Teacher and scholar Victor Davis Hanson was interviewed for an hour yesterday on Booknotes. His new book Mexifornia: A State of Becoming sounds like an important effort to insert some reality into the questions surrounding illegal immigration from Mexico.
Our immigration dilemma is a simple but apparently unsolvable calculus: Americans want the work they won't do to be done cheaply by foreigners who, they wrongly assume, will inevitably transform themselves into Americans. In turn, the downtrodden Mexicans who come here and their elite advocates in America romanticize Mexico, a nation that brought them the misery they fled, while too often deprecating the place that alone gave them sanctuary. Everyone sees this—at least in the abstract—and can probably agree on the appropriate remedy: far less illegal immigration and a more measured policy of legal immigration, along with a stronger mandate for assimilation. But caught in a paralysis of timidity and dishonesty, we still cannot enact the necessary plans for a workable solution. To do so, after all, entails confronting a truth that is painful and might displease thousands who have grown comfortable with the present chaos. Who wants to be called an isolationist or a nativist by the corporate Right, and a racist or a bigot by the multicultural Left?Posted by Alan at September 29, 2003 09:56 AMFor those of you who live outside of California, far away from Mexico, and sigh that the problem is ours, not yours: be careful. California has always been an idea, not merely a place. Our climate, social volatility and an absence of anything farther west always put us on the cutting edge.
Wherever you live, if you want your dirty work done cheaply by someone else, you will welcome illegal aliens, as we did. And if you become puzzled later over how to deal with the consequent problems of assimilation, you will also look to California and follow what we have done, slowly walking the path that leads to Mexisota, Utexico, Mexizona or even Mexichusetts—a place that is not quite Mexico and not quite America either.