a considerable extent, because a lot of shoveling gets done. As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says in support of a new amnesty for unauthorized immigrants: "There are approximately 10 million undocumented workers employed throughout the country who are working hard and performing tasks that most Americans take for granted but won't do themselves."

The second half of that sentence has been accepted as a truth for generations. Illegal immigrants are just doing the work Americans won't. But is it true today?

In April, I shopped for a contractor to paint my house trim. I got three bids. One was for $1,600, about $400 less than the others. The only condition was that payment be in cash. That wasn't remarkable. Is there a Californian alive who doesn't know they can pay under the table for cheap immigrant labor? You pay cash. There are no checks. There is no tax record. But this bargain didn't come from an undocumented worker. It came from an established businessman with good references. I asked why the ethical gyrations.

He vented: "If I'm going to stay in business, I have to do what the illegals do. They never pay taxes, on profits or on their employees' pay. Right there, I'm at a 20% disadvantage. They'll come in here with about six guys with paintbrushes who work for peanuts, do a fair job, and then they're gone." These competitors have driven every American out of gardening, he added, and are doing it to house-painting, roofing and car repair. He concluded in frustration, "What am I supposed to do?"

Roy Beck, executive director of Numbers USA Education and Research Foundation, a Washington, D.C., organization devoted to immigration control, says it's not that millions of unemployed Americans "are too lazy and shiftless to bus tables or wash dishes." What the Chamber of Commerce and like-minded business groups really mean, he says, is that "Americans won't work like slaves, like serfs. Americans want to be paid and treated fairly."

"The National Restaurant Assn., for one, doesn't want their customers to know that this system forces illegal workers to live in abject poverty," Beck says. "It's the serfdom thing. If customers thought about it, they'd say, 'No, I don't want people who are hidden in the kitchen or serving me to be so poor and neglected that they might be TB carriers, and hate my guts for not caring about them.' "

Terry Anderson, a black talk-radio host in Los Angeles, says he sees similar displacement throughout the African American community. "I defy you to find a black janitor in L.A.," Anderson says. "In the '70s, the auto body-repair business in South-Central was pretty much occupied by blacks. Those jobs are all gone now. They're all held by Hispanics, and all of them are illegals. And those $25 jobs that blacks used to hold in the '70s now pay $8 to $10, and a black man can't get hired even if he's expert. It's absolute discrimination, because there's a perception that a Hispanic works better. Well, he works cheaper. They're in the country illegally, so they have no bargaining power, and the wages get driven down."

The point he and Beck make is decidedly not a racial one, not black versus Latino or Mexican versus white. Their point is about money. Illegal, powerless immigrants versus relatively empowered American citizens. Who among us could survive if every day, the streets outside our workplaces were lined with people willing to do our jobs for two-thirds or half the pay because in the world they came from, in the world where their money is sent, half of our pay amounted to riches?

Anderson particularly despairs of the effect the scarcity of low-end jobs has on poor youths. In May, 6.1 million whites and 1.7 million blacks in the country were unemployed. But of those without jobs, young people took the worst hit. The unemployment rate for whites ages 16 to 19 in the labor force was 15.4%, with 892,000 unemployed; for black teenagers, it was 270,000 out of work, at a scary 35% rate.

These kids are the millions of potential burger-flippers and mowers of lawns that Beck and Anderson say employers are bypassing in favor of undocumented migrants. "There was this kid in my neighborhood—good kid, 17 years old, and he goes down to the local McDonald's to get an after-school job," Anderson says. "The manager tells him that because he doesn't speak Spanish, she can't hire him because it would have a disruptive effect on all the other workers who don't speak English. I mean, think of that: Here's a kid trying to get a little ahead—American born, four generations in South-Central—who's told he can't sell French fries because he can't speak a foreign language. You want to talk about disillusionment?"

As cheap, illegal workers flood the labor force, governments and taxpayers are feeling the pinch. Just as one dishonest act often leads to another, illegal labor has led to other illegalities. The most pervasive is the untaxed cash transaction. It has created a surging "underground economy" that has become a hole in society's pocket through which falls many of our democratic values, and a lot of loose cash.

John Chiang of Los Angeles, one of five members of the state Board of Equalization, California's tax oversight agency, says off-the-books businesses can have a "profoundly dislocating effect" on the economy. It pushes some businesses to compete by also cutting legal corners, and discourages other businesses from coming to California.

A study last year by the Economic Roundtable, a Los Angeles research group, found that the underground sector in Southern California probably accounts for 20% or more of the economy, says economist Dan Flaming, author of the report. Nationwide, the International Monetary Fund reported in a 2002 issues paper, underground work amounted to 10% of the total economy. As the underground sector surged in the '90s, an unpleasant snowball began to gather mass. The amount of tax revenues generated by the economy didn't keep pace with the population growth and accompanying rise in demands for government services. That, in turn, "adds significantly to the tax burden of honest taxpayers," Chiang says. He estimates that the state is losing $7 billion a year in unpaid taxes.

The state Employment Development Department's estimates are somewhat lower, at $3 billion to $6 billion annually in lost income and wage-related taxes. Any way it's counted, that's a pile of money for a state running a $38-billion deficit that Sacramento is attempting to close by cutting services, raising taxes and borrowing money.

Certainly, not all of the loss is due to illegal immigrants, and the state, with scrupulous political sensitivity, avoids placing blame there. But Jerry Hicks, whose job until recently was to measure the underground economy for the Employment Development Department, reluctantly agrees that common sense would put undocumented workers at the head of the tax-avoidance list. It's anybody's guess how much fault lies with businesses forced to compete by dealing in cash.

That loss of tax revenue is key to understanding why unchecked illegal immigration creates a downward economic spiral. Jan. C. Ting, Temple University law professor and former assistant commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, says the swelling population of poor people who have little more than manual labor to offer, and who pay few taxes, will inevitably draw heavily on social services. That drain will, in turn, increase taxes on businesses and homeowners, who may depart for other states, which in turn will drive tax rates even higher.

An often-cited National Research Council study in 1997 concluded that each native household in California was paying $1,178 a year in state and local taxes to cover services used by immigrant (legal and illegal) households. The demand for such offsetting taxes undoubtedly has increased in proportion to the numbers of illegal immigrants since then.

What is known is how the tax drain is changing society. As the IMF's issue paper warned last year, the lost revenue can lead to "a deterioration in the quality and administration of the public goods such as roads and hospitals provided by the government." Hospitals provide a clear warning signal. Here's how it happens: An illegal immigrant, without health insurance, has a serious health problem and goes to a public hospital, incurring a catastrophic medical cost. At bargain basement wages, that patient has as much chance of paying the hospital bill as paying off the national debt. So the patient scribbles out a passable IOU, and disappears.

