Victor Davis Hanson
San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003
$24.95
150 pp.
Reviewed by John Attarian
Immigration is profoundly transforming America, especially California, which receives millions of Mexican immigrants. In Mexifornia, Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist at California State University, Fresno, and a Central Valley farmer, takes a hard look at immigration into the state and its meaning. Drawing on his teaching and farming experience, Hanson challenges immigrationist dogmas, but his performance is mixed. An important addition to the immigration debate, Mexifornia merits sustained scrutiny.
California, he observes, is a bellwether, so how immigration plays out there prefigures America's fate. Our predicament is "apparently unsolvable": Americans want foreigners for unpleasant work, but wrongly assume they will assimilate. We probably want less immigration and more assimilation. "But caught in a paralysis of timidity and dishonesty, we still cannot enact the necessary plans for a workable solution." Rejecting historical determinism, Hanson maintains that our future is in our hands. He calls, therefore, for "honest discussion, without fear of recrimination and intimidation."
Some 40 percent of our immigrants live in California. Half of all illegal immigrants are Mexican; our Hispanic population is over 70 percent Mexican. If current immigration continues, by 2050 America will have 97 million Hispanics, 25 percent of America's population and over half of California's. What is new, Hanson argues, is not the immigration level but "a growing despair and uncertainty over how—or even whether—to assimilate the arrivals." Most Californians realize that they have made a "Devil's bargain" of admitting Mexican immigrants so as to escape menial labor. But since even timid attempts to discuss immigration honestly receive "the cheap slander of 'racist,'" most white Californians suppress their anger—and vent it in ballot propositions curtailing benefits for illegals.
Mexican immigration is unique, Hanson ably explains, because Mexico's proximity precludes immigrants' psychological amputation from their homeland and permits a steady influx of new immigrants, allowing immigrants to retain a Mexican milieu here. Both hamper assimilation. That white racism holds Mexicans back is only partially true, he argues, since it did not handicap Koreans, Armenians, and others, and in any case "belongs entirely to the past." Moreover, Mexico's government is complicit in our immigration problem. "Mexican elites rely on immigration northward as a means of avoiding domestic reform." They are "sitting on a demographic time bomb": a population of almost 100 million people growing at two percent a year, with provision of jobs, health care, etc. for such multitudes impossible. Without America receiving millions of her poor, Mexico might face either revolution or an African-style die-off.
Drawing on his farm experience, Hanson eloquently depicts the illegal alien's grim life. American teenagers won't pick crops, for good reason: it is physically hard. It pays well—provided you are young, healthy, and can find other work before you age. Crime and violence are pandemic; the Hispanic death rate from homicide is three times that of non-Hispanic whites. Drugs and drunkenness are pervasive; cirrhosis of the liver kills Hispanics at a higher rate than any other ethnic group, twice as frequently as whites. Likewise, sexually transmitted disease is widespread, and Hispanics have twice the HIV infection rate of the native white population. Vulnerable to many diseases, Hispanics are thirteen times as likely as whites to have tuberculosis.
Gradually illegals catch on that labor contractors and others are bilking them. They come to envy their rich white employers, and to realize despairingly that they are trapped: they will become decrepit and unemployable, and go on welfare. Those with large families are doomed to poverty and exhaustion. Their fates have a powerful demonstration effect on their sons, who opt instead to become gangsters and criminals. Assuming that Americans would understandably avoid dead-end labor, we blinked at the influx of poor Mexicans. "But what at first was a relief became a troubling dilemma, and is now a near-disaster," Hanson writes bluntly, revealing immigration's heavy burden on native Californians. His own life teems with immigrant drivers going off the road and wrecking his vineyard; aliens routinely dumping trash, including one trailer filled with garbage, beside and on his property ("perhaps it is an atavism from the old country where trash is everywhere dumped outside city limits?"); Mexicans routinely trespassing to shoot wildlife, get drunk, and steal; vandalism and burglary. ("I pick up their needles and condoms, brandy bottles and tampons nightly near our farm pond. Some have tried to break into my house.") Increasingly, Hanson finds keeping Mexican illegals and gangsters off his land "a hopeless task;…some trespassers seem piqued that anyone in California should dare to insist on the archaic notion of property rights. One especially smart teenager told me in broken English, 'Hey, it's our land anyway—not yours.'"
So much for the immigrants' much-vaunted "strong values," and the poppycock that assimilation and American identity rest on assent to "propositions." On Hanson's evidence, Mexico's folkways jarringly differ from America's, which flow from the centuries-old northern European, especially English, ethos of privacy, private property, gratification deferral, and self-control, and owe nothing to "propositions" or libertarian abstractions. Hanson is a valuable corrective for fatuous immigrationists sheltered from immigration's ugly realities.
Assimilation of immigrants in America does not mean miscegenation, wearing goofy T-shirts, or accepting a "proposition." It means acting white. This is not white supremacy, simply the truth that assimilation means adopting the ways of the host population; assimilation of whites in, say, Uganda means acting black. What else could it mean?
At the end, Hanson returns to reality—but only partially. Preserving the status quo, he rightly argues, will wreck California. We can keep open borders and insist on either assimilation sans bilingualism or separation, or we can slash immigration and let multiculturalism wither away with its clientele. Better, he argues, "to adopt sweeping restrictions on immigration and put an end to the separatist ideology along with the two-tier legal system for illegal aliens." Given this, "our present problems would vanish almost immediately," and wages would rise.
Hanson's proposal leaves millions of illegals here, so our problems would not "vanish." Deporting them and stopping immigration altogether would be better. This, however, is too much for him. Saying much that needs saying, Mexifornia is valuable, but caveat, emptor! Hanson's partial realism is welcome. But there is much that he has not faced or thought through. Sensible up to a point, Mexifornia is softheaded and ultimately subversive. "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau."