🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 5 Feb 2007 13:23:52 -0500, "Jim Higgins"
<gordian238@hotmail.com> wrote:

>Mexifornia, Five Years Later
>http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_1_mexifornia.html
>
>
>In the Spring 2002 issue of City Journal, I wrote an essay about growing up 
>in the central San Joaquin Valley and witnessing firsthand, especially over 
>the last 20 years, the ill effects of illegal immigration (City Journal's 
>editors chose the title of the piece: "Do We Want Mexifornia?"). Controversy 
>over my blunt assessment of the disaster of illegal immigration from Mexico 
>led to an expanded memoir, Mexifornia, published the following year by 
>Encounter Press.
>
>Mexifornia came out during the ultimately successful campaign to recall 
>California governor Gray Davis in autumn 2003. A popular public gripe was 
>that the embattled governor had appeased both employers and the more radical 
>Hispanic politicians of the California legislature on illegal immigration. 
>And indeed Davis had signed legislation allowing driver's licenses for 
>illegal aliens that both houses of state government had passed. So it was no 
>wonder that the book sometimes found its way into both the low and high 
>forms of the political debate. On the Internet, a close facsimile of a 
>California driver's license circulated, with a picture of a Mexican bandit 
>(the gifted actor Alfonso Bedoya of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), 
>together with a demeaning height (5'4"), weight ("too much"), and sex 
>("mucho") given. "Mexifornia" was emblazoned across the top where 
>"California" usually is stamped on the license.
>
>In such a polarized climate, heated debates and several radio interviews 
>followed, often with the query, "Why did you have to write this book?" The 
>Left saw the book's arguments and its title-Mexifornia was originally a term 
>of approbation used by activists buoyed by California's changing 
>demography-as unduly harsh to newcomers from Mexico. The Right saw the book 
>as long-overdue attention to a scandal ignored by the mainstream Republican 
>Party.
>
>Fast-forward nearly five years, and the national climate has radically 
>changed, so much so that the arguments of Mexifornia-close the borders, 
>return to the melting pot, offer earned citizenship to most aliens of long 
>residence in exchange for acceptance of English and American culture-seem 
>tame today, if not pass�. In 2002, when I wrote the original City Journal 
>essay, no one thought that the U.S. Congress would vote to erect a wall. 
>Today there is rumbling that the signed legislation entails only 700 miles 
>of fencing instead of spanning the entire 1,950-mile border.
>
>Deportation was once an unimaginable response to the problem of the 11 
>million here illegally. Now its practicality, rather than its morality, 
>appears the keener point of contention. And the concerted effort by Chicano 
>activists to drive from popular parlance the descriptive term "illegal 
> alien" in favor of the politically correct, but imprecise and often 
>misleading "undocumented worker" has largely failed. Similar efforts to 
>demonize opponents of open borders as "anti-immigrant" or "nativist" have 
>had only a marginal effect in stifling debate, as has the deliberate effort 
>to blur illegal and legal immigration. The old utopian talk of a new 
>borderless zone of dual cultures, spreading on both sides of a disappearing 
>boundary, has given way to a reexamination of NAFTA and its facilitation of 
>greater cross-border flows of goods, services-and illegal aliens and drugs.
>
>So why has the controversy over illegal immigration moved so markedly to the 
>right?
>
>We return always to the question of numbers. While it is true that no one 
>knows exactly how many are here illegally from Mexico and Latin America, 
>both sides in the debate often accept as reasonable estimates of 11 to 12 
>million illegals-with an additional 500,000 to 1 million arriving per year. 
>Given porous borders, such guesses about the number of illegal aliens in the 
>United States are outdated almost as soon as they are published. It is 
>plausible, then, that there may be an additional 3 to 4 million illegal 
>aliens here who were not here when the City Journal "Mexifornia" piece 
>appeared.
>
>The result of such staggering numbers is that aliens now don't just cluster 
>in the American Southwest but frequently appear at Home Depot parking lots 
>in the Midwest, emergency rooms in New England, and construction sites in 
>the Carolinas, making illegal immigration an American, rather than a mere 
>Californian or Arizonan, concern.