Someone else pays. America's health system draws its lifeblood from private health insurance, and if large numbers of patients have no insurance or can't pay, the money has to be taken from taxes—siphoned from the state treasury. A robust society can absorb a certain amount of those losses, but if the tax base isn't expanding as fast as the demands placed on it, the system begins to shut down—as Los Angeles County's has.

In 2002, 33% of L.A. County residents were without health insurance or were grossly underinsured. The county thinks that rate is the highest in the United States, which helps to explain why the county prepared to close two hospitals last year because there was too much demand and too little revenue.

Carol Gunter is acting director of county emergency medical services, the person who has to try to run a "business" in which about a quarter of the customers don't have the means to pay for her product, but are entitled to its full service. So just how many emergency room patients are illegal? Federal law prevents her from knowing because hospitals are forbidden to ask about citizenship. What Gunter does know is that, despite billion-dollar federal bailouts, the number of public L.A. County hospitals recently went from six to five, and another is going to close.

In March, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein announced she had joined other senators in supporting a bailout bill to reimburse state and local hospitals for emergency medical costs incurred by undocumented immigrants. She estimated those costs in California at $980 million in the past year. Celebration over the proposal becomes somewhat muted when we consider that a bailout is—by sinking-lifeboat definition—intended to overcome the effects of a leak, and her statement mentioned nothing about patching the boat. Feinstein declined to be interviewed on the subject.

Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Hospital Assn. of Southern California, puts it bluntly: "We are in a [health-care] meltdown in Los Angeles County to the extent we have never seen before."

The state can't be far behind. An estimated 20% of patients throughout California are uninsured, with hospitals incurring $3.6 billion in uncompensated care. Fifty-one percent of the state's hospitals operated in the red last year.

After the "please pay cash" painting contractor left my house, I put pencil to paper on the bids. Considering that his line of work is labor-intensive, if I accepted the above-board bid of $2,000, probably about $1,500 would go toward wages, and maybe 10% of that would go to the government. If I went for the underground bid, I would get off cheaper—and the government would lose $200. Multiply that by the countless such transactions in California daily, and a lot of hospitals are going to run short, and a lot of potholes are going to grow.

Author hanson describes the practical effect of the massive immigration numbers: "The unfortunate message we give migrants is, 'You can work here, but only undercover, and you can't join our society.' "

Chiang sees the same ominous divisions. "California is becoming a dichotomy society—high-wealth, low-wealth; educated, undereducated; and the underground economy plays a large role in creating the unregulated atmosphere that tends to widen those social and economic gaps."

So the people on either side of the divide go to their corners. The wealthy to West L.A. and its counterparts around the state. The poor? "We have towns in the Central Valley that are—literally—100% Mexican, and consist mainly of illegal migrants," Hanson says. "In those towns, Spanish is the only language spoken; there is no industry, and the towns are huge pockets of poverty. We can legitimately fear that this is the California of the future."

Two small cities of about the same size in Fresno County underscore Hanson's point. The town of Parlier in 2000 was 97% Latino, with 36% of the town living in poverty, and a per capita income of $7,078, Hanson says. The town of Kingsburg, whose population was 34% Latino, had just 11% living in poverty. The per capita income was $16,137.

The dependence upon agricultural labor, which usually has to be done by hand, puts a low ceiling on what immigrants can earn. That ceiling could be lifted either by stemming the flow of illegal labor, or by mechanizing the farm work. But neither is happening, which suits many farmers just fine.

Philip Martin, professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Davis, says farmers could quickly mechanize labor-intensive harvesting if it were not so cheap to hire migrants. "Back in the late '60s and '70s, there was a fear there wouldn't be enough farm workers, so that spurred mechanization research," Martin says. "Then there were 70-some subsidized projects at the University of California aimed at figuring out how to pick oranges mechanically. Today, there aren't any, because there is plenty of cheap farm labor. There is probably a machine available to harvest every crop grown in the U.S., but they won't be used as long as the laborers are available at low wages."

Martin's point reveals this turned-around truism: Agriculture in Mexico is modernizing, which forces many laborers off their jobs there. Machines are displacing laborers in the cornfields of Mexico, so they come north to the "advanced" United States to pick fruits and vegetables by hand.

Because the United States makes no real effort to count its undocumented workers, their true impact on the job market is unclear. Common sense does say, however, that if millions of Mexicans are here illegally, they must be working or they would go home. An estimated $10 billion was sent back to Mexico in 2002 by workers in the United States, an increase of $800 million from the year before, says the nonprofit Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C.

The migrants who come north used to be regarded as sellouts or deserters in Mexican society. Now, they're heroes praised by Mexican President Vicente Fox for the money they inject into that faltering economy. That is also a first, Hanson says. "Mexico is a failing society that stays afloat by exporting human capital. If you shut that border down, in five years you'd have a revolution, because Mexico can't meet the aspirations of its own people."

There is no question that illegal immigration greatly troubles Americans. The polls show it, both before and after 9/11. They want them to go home. One poll even showed that almost two-thirds want the military to patrol the border. Of course, they never gripe about the cheap hamburgers or the low-cost gardening that migrants make possible.

Yet, curiously, in a decade of unprecedented illegal immigration, the issue has been put on the back burner by most of society's seers and opinion-formers.

Illegal immigrants are the people we used to call illegal aliens in a coarser time. Now, to some, even "undocumented workers" is too harsh so they've adopted "unauthorized." To many critics of illegal immigration, this tiptoe nomenclature is part of the problem. They say a debate or consensus on the issue is made impossible by a barricade of political correctness, up against which a critic is in danger of that paralyzing accusation—racist.

Most politicians would rather swallow their tongues than talk about illegal immigration, and Dick Morris thinks he knows why. Morris, the former political strategist for Bill Clinton, says both political parties, "especially the Republicans, have to know they're running out of white people to split up. Any major politician is facing dodo bird extinction if he or she fails to reach out to Hispanics. It scares them."

Hanson believes the politics of immigration is about greed and power more than ideology. "It's one of those issues that's backed by strange bedfellows—on the right, you have big business types who want open borders to make money on cheap labor, and don't care about social consequences. On the other side, you have this left-wing racist—I think it's racist—separatist industry of Latino groups and leftist legislators" who want more immigration because it expands their power base.

