by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Cato Unbound<\/em><\/p>\n [In a current Cato Institute forum (published in\u00a0Cato Unbound<\/a>), VDH was asked to reply to the lead essay\u00a0“Mexicans in America”<\/a>\u00a0by Richard Rodriguez. What follows is VDH’s reply.]<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n B<\/span>efore replying to Richard Rodriquez\u2019s excurses, let me reiterate proposals advanced in\u00a0Mexifornia<\/i>, a book published three years ago, and in a series of essays that followed.<\/p>\n The remedy for the present illegal immigration mess, for both immigrants andAmerica\u00a0the host, I think should focus on the three goals of reasonable numbers, legality, and assimilation.<\/p>\n Border enforcement, reliable identification cards, and employer sanctions can help to advance those aims. In contrast, a guest-worker program will only perpetuate the notion of a second-tier of residents, working for wages that most Americans would not \u2014 and yet deprived of the full civic rights enjoyed by their employers.<\/p>\n Such helotage would only breed understandable resentment among an underclass, \u201cguest\u201d or not, as well driving down wages in entry-level jobs sought by first-generation citizen workers (many of them Mexican-American).<\/p>\n The Bracero program is often evoked with nostalgia. But my early memories of it here in the San Joaquin Valley were of exploited workers, who did not always wish to go home after harvest, had some portion of their attached pay stolen by the Mexican government, and were contracted out as near chattel to the largest employers with the greatest political connections.<\/p>\n By the same token, deporting some 11 million Mexicans here illegally\u00a0en masse<\/i>\u00a0makes little moral or practical sense. Some are aged and sick; many have lived productive lives that have enhanced the\u00a0United States\u00a0for decades, and could easily apply and receive citizenship without going back to\u00a0Mexico\u00a0.<\/p>\n A better approach then would be to return any illegal immigrants with criminal records and those who have only recently arrived, while offering a process of citizenship for many millions of the rest. And as part of a\u00a0quid pro quo<\/i>, in addition to closing an open border, we could systematically begin to eliminate bilingual documents, state interpreters, ethnic quotas in hiring, and linguistic separatism to encourage assimilation of naturalized Mexicans in the manner accorded to most other arrivals from\u00a0Southeast Asia\u00a0,\u00a0India\u00a0, and\u00a0Eastern Europe\u00a0.<\/p>\n I<\/span>\u00a0now turn to Rodriquez\u2019s stream-of-consciousness with a deep sense of regret, given both his earlier reasoned and often brave (or \u201cnotorious\u201d) arguments against ethnic tribalism \u2014 and his present baffling obsession with skin color and yet more evidence of the astonishing decline of a once insightful writer. Here he has sadly advanced no real argument, but instead offers only a m\u00e9lange of ethnic vignettes, and, for some reason,\u00a0ad hominem<\/i>\u00a0attacks of the very sort he used to deplore.<\/p>\n First, I share Rodriquez\u2019s worry that migrant workers are sometimes being demonized. But aside from necessary censure against bigots, it is all the more urgent to ensure that Mexican immigrants arrive in the United States legally, and in reasonable numbers that ensure that they can assimilate and find opportunities in education and employment as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n Yet we too often forget that much of the unfortunate animus toward illegal aliens is most often predicated on class considerations, more than race or religion. Americans of the lower middle classes of all races \u2014 who do not have nannies or gardeners, who rarely eat out or stay at a hotel, but who do compete for wages in construction and service industries with illegal aliens, and have their children in overcrowded inner-city or rural schools that are struggling with immigrants without English \u2014 are far more likely to demand reform than is our elite. The latter appreciates good cheap service while traveling and dining out, or industrious day-laborers for remodeling and landscaping \u2014 and, of course, has little worry about rival illegal-alien film producers, professors, writers, lawyers, or doctors undercutting their own salaries or unions.<\/p>\n Pace Rodriguez, we need not ask either a theologian or an economist about how much of\u00a0Mexico\u00a0we are willing to take in. We already have a good guess that one out of every ten Mexican citizens currently resides in the\u00a0United States, most of them under illegal auspices.