>
>Indeed, we forget how numbers are at the crux of the entire debate over 
>illegal immigration. In the 1970s, perhaps a few million illegals resided in 
>the United States, and their unassimilated presence went largely unnoticed. 
>Most Americans felt that the formidable powers of integration and popular 
>culture would continue to incorporate any distinctive ethnic enclave, as 
>they had so successfully done with the past generations that arrived en 
>masse from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. But when more than 10 million 
>fled Mexico in little over a decade-the great majority poor, without 
>English, job skills, a high school education, and legality-entire apartheid 
>communities in the American Southwest began springing up.
>
>During the heyday of multiculturalism and political correctness in the 
>1980s, the response of us, the hosts, to this novel challenge was not to 
>insist upon the traditional assimilation of the newcomer but rather to 
>accommodate the illegal alien with official Spanish-language documents, 
>bilingual education, and ethnic boosterism in our media, politics, and 
>education. These responses only encouraged more illegals to come, on the 
>guarantee that their material life could be better and yet their culture 
>unchanged in the United States. We now see the results. Los Angeles is today 
>the second-largest Mexican city in the world; one out of every ten Mexican 
>nationals resides in the United States, the vast majority illegally.
>
>Since Mexifornia appeared, the debate also no longer splits along 
>liberal/conservative, Republican/Democrat, or even white/brown fault lines. 
>Instead, class considerations more often divide Americans on the issue. The 
>majority of middle-class and poor whites, Asians, African-Americans, and 
>Hispanics wish to close the borders. They see few advantages to cheap 
>service labor, since they are not so likely to need it to mow their lawns, 
>watch their kids, or clean their houses. Because the less well-off eat out 
>less often, use hotels infrequently, and don't periodically remodel their 
>homes, the advantages to the economy of inexpensive, off-the-books 
>illegal-alien labor again are not so apparent.
>
>But the downside surely is apparent. Truck drivers, carpenters, janitors, 
>and gardeners- unlike lawyers, doctors, actors, writers, and 
>professors-correctly feel that their jobs are threatened, or at least their 
>wages lowered, by cheaper rival workers from Oaxaca or Jalisco. And 
>Americans who live in communities where thousands of illegal aliens have 
>arrived en masse more likely lack the money to move when Spanish-speaking 
>students flood the schools and gangs proliferate. Poorer Americans of all 
>ethnic backgrounds take for granted that poverty provides no exemption from 
>mastering English, so they wonder why the same is not true for incoming 
>Mexican nationals. Less than a mile from my home is a former farmhouse whose 
>new owner moved in several stationary Winnebagos, propane tanks, and outdoor 
>cooking facilities-and apparently four or five entire families rent such 
>facilities right outside his back door. Dozens live where a single family 
>used to-a common sight in rural California that reifies illegal immigration 
>in a way that books and essays do not.
>
>The problem with all this is that our now-spurned laws were originally 
>intended to ensure an (admittedly thin) veneer of civilization over innate 
>chaos-roads full of drivers who have passed a minimum test to ensure that 
>they are not a threat to others; single-family residence zoning to ensure 
>that there are adequate sewer, garbage, and water services for all; periodic 
>county inspections to ensure that untethered dogs are licensed and free of 
>disease and that housing is wired and plumbed properly to prevent mayhem; 
>and a consensus on school taxes to ensure that there are enough teachers and 
>classrooms for such sudden spikes in student populations.
>
>All these now-neglected or forgotten rules proved costly to the taxpayer. In 
>my own experience, the slow progress made in rural California since the 
>1950s of my youth-in which the county inspected our farm's rural dwellings, 
>eliminated the once-ubiquitous rural outhouse, shut down substandard 
>housing, and fined violators in hopes of providing a uniform humane standard 
>of residence for all rural residents-has been abandoned in just a few years 
>of laissez-faire policy toward illegal aliens. My own neighborhood is 
>reverting to conditions common about 1950, but with the insult of far higher 
>tax rates added to the injury of nonexistent enforcement of 
>once-comprehensive statutes. The government's attitude at all levels is to 
>punish the dutiful citizen's misdemeanors while ignoring the alien's felony, 
>on the logic that the former will at least comply while the latter either 
>cannot or will not.
>
>Fairness about who is allowed into the United States is another issue that 
>reflects class divides-especially when almost 70 percent of all immigrants, 
>legal and illegal, arrive from Mexico alone. Asians, for example, are 
>puzzled as to why their relatives wait years for official approval to enter 
>the United States, while Mexican nationals come across the border illegally, 
>counting on serial amnesties to obtain citizenship.
>
>These class divisions cut both ways, and they help explain the anomaly of 
>the Wall Street Journal op-ed page mandarins echoing the arguments of the 
>elite Chicano studies professors. Both tend to ridicule the far less 
>affluent Minutemen and English-only activists, in part because they do not 
>experience firsthand the problems associated with illegal immigration but 
>instead find millions of aliens grist for their own contrasting agendas. 
>Indeed, every time an alien crosses the border legally, fluent in English 
>and with a high school diploma, the La Raza industry and the corporate farm 
>or construction company alike most likely lose a constituent.
>
>The ripples of September 11-whether seen in the arrests of dozens of 
>potential saboteurs here in America or the terrorist bombings abroad in 
>Madrid and London-remind Americans that their present enemies can do us harm 
>only if they can first somehow enter the United States. Again, it makes 
>little sense to screen tourists, inspect cargo containers, and check the 
>passenger lists of incoming flights, when our border with an untrustworthy 
>Mexico remains porous. While it may be true that the opponents of illegal 
>immigration have used the post-September 11 fear of terrorism to further 
>their own agenda of closing the border with Mexico, they are absolutely 
>correct that presently the best way for jihadist cells to cross into the 
>United States is overland from the south.
>
>Other foreign developments have also steered the debate ever more rightward. 
>In the last decade, the United States has clearly seen the wages of 
>sectarianism and ethnic chauvinism abroad. The unraveling of Yugoslavia into 
>Croatian, Serbian, and Albanian sects followed the Hutu-Tutsi bloodbath in 
>Rwanda. And now almost daily we hear of Pashtun-Tajik-Uzbek hatred among the 
>multiplicity of warring clans in Afghanistan and the daily mayhem among 
>Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis in Iraq. Why-when we are spending blood and 
>treasure abroad to encourage the melting pot and national unity-would anyone 
>wish to contribute to tribalism or foster the roots of such ethnic 
>separatism here in the United States?
>
>Moreover, all during the 1990s, blue-state America offered up the European 
>Union as the proper postmodern antidote to the United States. But just as we 
>have recoiled from the EU's statist and undemocratic tendencies-which have 
>resulted in popular dissatisfaction, sluggish economic growth, high 
>unemployment, falling demography, and unsustainable entitlement 
>commitments-so, too, have its unassimilated Muslim minorities served as 
>another canary in the mine. The riots in France, the support for jihadism 
>among Pakistanis in London, and the demands of Islamists in Scandinavia, 
>Germany, and the Netherlands do not encourage Americans to let in more poor 
>Mexican illegal immigrants with loud agendas, or to embrace the 
>multicultural salad bowl over their own distinctive melting pot.
>
>Then there were the April-May 2006 demonstrations here in the United States, 
>when nearly half a million protesters took to the streets of our largest 
>cities, from Chicago to Los Angeles. Previously, naive Americans had 
>considered that their own discussions over border security and immigration 
>were in their own hands. And while Chicano-rights organizations and employer 
>lobbyists were often vehement in their efforts to keep the border open, 
>illegal aliens themselves used to be mostly quiet about our internal legal 
>debates.
>
>In contrast, this spring Americans witnessed millions of illegal aliens who 
>not only were unapologetic about their illegal status but were demanding 
>that their hosts accommodate their own political grievances, from providing 
>driver's licenses to full amnesty. The largest demonstrations-held on May 
>Day, with thousands of protesters waving Mexican flags and bearing placards 
>depicting the communist insurrectionist Che Guevara-only confirmed to most 
>Americans that illegal immigration was out of control and beginning to 
>become politicized along the lines of Latin American radicalism. I 
>chronicled in Mexifornia the anomaly of angry protesters waving the flag of 
>the country they vehemently did not wish to return to, but now the evening 
>news beamed these images to millions. In short, the radical socialism of 
>Latin America, seething in the angry millions who flocked to support 
>Venezuela's Hugo Ch�vez, Bolivia's Evo Morales, and Mexico's Andr�s L�pez 
>Obrador, had now seemingly been imported into our own largest cities.