Quixotically, on the border south of San Diego, the U.S. runs a version of "Checkpoint Charlie" to keep them out. Operation Gatekeeper started in 1994 to stem the flow of illegal immigration north by clamping down on the main ports of entry in the Southwest. In addition to forcing many border crossers to attempt a dangerous trip across the desert, it has had the unintended consequence of transforming a fluid population that used to go back and forth into one that simply stays here.

An unauthorized worker probably would prefer to work in this country and return home as often as possible, preserving his Mexican roots. Gatekeeper, however, has cemented that worker's feet in the U.S. It's not hard to understand his hesitancy to go home for a holiday or family event if he knows there's a good chance he'll be caught on his return. So, he does the obvious thing: He hires a coyote (outlaw immigrant trafficker) to bring his whole family north, often one member at a time.

So, what are the options? close the borders and kick out the undocumented as some arch-conservatives want? Or, on the other extreme, open the borders completely, as libertarians and some Latino groups tend to favor? On both counts, forget about it. Not going to happen. And you can trash amnesty at the present time, too. The War on Terrorism and the tension it has caused between Mexico and the United States, plus a sour remembrance from the results of the 1986 amnesty law, closed the book on "regularization," as Bush and Fox euphemistically called amnesty in the fond days of their mutual affection a couple years ago. A 2002 poll by Zogby International, a polling firm, showed that 65% of Americans opposed a new amnesty.

When the nation tried amnesty 17 years ago, the whole idea was to combine it with a crackdown on hiring illegal workers. Guess what? The amnesty worked for 2.8 million migrants, putting them on the track for citizenship; the crackdown did not, as the rising numbers of illegal crossings demonstrate.

The first amnesty seemed likely to only lead to another, and then another. An advocate of controlled borders is Cecilia Muñoz, vice president of the National Council of La Raza, the group considered an arch defender of illegal migration. Muñoz says undocumented immigration is bad for both the country and the workers, so she supports amnesty to make them legal, calling it "earned legalization." Her enthusiasm flags, though, when asked if the government should crack down on subsequent illegal immigration that undoubtedly would follow a new amnesty.

But her convictions don't falter. "We are going to ultimately succeed because we're all complicit in this system. We don't like it, but we benefit" from it, and therefore should grant the laborers amnesty.

The last-gasp alternative to amnesty seems to be a "guest-worker program." The guest-worker idea had two antecedents, one from 1917 to 1921, and another, known as the bracero program, from 1942 to 1964. Each was started in response to farmers' complaints of wartime labor shortages. After studying both, professor Martin is convinced that "there's nothing more permanent than temporary workers." He realizes the folly of inviting a poor laborer into a comparative worker's paradise, and then expecting him to run along home when the job is finished.

David Lorey, author of the scholarly "The U.S.-Mexican Border in the 20th Century," says the lesson of the bracero experience "is that guest-worker programs encourage migration." He adds, "There were horrible conditions in the migrant camps, and a lot of abuses that resulted from this neither-fish-nor-fowl program."

In retrospect, the lasting effect of the bracero program was to draw workers north to the border and give them a taste of American wages. For example, in 1940, Mexicali, a Mexican border town south of El Centro, had a population of less than 20,000 people. In 1960, it was 175,000. The programs succeeded in drawing workers, especially in agriculture, but also left a legacy of exploitation and ineffective regulation that has made bracero a dirty word in the lexicon of Mexican migration.

Memories of the abuses leave Hispanic groups skittish to the idea of guest-worker programs. But Brent Wilkes, executive director of the powerful League of United Latin American Citizens, says that his organization might support such a program provided the workers have labor rights equal to those of American laborers, and have an inside-track to eventual citizenship.

However, law professor Ting calls a guest-worker program in any form unworkable. "It's camouflaged amnesty. No one wants to use the word 'amnesty' because the American people recognize it for what it is—admitting defeat of our immigration system. So, they say, 'Let's call it something else. Let's call it a 'guest-worker program.' "

The vacillation over how to effectively control illegal migration drives a senior immigration investigator right up the wall, because he believes the bureaucracy has the answer in its own hands. The investigator has more than 20 years' experience with the INS. Still, he believes he must remain anonymous for fear of retribution.

Currently, he explains, the law requires an employer to make a good-faith effort to ascertain that applicants have valid identification. However, he considers that law a political con job because it gives unscrupulous employers an easy out: They can't be held responsible for not having the expertise to identify illegal or forged documents, so anything short of those being written in crayon can pass muster. The biggest abuses, he says, are of forged immigrant registration cards (green cards) and Social Security cards.

What frustrates him is his conviction that a procedure is already in place that would "immediately identify 70% of the illegal workforce." He explains that as a part of the 1986 immigration law, a voluntary employee verification pilot program was established, and is still operating. Under the program, the validity of Social Security cards and green cards can be quickly checked on all new employees by phone or online. He says the system could easily be expanded into a mandatory nationwide computer hookup by cross-indexing the data bases of the immigration service with the Social Security Administration. The effect would be that honest employers could instantly ascertain the legality of their workforce, and dishonest employers would have no excuse for hiring undocumented workers.

Bill Strasberger, a spokesman for the immigration service, says the pilot program is considered successful. "Employers using it are pleased, and so are we. It provides verification with confidentiality." Asked if it would be expanded or made mandatory by Congress, he laughed briefly, then said, "It really is the direction we need to move in."

Why, then, aren't we doing it? The investigator says that Congress refuses to make the program mandatory so as not to offend big agribusiness and other industries that freely employ illegal workers. These industries then take some of those profits and give generously to members of Congress.

Beck's organization, which advocates immigration control, plans to push for a mandatory employee-verification law. "The American people would not stand for a massive deportation, so what we need to do is use this program to dry up the jobs, then most illegals would gradually go home." If such a law was enacted, he says, the end result would be American workers gravitating to those jobs for slightly higher wages. "You'd end up paying 25 cents more for a hamburger and a dime more for lettuce. Big deal."

This affluent society can certainly afford more expensive hamburgers, but can it afford the hidden costs that currently make those burgers and fries dirt cheap? As Beck asks, "How many unskilled illegal migrants do we allow in? Forty million? Fifty million? What is the end point?"

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Author: Flood of illegal aliens straining California's resources
By Kevin Freking
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock), August 20, 2003

WASHINGTON -- An unchecked flood of illegal immigration from Mexico has transformed California into a separate but unequal state that not only strains the resources of the native population but eventually abuses the illegal population, too, says the author of a book that has become popular with immigration experts here.

Victor David Hanson, a professor at California State University in Fresno, is the author of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming. Hanson told an audience at the National Press Club on Tuesday that the Mexican immigration that has occurred in California over the past three decades is unlike any wave before, because of its intensity. More than 100,000 legal immigrants from Mexico arrive in California each year. Untold thousands more illegal aliens also go to California each year.

As a result, the immigrants, legal and illegal, never have to assimilate into American society. They are content with knowing only Spanish, Hanson said. They live in entirely Hispanic communities. And they perform hard labor until their bodies can no longer hold out. Then, they are discarded by employers and often must rely on the U.S. government to survive.

"We've created an alternative universe like we've never had before in the United States," Hanson said. "There are towns that are 100 percent composed of people that are first-generation from Mexico or illegal aliens, or possibly second-generation, where the third and fourth generations from Mexico have left, and basic services don't work at the levels of surrounding communities."

CALL FOR AN END

The Center for Immigration Studies, which has long called for the United States government to crack down on illegal immigration, sponsored the briefing, which included Hanson and Joseph Perkins, a columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune. Perkins said he was once all for the open-borders policy that basically allows illegal immigration to occur unchecked, but that was when he was an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal.

He said it was easy to have those feelings working in an office in New York City, but when he moved to San Diego, it struck him just how difficult it is to absorb hundreds of thousands of immigrants each year, how it stresses schools, hospitals and law enforcement. He called for a halt on all immigration to California while the nation deals with the problem of illegal immigration. Perkins agreed with Hanson that many of the immigrants are not interested in becoming United States citizens. He said that makes them different from previous generations of immigrants.

"Far too many Mexican immigrants to California are ambivalent at best and hostile at worst to fully assimilating into American culture. It has the consequence, I think, of creating a permanent underclass," Perkins said. "If things don't change in the next five years or 10 years, we're going to see the kind of apartheid that we have seen in other parts of the world, and it's something that troubles me greatly."

A ROUGH ROAD

While Hanson and Perkins bemoaned the state of immigration in California, a survey of Hispanics last year by the Pew Hispanic Center indicated that many immigrants do seek "the melting pot experience" that has made the United States a nation of immigrants.

"No doubt it's a rough road for the immigrant population," said Richard Fry, the center's senior research associate. "Their kids do much better."

By the third generation, he said, most Hispanics can no longer speak Spanish. And, he added, while native-born Hispanics don't earn as much as whites, they are paid better than blacks.

The center's survey made similar conclusions. "If there's a lot of Spanish being spoken in this country, it's because we are experiencing high levels of immigration, not because Latinos are resistant to learning English," it summarized. "All Latinos believe that learning English is necessary to succeed in this country and immigrants believe it even more than the native-born."

Hanson said the political dynamics of immigration are unlike the dynamics of any other issue, which is why little is done by the U.S. government to stop the flow of illegal immigrants. Liberal groups, such as the National Council of LaRaza, have views on immigration comparable to the conservative business community, which says it needs cheap labor to compete globally. Meanwhile, some environmental groups hold beliefs comparable to the anti-immigration views espoused by conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, he said.

"I know I can't predict what somebody is going to say about this issue based on their political affiliation," Hanson said.

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"Heard on the Hill"
Pelosi's pizza problem
By Ed Henry
Roll Call, September 2, 2003
http://www.rollcall.com/issues/49_16/hoh/2630-1.html (requires registration)

A lively debate on immigration during the dog days of August nearly turned into a sort-of food fight as a staffer for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tried to launch a bizarre protest by walking off with a pizza.

Federico DeJesus, who handles Hispanic media outreach for Pelosi, was infuriated by Victor Davis Hanson's presentation at the Aug. 19 event, sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies.

Hanson, author of the book "Mexifornia: A State of Becoming," is an outspoken advocate of stopping the flood of illegal immigration from Mexico to California.

At the end of the speech in the Longworth House Office Building, DeJesus stood up to deliver the first question from the audience and launched into a long rant accusing Hanson of penning a "racist" book.

The controversy was compounded by the fact that Hanson had earlier noted he is a "classicist," as in a classics professor at California State University at Fresno.

"You yourself admitted that you're a 'classist,'" DeJesus shouted, apparently believing that the professor had confessed to being an elitist or some such taboo.

"I thought Pelosi would have had more sensible staff," Mark Krikorian, executive director of the CIS, told HOH. "Some basic democratic civility would have been appropriate. There were some other Democratic staff there, and I think they were embarrassed."

Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly told HOH that DeJesus was merely trying to correct the record with regard to some statements the professor had made about a prominent Hispanic group.

"He felt the speaker was making some comments about La Raza that were inaccurate, and he wanted to correct them," said Daly, in reference to the National Council for La Raza, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving life for Hispanic Americans.

Daly allowed that the discussion did grow heated, but only because some people in attendance repeatedly referred to DeJesus as "Mr. Sosa," as in Hispanic baseball star Sammy Sosa, during his question.

"He felt that they were intentionally getting his name wrong, and he was offended by that," Daly said.

The fight reached its climax when DeJesus stormed away from his seat and decided to grab one of the many boxes of pizza in the back of the room on his way out the door.

"He tried to steal one of our pizzas," charged Krikorian. "One of my guys had to get it back. He yelled, 'I hope you enjoy the pizza!' He was basically a heckler."

DeJesus claimed that he merely wanted to take some food back to his office and meant no disrespect, but Krikorian wasn't buying that.

"This was sort of sophomoric," said Krikorian. "Something you'd expect at some radicalized university campus, not Capitol Hill."

==================================================================

Capitol Hill fracas highlights immigration debate
By Jerry Kammer
Copley News Service, August 25, 2003

When Victor Davis Hansen, a scholar of ancient Rome and Greece and a professor at California State University Fresno, described himself Wednesday as "a classicist" at a Capitol Hill briefing, a press assistant for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi took offense.

Hansen regards the ensuing fracas as a teaching aide illustrating one of the points he makes in his new book about immigration: Efforts to discuss the issue are often hijacked by hotheads more interested in intimidation than discussion.

Frederico de Jesus apparently thought Hansen had acknowledged "classist" bias against immigrants. According to Hansen and several others at the meeting, he launched an irate attack on Hansen and his new book "Mexifornia," which argues that mass illegal immigration, coupled with the loss of traditional ways of assimilating newcomers into American culture, has produced a social and civic debacle in California.

"You admitted you were a classist!" De Jesus charged, according to congressional staffers and Mark Krikorian, who sponsored the briefing as director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter limits on immigration. The observers said De Jesus accused Hansen of "racism" and "xenophobia" and repeatedly interrupted him before stalking out of the room.

De Jesus did not respond to calls and e-mails seeking comment. Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for Rep. Pelosi, a California Democrat, offered this statement: "A staffer thought a racially insensitive remark was made. He objected and left the briefing." She said she could not respond to other questions except to say De Jesus "spoke for himself," not for Pelosi.

"It was a tirade, and it was an embarrassing show of ignorance," said Krikorian, who accused De Jesus of trying to steal a box of pizza as he walked out. He said a CIS staff member recovered the pizza after a brief struggle.

Said Hansen: "I thought to myself: this is the point man for the House Minority leader on this crucial issue for the state of California. If he can't even come to discuss it without using slurs, there's no mystery why people don't want to discuss it." Hansen is no stranger to controversy. Though a lifelong Democrat, he has a national reputation as a conservative scholar and military historian. His books and essays challenge what he sees as the frauds of multiculturalism and "therapeutic" liberalism. After the 2001 terror attacks, he wrote that great leaders throughout history have confronted evil head-on, spurning utopian visions of world harmony.

In "Mexifornia" Hansen takes on illegal immigration. In an interview, he said unchecked immigration from Mexico has grown into "the 800 pound gorilla that's living in the house and no one wants to talk about." His book finds many reasons for the silence, including intimidation.

"Even timorous attempts to initiate an honest public discussion of the issue can earn one the cheap slander of "racist." As a result, he writes, cowed Californians prefer to "go quietly to the polls," passing restrictionist initiatives like Proposition 187 and opposing bilingual education.

"It is not a very healthy state of affairs to have a voting population of millions thinking privately what they would never express publicly," he writes.

Hansen identifies a generalized breakdown of civic responsibility, charging that politicians on the right play up to business interests that demand a steady supply of the easily exploited; politicians on the left coddle illegal immigrants as a potential treasure trove of votes; the press fails to square up to the problem.

Meanwhile, suburbanites live like aristocrats with servants to cut their grass, clean their house and mind their children.

Hansen takes pains to defuse the rhetorical bombs of racism hurled his way. A fifth-generation resident of California's central valley, he proudly claims Mexican-American in-laws and nieces and nephews. He said his two daughters are dating "two wonderful young men," who are sons of Mexican immigrants." He writes with admiration about immigrant energy and commitment to work.

Far from a rant, "Mexifornia" is a lament and a warning. Hansen writes that it is partly "a melancholy remembrance of a world gone by" - the California before mass migration from Mexico began in the 1970s and before multiculturalism dismantled public school efforts to assimilate young immigrants into American life and culture."

When he was a child, Hansen said this week, public schools graduated immigrant children "who became some of the finest citizens in the state."

Now, Hansen finds a landscape of failure, poverty and dependence, where 40 percent of Hispanic children drop out of school and are drawn into a low-wage job system. He condemns businessmen who use them up, then demand a steady supply of new illegal immigrants because they scorn the second generation as too Americanized to work backbreaking jobs at low pay.

He surveys with alarm 100 percent immigrant communities that are steadily more separate and unequal, locked in downward spirals of unemployment, welfare dependency and crime.

"It is incumbent upon us to say if they are here, let's immerse them in culture and English," Hansen said. "Let's make Americans out of them, not just use them for cement work and say, 'Go live in that ghetto and take ethnic studies to feel good about yourselves.' "

Hansen says he takes as much criticism from the far right as from the far left.

Last week, for example, he received an e-mail from a woman saying that as a military historian he should know that Mexican immigration has become "demographic warfare" against white America. The right is aghast at his advocacy of amnesty, a position he strongly conditions by saying that it must be a one-time policy instead of a rolling series of legalizations.

Above all, Hansen wants Californians to engage the issue, not to surrender the forum to those who would shout them down from the left or right.

"Unless the political middle steps in, the only people in the debate will be those who appear to fears on the left and the right," he warns. "I am worried about that. That's an invitation to demagogues."

==================================================================

Far too generous on immigration
By Joseph Perkins
The San Diego Union-Tribune, August 29, 2003
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/op-ed/perkins/20030829-9999_mz1e29perkin.html

Federico de Jesus owes Victor David Hanson an apology. De Jesus, a staffer for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, falsely accused Hanson, the distinguished author of the just-published book "Mexifornia," of racism and xenophobia at a recent Capitol Hill briefing.

During his introduction, Hanson, a scholar of ancient Rome and Greece, was aptly described as "a classicist." De Jesus somehow interpreted that to mean that the author had a white "classist" bias against immigrants.

Pelosi's aide, who somehow earned a diploma without being able to make a distinction between a classicist and a classist, got ugly with Hanson and stormed out of the briefing in protest.

His hysterics reveal what kind of not-so-beautiful minds the House's top Democrat has shaping her views on issues.

That troubles because there hardly is a more urgent issue facing America than immigration, particularly illegal immigration from Mexico. And Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat, ought to know that better than most of her colleagues on the Hill. That's because California is the state of choice for an estimated 40 percent of the nation's legal and illegal immigrants, a disproportionate number of whom hail from south of the border.

The nation's most populous state has reached the tipping point with Mexican immigration. Every year, it adds not only 100,000 legal Mexican immigrants to its population, but also, it is estimated, just as many illegal Mexican immigrants.

Meanwhile, the quality of life further diminishes for the once-Golden State's native-born population.

"Massive illegal immigration from Mexico to California, coupled with a loss of confidence in the old melting pot model of transforming newcomers into Americans, is changing the very nature of the state," Hanson writes, in "Mexifornia."

Indeed, while Mexican immigrants come to America no more or less poor, no more or less uneducated than previous waves of immigrants, they are far more resistant to assimilating American culture.

Hanson notes that, of the millions of Mexican immigrants legally admitted to this country since 1982, only 20 percent had bothered to become citizens by 1997.

That resistance to fully assimilating into American society, the de-emphasis of "American" in Mexican-American, has impeded the Mexican immigrant population's upward mobility in California.

And that is borne out by data compiled by the Center for Immigration Studies, the Washington-based public policy group headed by immigration expert Mark Krikorian.

Some 65 percent of Mexican immigrants in California are high school dropouts, according to the center, compared to only 7 percent of the native-born population. Some 41 percent of Mexican immigrant households are on the public welfare rolls, compared to 14 percent of natives.

And the socio-economic status of Mexican immigrants barely improves over time.

In fact, nearly 55 percent of Mexican immigrants are living in or near poverty after residing here in this country more than 20 years. Some 45 percent are without health care after 20 years and 37 percent are still relying on welfare.

The reality is that second and third generation Mexican-Americans are barely better off than their forebears who immigrated to this country.