<\/p>\n This influx is largely due to the cynical policies of American business that wants robust Mexican youth to work cheaply at wages Americans apparently will not. When the worker\u2019s vigor and health are exhausted, the employer expects to find a younger replacement from\u00a0Mexico\u00a0\u2014 with the added expectation that the government entitlement industry will provide for his former employee\u2019s health and retirement needs.<\/p>\n Then there is the\u00a0Mexican\u00a0City\u00a0government that counts on $15 billion in remittances to prop up a near-failed state, without much care how minimum-wage workers abroad survive after sending so much of their wages home. Illegal immigration for\u00a0Mexico\u00a0is a safety valve that ensures dissidents migrate rather than agitate. And\u00a0Mexico\u00a0also nurses ethnic chauvinism and old grievances, delighted to discover that its expatriate community grows fonder ofMexico\u00a0the longer and further it is free from it. Rodriquez thinks it is \u201ccurious\u201d that \u201cIndians\u201d are coming north from\u00a0Mexico\u00a0. Perhaps, but instead of condemning the \u201ccold heart\u201d of\u00a0America\u00a0, he should ask why they apparently find \u201cwhite\u201d or \u201cAnglo\u201d culture more tolerant than the \u201cSpanish\u201d establishment of\u00a0Mexico\u00a0that is apparently relieved to see its own mestizos leave.<\/p>\n Y<\/span>es, September 11 made Samuel Huntington a \u201cprophet\u201d because, unlike the determinist Francis Fukuyama, he warned that the end of the Cold War would not lead inevitably to a global acceptance of consumer capitalism, democracy, and the end of history, but, as in the case of radical Islam, that millions of reactionaries would reject modernity and globalization with a vengeance, sometimes violently so. Rodriquez should try to refute that thesis rather than cheaply lampoon its author.<\/p>\n Rodriquez also offers a laughable caricature of\u00a0Huntington\u00a0\u2019s\u00a0Who Are We?<\/i>\u00a0(I have no idea what his \u201cbrown\u201d\u00a0Charles River\u00a0or \u201cdialectical meetings\u201d is supposed to mean).\u00a0Huntington\u00a0\u2019s point was not to erase the toil and hard work of the variously mentioned aggrieved groups from our collective memory. Rather he argued that the assimilation that they \u2014 and most others fromEurope\u00a0as well \u2014 went through came mostly from a variant of Western culture derived in large part from Protestant England.<\/p>\n Again, as far as Rodriquez\u2019s personal asides, I don\u2019t know whether Samuel Huntington lives in a minaret in Cambridge; but I might hazard a guess that Rodriguez sees far more spires himself from the \u201crestored Victorian\u201d neighborhoods of San Francisco that are about as out of touch with the world of the illegal alien as is Harvard Yard \u2014 despite his own use of the throat-clearing \u201cas a Mexican-American\u201d twice in the same paragraph.<\/p>\n Rodriguez also offers the same cartoon of my own work, and he gives that game away with the buzz nouns and meaningless adjectives so often tossed about by the race industry \u2014 \u201cwhite,\u201d \u201cnativist,\u201d \u201cpeasants,\u201d etc. He thinks I am \u201cungenerous\u201d in being angry when a \u201ckid\u201d damages my property. But most of the illegal alien \u201ckids\u201d that I have seen over the last twenty years are those that I taught and tutored classics to at Cal State Fresno. In fact, I have had not one \u201ckid,\u201d but five adult aliens ram their vehicles into our vineyards and orchards, all fleeing the scene, but leaving behind only their unregistered and uninsured wrecked cars that have done over $50,000 in aggregate damage.<\/p>\n Is it \u201cungenerous\u201d to worry about having been broadsided by an uninsured and illegal driver who tried to run from the scene of a serious accident, or having our home broken into twice while the five of us were asleep and awoke to intruders? Given the sheer numbers of illegal aliens, the predominance of single, young men in that cohort, and the laxity of the host that both wants and doesn\u2019t want the newcomers, I am surprised crime, vandalism, and neglect of the law are not more prevalent.<\/p>\n N<\/span>or is there any need for more lectures from the Bay Area about Steinbeck\u2019s \u201cOkies.\u201d My wife\u2019s family migrated from\u00a0Oklahoma\u00a0, as did most of the so-called whites who still live nearby in southwestern\u00a0Fresno\u00a0County\u00a0. That the literary Rodriquez draws on the\u00a0Grapes of Wrath<\/i>, and sees only melodrama rather than tragedy, is once again indicative of his lack of any recent first-hand familiarity with either illegal immigrants or \u201cOkies.\u201d And the clash of cultures that arose from the great Dust Bowl migration from the American Southwest was not just a matter of prejudice against the poor and unwashed \u2014 although it was surely that. Many of Steinbeck\u2019s romantic Joads also brought with them from the South its racial hostility and fundamentalism that were bound to collide with a very different preexisting multiethnic, half-century-old culture of the\u00a0Central Valley\u00a0. I\u2019ll leave it to Rodriquez to ponder whether the Methodists or Lutherans of a\u00a0Visalia\u00a0or Kingsburg were any more intolerant of the Holy Rollers of the new Pentecostal congregations of\u00a0Tulareand\u00a0Bakersfield\u00a0that appeared in the 1930s.<\/p>\n More importantly, throughout this essay we suffer through more silly stereotypes that remain just that despite the rhetorical flourishes: Mexicans are \u201csweet\u201d and love their families, charming in their \u201clard\u201d and \u201cbeer.\u201d Americans are hypocrites, but \u201cnice.\u201d Gringo is an OK word \u2014 if voiced by a \u201cMexican-American.\u201d<\/p>\n Somehow a rant on Iraq makes its way into this blur, with its \u201cscreeching skies\u201d and \u201cexploding earth\u201d and \u201cthe illegal immigrant becomes bin-Laden’s doppelganger\u201d \u2014 whatever that means. Somewhere in all this mess, I think Rodriguez is trying to laugh at \u201cnice\u201d Americans who for some reason have this absolutely odd notion that more stealthy terrorists might try to cross an unguarded 1,500 mile border to trump the mass murder of September 11. Next thing he will snicker at the equally silly recent concerns over packing shampoo in our carry-on luggage at airports.<\/p>\n A<\/span>t this point the only thing missing was the tired La Raza mythologizing about \u201cGringos\u201d who \u201cstole\u201d Mexican land \u2014 and, then, of course it too appeared, sort of at least. But if it is to be a question of theft rather than tragedy,Mexico\u00a0took the American Southwest from\u00a0Spain\u00a0, who lifted it from Indians, and so on back to Neanderthal times \u2014 as is the way with most of the history of our aggressive species.<\/p>\n Yet what is odd, from a military and historical view, about the Mexican War and its aftermath, is not that conquering armies the world over regrettably annex land, but that after invading and occupying central Mexico, the United States wanted little of it, acquired only a small sparsely populated part of its northern territory, tried to legalize the transaction, and then had a fierce national debate over the morality of it all. If he wishes to return to the 19th century, Rodriquez could do better by exploring its ironic legacy: recent polls of Mexicans revealed two contradictory sentiments: most expressed a desire to leave and emigrate to the United States, but a near majority also thought that our Southwest does \u2014 and should \u2014 belong to Mexico. An Orwellian corollary then follows: should El Norte return to\u00a0Mexico\u00a0, then many Mexicans would not wish to escape to El Norte?<\/p>\n Catholicism and the notion of suffering, together with asides about Protestantism and Puritanism, permeate Rodriguez\u2019s essay. Left unsaid is that the absence of family planning in a postagrarian age \u2014 more so even than questions of income parity \u2014 ensures that many immigrant families, arriving with 3-8 children, will never in the first generation achieve a parity of livelihood with American households who rarely have more than three offspring.<\/p>\n While the Catholic Church is critical of government efforts to curtail the number of illegal aliens, it is silent about its own role in this nexus between poverty, \u201csuffering,\u201d and large families. Only six out of ten second-generation Mexican Americans on average graduate from high school in four years; and less than ten percent have a BA degree\u2014the legacy not of racism or America\u2019s \u201ccold heart,\u201d but of millions arriving from Mexico without English, education, and legality.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t believe much of what Rodriquez has written here, and suspect he really doesn\u2019t either \u2014 except in one instance: his own revealing admission about the spring demonstrations that \u201cIt was the first time I had seen illegal parents, standing fearlessly in public with their children.\u201d<\/p>\n Had Richard Rodriquez left the world of Fillmore Street caf\u00e9s more often to visit a baseball game in Orange Cove, the emergency room in Selma, or the public park in Parlier, he could have witnessed just such \u201cfearlessness\u201d \u2014 which for 30 years has pretty much been about the norm around here.<\/p>\n \u00a92006 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson Cato Unbound [In a current Cato Institute forum (published in\u00a0Cato Unbound), VDH was asked to reply to the lead essay\u00a0“Mexicans in America”\u00a0by Richard Rodriguez. What follows is VDH’s reply.