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

grow to 50 or 60 million souls in the next twenty years - almost all of that increase the result of either illegal immigration or the large families of first-and second-generation Hispanic newcomers. For example, in the two-year period between the 2000 Census and the end of 2002, California's population growth by 872,000 was almost entirely due to immigration, mostly from Mexico and much of it illegal. To go from trying to stay alive while crossing the border, to enjoying the bounty of Kmart and Burger King, to joining the Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club is a complex task requiring more than a single generation.

What happens when all that assiduous effort to recycle trash, block power-plant construction and try to ban internal combustion engines butts up against the real needs of millions of the desperate who first want the warmth of four walls, a flush toilet and basic appliances? Tearing out vineyards in the Central Valley to build HUD-supported housing tracts ensures such immigrants a decent home. Erecting more freeways accommodates millions more of the second-hand, often severely polluting cars that poor immigrants drive. Building schools, hospitals and clinics meets the rising demands of millions of young Hispanics without birth control or insurance. And all these services are somewhat antithetical to preserving untamed whitewater rivers (which could be dammed to provide water and power for a thirsty, energy-hungry state), green belts (which cause the remaining usable land to become too expensive for affordable new tract houses), and stringent restrictions on dumping, hunting, fishing, camping and use of public lands (which mostly hurt the poor, who rarely are acquainted with complex laws or have easy access to proper public facilities).

Even the libertarians of California have their own dilemma. In theory, they advocate open borders - the Chicano dream of sin fronteras - and the idea that capital flow, not centralized government, adjudicates who comes and who goes. In principle, they support the right of a small businessman to choose who works for him - preferably for low pay and with little hassle. But in reality, the free-market and corporate establishment sighs when thousands of California residents root for Mexico to beat the United States in the World Cup. A contractor or a farmer going to his favorite restaurant is piqued to witness two dozen men, exhausted from work, stripped to their boxer shorts while their work clothes are in the wash at the laundry next door. And the motel owner who relies on just such immigrants as housekeepers does not like to keep seeing gang shootings on the nightly news, wrecked cars on the roadside, or her taxes going into new prisons. So like their Sierra Club counterparts, the politically independent mogul, the agribusinessman and the small entrepreneur are all rethinking the political orthodoxy that once committed them to open borders. With no consistent ideology, they are sometimes stunningly hypocritical in simultaneously hiring illegal aliens and advocating immigration reform.

Californians of all political shades are now carefully weighing the pros and cons of illegal immigration at current rates - the business establishment most of all. Wages to illegals are often paid in cash, which is a bargain for everyone involved. For instance, at $10 an hour without state, federal and payroll taxes deducted, the worker really earns the equivalent of a gross $13 an hour or more, while the employer saves over 30 percent in payroll contributions and expensive paperwork. Meanwhile, however, such cash payments force other Americans and legal immigrants to pay steeper taxes in part to cover those who pay none. So the farmer cheering over access to solid, dependable, cheap labor is now learning that he pays more than he thinks for illegal aliens in the form of rising taxes as well as a fraying social fabric.

Polls taken even before September II, 2001, showed that over 70 percent of Americans wanted immigration reduced. Nearly 90 percent reported that they would insist on English as the official language of the United States. Recently this conversation has shifted markedly to the right, as topics that only two or three years ago would have resided outside mainstream discussion - sending American troops to the border or summarily deporting illegal residents - have become the stuff of evening news debates.

My once sleepy hometown of Selma, California, in the center of the San JoaquinValley, is again in the middle of all this. The formerly rural community has grown from a few thousand to over twenty thousand in a mere three decades - as a result of immigration from Mexico, mostly illegal. On our streets I have no idea whether the mostly young male illegal aliens I meet are economic refugees or fugitives from crime in Mexico, perhaps serious felons - and no one else does either, because there is no legal record of their existence, and what documents they and our local authorities possess are almost always fraudulent, forged to mask the conditions of their arrival. In the 1950s Mexicans flocked to do agricultural labor in the surrounding orchards and vineyards, usually in manageable numbers and under legal auspices. But since 1970 the community has simply become a good place to find safe refuge from Mexico as well as all sorts of work - construction, hotels and restaurants, fabrication - in the bedroom communities that surround Fresno. Our social problems are hardly white on Mexican, but often Mexican-American on Mexican - or rather, the struggle by second- and third-generation Americans of Mexican ancestry who run our schools, police our streets and manage our city government to cope with thousands of break-ins yearly, vandalism, hit-and-run accidents, drug manufacture and distribution, and public schools and hospitals that are overflowing with clients who speak little English and have little capital, but expect instantaneous American-style service.

Selma is now somewhere between 60 and 90 percent Hispanic. But then how does the government count those who do not wish to be counted? Even legal immigrants from Mexico rarely become citizens: of all those admitted legally to the United States