So why does America continue to allow the yearly influx of hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants, not just legal, but also illegal? Because there are interests on both the right and left that favor this nation's de facto open borders policy.

Conservative corporations, contractors and agribusiness demand cheap labor from Mexico, according to Hanson, no matter the social consequences. Meanwhile, so-called "progressive" academics, journalists, government bureaucrats and La Raza advocates see illegal immigrants as a vast new political constituency for those peddling the notion that victimhood, not citizenship, is the key to advancement.

The American public sees things different from both ideological camps.

Two-thirds believe the United States should set the goal of completely halting illegal immigration, according a Roper-ASW poll this past March. And nearly half say legal immigration levels should be decreased, according to a Gallup poll last month.

It's not that two-thirds of Americans are racists, or that half are xenophobic. It's just that they recognize that this nation, which admits more immigrants each year than any other, can no longer afford to be so overly magnanimous.

==================================================================

Such a Lovely Place
Talking with Victor Davis Hanson about the future of California — and the
United States.
A Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez
National Review Online, June 11, 2003
http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interrogatory061103.asp

Regular readers of National Review Online are no strangers to Victor Davis Hanson. He writes a weekly column for us, as well as writing for City Journal, lecturing, and book composing, among other things. A professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, he is the author of Carnage and Culture, The Western Way of War, and the upcoming Ripples of Battle: How Wars Fought Long Ago Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think. His most recent book, just published by Peter Collier's Encounter Books is Mexifornia: A State of Becoming. He talked to NRO about Mexifornia, immigration, and his beloved California on Tuesday.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: What has multiculturalism and mass immigration wrought in Selma, California, your hometown?

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, a town once almost evenly divided between those of Mexican ancestry and others, who all sought to shed their ethnic identifications due to the assimilationist policies of the schools, government, and wider culture, is now composed of somewhere between 70-95 percent Mexican-American and Mexican residents.

Yet no one really knows due to the large number of illegal aliens who reside here. Immigration from Mexico was once as measured and legal as it is now uncontrolled and unlawful. And instead of meeting the challenge of turning illegal immigrants into Americans, our teachers, politicians, and government officials for some time have taken the easier route of allowing a separatist culture, from bilingualism and historical revisionism in the schools, to non-enforcement of legal statutes and a general self-imposed censorship about honest discussion of the problem.

The result is that we are seeing in the area the emergence of truly apartheid communities — like nearby Orange Cove, Parlier, Mendota, and Calwa — that resemble Mexican rather than American societies, and that are plagued by dismal schools, scant capital, many of the same social problems as Mexico, and a general neglect by the larger culture, including prosperous and successful second- and third-generation Mexican Americans who would never live there.

Lopez: The current dilemma in California "has nothing to do with race," you say in Mexifornia. How so?

Hanson: Here in the Central Valley we have literally thousands of new immigrants of all races from southeast Asia, the Punjab, Armenia, and Mexico who arrived under lawful auspices, in numbers that do not overwhelm local facilities, and with the assumption that assimilation and acculturation alone promise success in their new country.

A multiracial society works. But a multicultural one — whose separatist identity transcends the enriching and diverse elements of food, fashion, entertainment, music, etc. — whether in Rwanda or the Balkans — does not, especially when new arrivals do not learn English, often appear as single males in the first wave, and are cynically exploited in unskilled and low-paying jobs and as a dependent collective constituency by self-appointed shepherds in the ethnic industry.

Lopez: What do you think will happen to California, if you had to make a guess? Any reason to be hopeful about the future?

Hanson: We know that when immigrants from Mexico — as in the case, for example, of Cuba — come legally, and with families intact, and are not followed by a steady cohort of illegal aliens. Within a generation or two they melt into the general fabric and America is better for their presence.

So the trick is to return to legal, controlled immigration, coupled with assimilation — the powerful engine of popular culture — and everything from Jennifer Lopez to Tiger Woods to Sammy Sosa will do the rest in creating shared appetites and habits.

Lopez: If Californians were to read Mexifornia in part as a call to action, what lesson would you want them to take from it? And those of us outside of California, too.

Hanson: Seek the truth, and shed the old fears of being called a "protectionist" by the free-market Right and a "racist" by the manipulative Left. Hand-in-glove, the two have conspired to create an alternative society of illegal aliens who are used by both groups, remain in the shadows of the law, and are fed the half-truths and excuses of "at least it is better than in Mexico" by the former, and "the borders crossed you, not you the borders" by the latter.

If we make the hard, tough decisions now, a number of positive consequences will result in the next two decades: a more united society here at home; pressure on Mexico from dissatisfied Mexicans without recourse who will force needed social and economic change there; improvement in the minimum wage and conditions for unskilled American citizens who need jobs here; and a revised school curriculum that emphasizes real knowledge rather than therapy.

Lopez: Are there people today thinking and talking realistically about immigration?

Hanson: Hardly. Instead, they mutter homilies and smile, and then go into the ballot booth and vent by voting for a number of ballot propositions — denying state aid to illegals, elimination of bilingual education, an end to affirmative action — that are quickly challenged and circumvented by elites in the judiciary, university, and government.

We live in an Orwellian state, where liberal Silicon Valley executives pick up day workers on El Camino Real in Atherton, drive them home for a few hours of trench work, and then dump them off on the street at 5 P.M., as if they are going to parachute back to Oaxaca — or conservative hoteliers, farmers, and contractors who employ for 30 years hardworking illegal aliens until their bodies give out at 50, then expect the state to provide with entitlements what the employer could not with retirement plans, lament the absence of a "work ethic" among the aliens' children — all as a preliminary to welcoming another cohort, as the tragic traffic in human capital continues in some sort of surreal life cycle.

Lopez: What will the future California chooses for itself mean for the U.S. and U.S. culture?

Hanson: We of the far west here in California, with radical — and sometimes crackpot — ideas, and a huge population are often the future paradigm of America. But we are $34 billion in debt, despite the highest taxes in the nation, great resources from oil to minerals, substantial ports at Los Angeles and Oakland, tourism from Yosemite to Hollywood and Disneyland, the world's richest agricultural industry, defense and manufacturing, and a once great tripartite university system. So whatever we are currently doing, DON'T TRY IT!

Lopez: Do the students you teach realize what a crisis their state is in? Do they feel wronged? Do they want a different future?

Hanson: Almost all my students are minorities — and not just hyphenated minorities, but of all different sorts, like my nephew and niece who are half-Mexican, or a sister-in-law who is half Jewish, half Mexican. Our top student at CSU Fresno this year — the president's medallist — the septlingual classics whiz and local celebrity, Sabina Robinson, an African-American who has a mother in Germany, is headed to Princeton for graduate work, where she will join Sal Diaz, another of our students who was an illegal alien.