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[771],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-116","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1460,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-unbound\/","url_meta":{"origin":3912,"position":0},"title":"Obama Unbound","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 14, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Richard Nixon went to Red China with political impunity. Had a Democrat tried that, he would have been branded a Commie appeaser. To this day, liberals cannot conceive that during the two world wars, progressives like Woodrow Wilson, Earl Warren, and Franklin Delano\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Foreign Policy"","block_context":{"text":"Foreign Policy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/foreign-policy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":645,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/biden-unbound\/","url_meta":{"origin":3912,"position":1},"title":"Biden Unbound","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 14, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Joe Biden is at it again, accusing the president\u2019s opponents of hoping for bad news and the Republicans in particular of rooting for dismal economic reports, by virtue of opposing legislation of the sort they supposedly earlier would have supported. I am sure, as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9475,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-next-president-unbound\/","url_meta":{"origin":3912,"position":2},"title":"The Next President Unbound","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 2, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"There is reason to worry about both candidates abusing power as president, because Obama and the press normalized executive overreach. By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online Donald Trump\u2019s supporters see a potential Hillary Clinton victory in November as the end of any conservative chance to restore small government,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9608,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/9608\/","url_meta":{"origin":3912,"position":3},"title":"Comment from an Angry Reader:\u2026","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 15, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Comment from an Angry Reader: I\u2019m sure it was fun exercising your giant brain, but my surprise and I imagine most \u201cliberals\u201d was that enough Americans were willing to vote for what appears to be a sociopath. He disqualified himself for me when he openly espoused physical violence against those\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6318,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/putinology\/","url_meta":{"origin":3912,"position":4},"title":"Putinology","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 9, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner Barack Obama\u2019s cancellation of his Russian visit is the normal sort of diplomat payback for insult and injury \u2014 in this case the asylum offered Edward Snowden in the face of administration pleas to send him home for punishment. But with Obama, as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Foreign Policy"","block_context":{"text":"Foreign Policy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/foreign-policy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/Barack_Obama_and_Vladmir_Putin_at_G8_summit_2013.jpg?fit=560%2C373&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/Barack_Obama_and_Vladmir_Putin_at_G8_summit_2013.jpg?fit=560%2C373&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/Barack_Obama_and_Vladmir_Putin_at_G8_summit_2013.jpg?fit=560%2C373&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":10536,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/preemptive-strikes-and-preventive-wars-a-historians-perspective\/","url_meta":{"origin":3912,"position":5},"title":"Preemptive Strikes and Preventive Wars: A Historian\u2019s Perspective","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 31, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By Barry Strauss Strategika Preventive wars and preemptive strikes are both risky business. A preventive war is a military, diplomatic, and strategic endeavor, aimed at an enemy whom one expects to grow so strong that delay would cause defeat. A preemptive strike is a military operation or series of operations\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Strategika"","block_context":{"text":"Strategika","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/strategika\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/buyWarBonds.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3912"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3912"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3913,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3912\/revisions\/3913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}