>
>Turmoil in areas of Mexico that send many illegal aliens to the United 
>States is especially worrisome. Recently, for example, almost the entire 
>state of Oaxaca was in near-open revolt over efforts to force the 
>resignation of provincial governor Ulises Ruiz. There was widespread 
>lawlessness, vigilantism, and at times the complete breakdown of order. All 
>this feeds the growing perception that illegal aliens increasingly are 
>arriving not merely as economic refugees but as political dissidents who don't 
>hesitate to take to the streets here to demand social justice, as they did 
>back home.
>
>More important still, Oaxaca's troubles cast doubt on the conventional 
>wisdom that illegal immigration is a safety valve that allows Mexico 
>critical time to get its house in order. Perhaps the opposite is true: some 
>of the areas, like Oaxaca, that send the most illegal aliens to the United 
>States, still experience the greatest social tensions-in part because of the 
>familial disruption and social chaos that results when adult males flee and 
>depopulated communities consequently become captive to foreign remittances.
>
>Two further issues have persuaded Americans to close the borders: the 
>attitude of the Mexican government and the problems with first-generation 
>native-born children of illegal aliens.
>
>Worker remittances sent back to Mexico now earn it precious American dollars 
>equal to the revenue from 500,000 barrels of daily exported oil. In short, 
>Mexico cannot afford to lose its second-largest source of hard currency and 
>will do almost anything to ensure its continuance. When Mexico City 
>publishes comic books advising its own citizens how best to cross the Rio 
>Grande, Americans take offense. Not only does Mexico brazenly wish to 
>undermine American law to subsidize its own failures, but it also assumes 
>that those who flee northward are among its least educated, departing 
>without much ability to read beyond the comic-book level.
>
>We are also learning not only that Mexico wants its expatriates' cash-and 
>its nationals lobbying for Mexican interests-once they are safely away from 
>their motherland; we are also discovering that Mexico doesn't have much 
>concern about the welfare of its citizens abroad in America. The 
>conservative estimate of $15 billion sent home comes always at the expense 
>of low-paid Mexicans toiling here, who must live in impoverished 
>circumstances if they are to send substantial portions of their wages home 
>to Mexico. (And it comes as well at the expense of American taxpayers, 
>providing health-care and food subsidies in efforts to offer a safety net to 
>cash-strapped illegal aliens.) So it is not just that Mexico exports its own 
>citizens, but it does so on the expectation that they are serfs of a sort, 
>who, like the helots of old, surrender much of the earnings of their toil to 
>their distant masters.
>
>But even more grotesquely, in the last five years, the Mexican real-estate 
>market has boomed on the Baja California peninsula. Once Mexico grasped that 
>its own unspoiled coast was highly desirable for wealthy expatriate 
>Americans as a continuation of the prized but crowded Santa Barbara-San 
>Diego seaside corridor, it began to reform its real-estate market, making 
>the necessary changes in property and title law, and it welcomed with open 
>arms cash-laden subdividers looking to come south. This is sound economics, 
>but examine the ethical message: Mexico City will send the United States 
>millions of its own illiterate and poor whom it will neither feed nor 
>provide with even modest housing, but at the same time it welcomes thousands 
>of Americans with cash to build expensive seaside second homes.
>
>Of course, the ultimate solution to the illegal immigration debacle is for 
>Mexican society to bring itself up to the levels of affluence found in the 
>United States by embracing market reforms of the sort we have seen in South 
>Korea, Taiwan, and China. But rarely do Mexican supporters of such 
>globalization, or their sympathetic counterparts in the United States, see 
>the proliferation of a Wal-Mart or Starbucks down south in such terms. 
>Rather, to them American consumerism and investment in Mexico suggest only 
>an owed reciprocity of sentiment: Why should Americans get mad about Mexican 
>illegals coming north when our own crass culture, with its blaring neon 
>signs in English, spreads southward? In such morally equivalent arguments, 
>it is never mentioned that Americanization occurs legally and brings 
>capital, while Mexicanization comes about by illegal means and is driven by 
>poverty.
>
>At the same time, focus has turned more to the U.S.-born children of Mexican 
>illegal immigrants, in whom illegitimacy, school dropout rates, and criminal 
>activity have risen to such levels that no longer can we simply dismiss 
>Mexican immigration as resembling the more problematic but eventually 
>successful Italian model of a century ago. Then, large numbers of southern 
>European Catholics, most without capital and education, arrived en masse 
>from Italy and Sicily, lived in ethnic enclaves, and for decades lagged 
>behind the majority population in educational achievement, income, and 
>avoidance of crime-before achieving financial parity as well as full 
>assimilation and intermarriage. Since 1990, the number of poor 
>Mexican-Americans has climbed 52 percent, a figure that skewed U.S. poverty 
>rates. Billions of dollars spent on our own poor will not improve our 
>poverty statistics when 1 million of the world's poorest cross our border 
>each year. The number of impoverished black children has dropped 17 percent 
>in the last 16 years, but the number of Hispanic poor has gone up 43 
>percent. We don't like to talk of illegitimacy, but here again the ripples 
>of illegal immigration reach the U.S.-born generation. Half of births to 
>Hispanic-Americans were illegitimate, 42 percent higher than the general 
>rate of the American population. Illegitimacy is higher in general in Mexico 
>than in the United States, but the force multiplier of illegal status, lack 
>of English, and an absence of higher education means that the children of 
>Mexican immigrants have illegitimacy rates even higher than those found in 
>either Mexico or the United States.
>
>Education levels reveal the same dismal pattern-nearly half of all Hispanics 
>are not graduating from high school in four years. And the more Hispanic a 
>school district becomes, the greater level of failure for Hispanic students. 
>In the Los Angeles district, 73 percent Hispanic, 60 percent of the students 
>are not graduating. But the real tragedy is that, of those Hispanics who do 
>graduate, only about one in five will have completed a high school 
>curriculum that qualifies for college enrollment. That partly helps to 
>explain why at many campuses of the California State University system, 
>almost half of the incoming class must first take remedial education. Less 
>than 10 percent of those who identify themselves as Hispanic have graduated 
>from college with a bachelor's degree. I found that teaching Latin to 
>first-generation Mexican-Americans and illegal aliens was valuable not so 
>much as an introduction to the ancient world but as their first experience 
>with remedial English grammar.
>
>Meanwhile, almost one in three Mexican-American males between the ages of 18 
>and 24 recently reported being arrested, one in five has been jailed, and 
>15,000 illegal aliens are currently in the California penal system.
>
>Statistics like these have changed the debate radically. While politicians 
>and academics assured the public that illegal aliens came here only to work 
>and would quickly assume an American identity, the public's own ad hoc and 
>empirical observations of vast problems with crime, illiteracy, and 
>illegitimacy have now been confirmed by hard data. Ever since the influx of 
>illegals into our quiet valley became a flood, I have had five drivers leave 
>the road, plow into my vineyard, and abandon their cars, without evidence of 
>either registration or insurance. On each occasion, I have seen them simply 
>walk or run away from the scene of thousands of dollars in damage. 
>Similarly, an intoxicated driver who ran a stop sign hit my car broadside 
>and then fled the scene. Our farmhouse in the Central Valley has been broken 
>into three times. We used to have an open yard; now it is walled, with steel 
>gates on the driveway. Such anecdotes have become common currency in the 
>American Southwest. Ridiculed by elites as evidence of prejudice, these 
>stories, statistical studies now show, reflect hard fact.
>
>The growing national discomfort over illegal immigration more than four 
>years after "Mexifornia" first appeared in City Journal is not only apparent 
>in the rightward shift of the debate but also in the absence of any new 
>arguments for open borders-while the old arguments, Americans are finally 
>concluding, really do erode the law, reward the cynical here and abroad, and 
>needlessly divide Americans along class, political, and ethnic lines.

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