Race is so baffling now. Due to intermarriage it would take the machinations of the Old Confederacy to attain any exact racial categorization — not that our ethnic-studies department doesn't try. All of these students are proud of their ancestry, but like most Americans rejected ethnic identification as a meaningful barometer of who they are. They read Virgil in Latin, not necessarily Chicano literature; German or French not Chicano feminism, and avoided our university's auxiliary but still segregated Chicano graduation ceremony.

Our Asian, quarter-Chicano, or three-eighths white students all sought to be natural aristocrats, whose future privilege would accrue from superior education and civic values, not simply the acquisition of smug rejoinders that put down or conned guilty white liberals, who lived in distant suburbs and mouthed abstractions that were never followed in their own concrete lives.

Lopez: Why are conservatives and the Republican party so seemingly disorganized in California?

Hanson: Well, they mishandled Prop. 187 that ended state aid for illegals but was overturned by the courts. The populace voted overwhelmingly for it, but the Republican party crudely piggybacked the issue, when there was great opportunity to appeal to low-income legal residents and poor American citizens of all backgrounds who can't compete with illegal aliens wageworkers and need help and attention.

Then instead of turning to successful assimilated Mexican Americans whose hard work and success under prior protocols prove the present system is pathological, they simply panicked and caved in to the ethnic industry, as if millions would flock to "family values, anti-abortion, and religion" when the alternative was a more seductive and profitable victimhood. So now the Republicans appear as cynical trollers for the Hispanic vote without principles. Had they come out and said, "This is a tragedy for everyone involved. We are going to fix it and ensure aliens become the successful Mexican Americans that we all treasure, and to do that we need legality, proportionality, and assimilation — then a Gray Davis would never have had a chance, much less many in the legislature who somehow bankrupted the state in a mere eight years.

Lopez: Would Arnold Schwarzenegger running for governor be a good thing for your state?

Hanson: I like him as an actor, but know nothing about his qualifications or principles. Perhaps the idea he is an immigrant might have social capital here in our state.

Lopez: Mexifornia is different for you: It's not military history, it's very close to home, literally. Was it easier or harder to do?

Hanson: Oh, much harder. Peter Collier, the very gifted editor who runs Encounter is responsible. I didn't want to write it — who would, given the land mines everywhere in the debate? But he called often last summer and made good arguments as is his wont, and suggested that as a historian, someone who is a 5th-generation Californian, and one whose relatives are Mexican American and whose two daughters currently are going with Mexican Americans, and one who teaches minorities, with all that I suppose I could offer a different perspective. My wife, whose family emigrated from Oklahoma during the great migrations that followed the Dust Bowl, encouraged me as well to write about what had so frustrated me for years of teaching and working in the Central Valley — the brotherhood of silence that prohibited honest discussion and allowed untruths to flourish.

Lopez: You write a great deal, lecture, teach. And you are a farmer. These days, how much of the farm responsibilities are yours and roughly what do they entail?

Hanson: I was at Annapolis this year for the entire year. So I have rented my vineyard to Harvey Singh, a neighbor and friend, and my twin brother who farms full time next door helped out as well. And I think that will be more the norm these days — given the depression in agricultural prices, much worse than the scenario I wrote about in Fields without Dreams and The Land Was Everything. My brother and cousin pack fruit a few feet from my door in my shed, and our three children work all summer on the farm, but I'm a putterer now and I might as well confess it — a little weed spraying here, some irrigation and tractor driving there, but nothing like I used to do. I'll never move off the farm, but farming is over for all practical purposes.

Lopez: You've done a good deal of traveling these past two years or so. Anything that has surprised you about the U.S.?

Hanson: I go to Greece this week and will be interested in the annual reception there; it is more anti-Americanism each summer it seems. And for some reason the last three years so many Europeans seem to grate more and more, if one can use such a crude generalization, and realize that I have met wonderful individuals abroad. But I am struck by the disingenuousness displayed to America: public posturing and anti-American cant, but private desires to go to America, look or act American, and to emulate America. I'm so sick of "I like America, but..." followed by inquiries about visits, fellowships, training, etc. Don't they get it?

Since September 11, I have been amazed at the power and ubiquity of envy — an age-old emotion so profound in Hesiod and Thucydides, but one whose strength I had underestimated and forgotten. Failed societies in the Middle East or in Mexico — or proud but militarily insecure countries in Europe — they are resent their own appetites for things American.

I've learned that we are such an insidious, such a complex society — from the Williams sisters playing tennis in Paris, to the Left offering fellowships to America's critics to come to Harvard, to George Bush's top national advisers being both African American, to Real TV being damned by elites and watched by the masses — that we seem to drive the world crazy in exasperation. Good! They need to relax and accept that we are the world's first and most successful multiracial society that is as powerful as it is humane.

And after traveling to about 40 states the last two years, I keep wondering what our enemies were drinking? Did they have any idea of the mettle and toughness of Americans? Did they think the children of Iwo Jima, Pusan, and Hue were going to roll over on the highway to Baghdad? So I'm glad these amazing Americans are all on my side — one is worth a dozen — no a 100 — al Qaedists in a pinch!

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Hanson on “Mexifornia”: Good – But Not Good Enough
By Sam Francis
VDare.com, June 19, 2003
http://www.vdare.com/francis/mexifornia.htm

With California now being digested by the mass immigration the Treason Lobby has imported, even academics are beginning to see—up to a point—what's going on. Interviewed recently on National Review Online, historian Victor Davis Hanson tried to explain.

His explanation is not quite complete, though it shows progress, but what he had to say about the wonderful world of diversity mass immigration has created in his state could not have made too many of the pro-immigration pseudo-conservatives who run the magazine very happy.

Asked by his interviewer "what has multiculturalism and mass immigration wrought in Selma, California, your hometown?" Mr. Hanson, a classics professor at California State University at Fresno and author of several important works in ancient history (and a new one, Mexifornia, about what immigration is doing to his own native state), had a mouthful to say:

"Immigration from Mexico was once as measured and legal as it is now uncontrolled and unlawful. And instead of meeting the challenge of turning illegal immigrants into Americans, our teachers, politicians, and government officials for some time have taken the easier route of allowing a separatist culture, from bilingualism and historical revisionism in the schools, to non-enforcement of legal statutes and a general self-imposed censorship about honest discussion of the problem.

