Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, Victor Hanson [cool books to read .txt] 📗

be impossible to sustain with more than one or two dependent children. In places like Menlo Park, Santa Rosa and Monterey there is an entire generation of childless married couples, thousands of gay households and many affluent professional singles who no longer see child-raising as either their social duty or integral to their own personal happiness.

Yet at the very time the new creed took hold across class lines that small families were economically wise, culturally desirable, socially progressive and the only way to ensure a choice few children full opportunity - everything from piano lessons at three years of age to SAT preparation at ten - California's population was exploding. It grew mostly from immigration, both legal and not, and involved the slow assimilation of first- and second-generation immigrants who, at least initially, shared few of the liberal assumptions about the necessity or the desirability of reducing family size. One of my liberal friends recently summed up his "dilemma" when he explained to me that he had sired one child to guarantee her the maximum of parental attention and financial support, yet he now was slowly realizing that she would live in a state where millions of her peers got neither much attention nor adequate support - a development as depressing to him as he felt it might someday be dangerous to his daughter.

A far greater moral problem looms a mere decade from now, when the aging white population of the Baby Boomer generation finally - and nearly all at once - reaches retirement. Influential, affluent, informed (and not shy about self-interest or self-promotion), it will demand that Social Security and state retirement programs continue to be funded at promised levels. But these benefits will remain possible only with a complacent majority population of younger Hispanics who have large families and often work for wages lower than what retired whites with no dependents will receive. It will be a strange thing to see the 1960s generation of California elites in their seventies on the golf course or at the coffeehouse, drawing Social Security in aggregate amounts greater than what they contributed, and using that annuity as pocket money to supplement their private retirements and savings - as long as the darker-skinned groundskeepers and waitresses nearby keep working to pay hundreds of dollars per month in deductions that might otherwise have gone to support their six or seven dependents, (The Social Security tax bite is mostly fixed across class lines, not calibrated by income levels to the same degree as the income tax.)

Cringing at the thought of these and similar contradictions, neither Republican nor Democratic leaders officially wish to discuss cross-border traffic honestly. Both are unsure of the volatile public mood on any given day - unsure whether Californians of all races will finally say no mas, or whether those who are part Mexican or married to Mexican-Americans will vent their wrath at the polls or slander them on the evening news. The two parties, for reasons of money and power, ignore the social chaos brought by millions of illegal aliens: capitalists count on profits from plentiful, cheap workers, while activists expect these laborers to become liberal voters. And no wonder: in the 1996 election, over 70 percent of all Hispanic voters opted for the Clinton-Gore ticket.

Yet the actual aggregate Mexican-American vote that the Democrats so eagerly court remains just a fraction of the eligible pool. For example, a few miles away from me in the small upscale town of Hanford, of the 14,173 residents who identified themselves as Latino (34 percent of the town's entire population), only 110 are registered to vote. And we have no idea how many of that 770 actually voted on election day last November. The Mexican-American liberal electorate may be a chimera that will never materialize because immigrants assimilate and grow more conservative - or it may be a huge bottled genie that promises unending political power to any who can one day release it.

Illustrating the law of unintended consequences, the present immigration crisis is not quite what any of the stakeholders anticipated. For in addition to some cheap labor, the tax-conscious Right also got thousands of unassimilated others who eventually plugged into the state's nearly bankrupt entitlement industry and filled its newly built prisons. (Almost one-quarter of California's inmates are from Mexico, and almost a third of recent drug-trafficking arrests involved illegal aliens.) In contrast, the pro-labor

Left, salivating over a larger bloc vote, slowly discovered that the wages of its own impoverished domestic constituencies were eroded by less expensive and more industrious alien workers (50 percent of real wage labor losses was recently attributed by the Labor Department to the influx of cheap immigrant labor) - and that puts a strain on the coalition that the Left wants to build.

It is hard for progressive unions to be eager for imported labor from Mexico when millions of second-generation Mexican-American and African-American laborers are making not much above the minimum wage. Indeed, one of the unforeseen results of the infamous "Operation Wetback" that sought to deport illegal immigrants during the 1950s was a rapid increase in wage labor for legal farm workers throughout the Southwest. Conversely, some studies indicate that the presence of plentiful foreign laborers in the 1990s reduced the wages of unskilled workers by 5 percent. So does tough border control unfairly exclude Mexican nationals from the American dream, or does it assure Mexican-American citizens that their labor will be fairly rewarded?

Perplexed liberals of northern California are in a special dilemma. Committed to a multicultural agenda that does not "privilege" any particular heritage and in theory favors granting the world's poor nearly unlimited access to America, they nevertheless are also keen environmentalists who adamantly support population control. A San Francisco Bay Area Sierra Club member with one or two children who drives a fuel-efficient Volvo or a small four-wheel-drive Toyota, loves to backpack and fights for the state's shrinking open spaces cannot help but be worried over news that California's population is destined to