"The result is that we are seeing in the area the emergence of truly apartheid communities … plagued by dismal schools, scant capital, many of the same social problems as Mexico, and a general neglect by the larger culture, including prosperous and successful second- and third-generation Mexican Americans who would never live there."

Well, so much for diversity, which Mr. Hanson rightly sees as a dismal failure, a vision rather different from the chirpy delusions of the Open Borders crowd that poses as conservative.

But even Mr. Hanson doesn't quite grasp what's happening.

In the first place, the problems created by mass immigration in California and the rest of the country are not mainly the result of illegal immigration but of the legal variety. The state's foreign-born population is about 9 million, but only some 2.3 million illegals (25 percent). If we want to curb the "diversity" Mr. Hanson is justly denouncing, we mainly have to cut legal immigration—as well as enforce the laws already on the books against the illegal kind.

Secondly, why is the "challenge" to turn "illegal immigrants into Americans"?

Why isn't the challenge to stop illegals from coming at all and to send back those already here?

One suspects Mr. Hanson is being careful not to be too anti-immigration (in which case he wouldn't be in National Review at all), so he dwells on illegal immigrants and the problem of assimilating them.

But he also betrays other misconceptions about subjects he should have thought through a little more carefully. In his new book, Mr. Hanson writes that the problem "has nothing to do with race," and he expands on that in his interview.

"Here in the Central Valley we have literally thousands of new immigrants of all races from southeast Asia, the Punjab, Armenia, and Mexico who arrived under lawful auspices, in numbers that do not overwhelm local facilities, and with the assumption that assimilation and acculturation alone promise success in their new country.

"A multiracial society works. But a multicultural one—whose separatist identity transcends the enriching and diverse elements of food, fashion, entertainment, music, etc.—whether in Rwanda or the Balkans—does not."

Well, now, in the first place (again), the legal status of immigrants has nothing to do with whether they assimilate or not.

In the second place, what Mr. Hanson is trying to claim here is – well—nonsense.

The "society" he is criticizing is a "multicultural" one precisely because it is "multiracial." Where else does he imagine the "many cultures" the immigrants import come from?

The scientific jury may still be out on how much race determines or causes culture, but there's no doubt that race carries culture—that you learn cultural traits mainly from the same people your ancestors and parents married. When you have millions (not thousands) of people of the same race living together, the result is that they plant their culture there. When you have several other races doing the same thing, the result is the multicultural (and simultaneously the multiracial) mess Mr. Hanson rightly dislikes.

Much of what the professor has to say is worth saying and reading, and it ought to jog a few brain cells even in what passes for the conservative mind at National Review these days.

But when Mr. Hanson roots out of his own mind a few more of his unexamined preconceptions about race, culture and immigration, you probably won't be reading about it in National Review at all.

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Straight talk about immigration
By Mona Charen
TownHall.com, June 27, 2003
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/mc20030627.shtml

SAN DIEGO -- Victor Davis Hanson should be cloned so that his erudition, wisdom and humane enlightenment could illuminate every important national question. But wait, he already does address most of the pressing issues of the day.

In his books, his commentaries for National Review Online and Commentary, and his television appearances, Hanson seems to have been cloned already.

I once emailed a column he had written after Sept. 11 to a friend. It began, "As I was walking through my orchard, I was thinking ..." My friend emailed back, "He's had more thoughts in one stroll through his orchard than I've had in my entire life."

Hanson teaches classics at California State in Fresno. He is also a fifth-generation California farmer, and he has turned his considerable intellectual powers to the most vexing question facing California -- illegal immigration.

Hanson grew up among Mexicans and Americans of Mexican ancestry. Hispanics represented the overwhelming majority of students in his Selma, Calif., public elementary school, and his friends, colleagues, employees, students and relatives have always been Hispanic. Though Hanson makes an excellent case that immigration policy is badly out of whack, not to say insane, in California, part of the strength of his new book Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, is his deep compassion for Mexicans and other immigrants.

Everyone knows that illegal immigrants come to America for a better life. Hanson fills in some of the blanks that most Americans may not know -- for example, the inflexible racism and two-tiered nature of Mexican society. Their country is so poor, and so backward, that most Mexicans have more in common with Egyptians and Indians than with Americans. They flee north because they can, and the Mexican government offers a wink and a nod, and often more, to facilitate this flow. Why? Hanson argues that it serves as a safety valve for Mexico itself. If the discontented could not flee north, pressure would build within Mexico for reform. And reform is exactly what the power elite in Mexico wishes to avoid.

It is simply impossible to conceive that a wealthy nation living next to a poor one will not have a problem with illegal aliens. But having lived in California all of his life, and having worked on a farm and witnessed the life of illegals close up, Hanson is in an excellent position to evaluate what has changed in the nature of immigration over the past 30 or so years.

Californians and other Americans have always had compesinos picking our fruit, mowing our lawns and bussing our tables. Mexicans do the work that native-born Americans do not want to do. And the work can be backbreaking.

Hanson describes picking peaches: "The 12-foot ladder is heavy and unstable, especially when you must clamber up among the top branches 60 or 70 times a day and then descend with 50 pounds of peaches. ... You tend to run rather than walk because at piece-rate labor, you can make $90 to $120 in a 9-hour shift. ... It can easily reach 110 degrees ... in the Central Valley ... and sometimes the labor contractor can withhold your check without cause, or deduct 30 percent of it for Cokes, rides to work and everything in between."

And yet while we have always employed Mexicans in this way, Hanson argues that the old assimilationist model worked far better for the immigrants themselves and for the larger society than the multiculturalist, separatist, gripe-obsessed, accusation-flinging culture we now enjoy.

Today, poor Mexicans continue to mow the lawns and turn the raisins in the sun, but they are no longer encouraged, far less forced, to learn proper English, adopt American history and culture as their own, and form lasting ties to their new nation. Instead, they are fed an unwholesome (and frequently false) set of fables about how wonderful and superior Mexico is, how precious their language and culture are, and how rapacious, cruel and intolerant the United States is.

Hanson compares some of his successful classics students, who can read Ovid in the original, with the students who major in Hispanic studies and are fed a diet of resentment and victimology. Who is likely to be happier and more successful?

Continuing down the current path will lead to a Mexifornia. At present, 70 percent of the public school students in Los Angeles are Hispanic, the rest a mix of Asian, black and a variety of other hues. The huge array of government services these newcomers expect and get are bankrupting the state and will continue to do so absent an abrupt change of direction.

Hanson argues forcefully for a combination of border patrol and assimilation. This is an incredibly important and timely book -- a must read not just for those interested in immigration or California, but for those interested in what America is becoming.