The Coming of Mexifornia

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The Coming of Mexifornia

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The Coming of Mexifornia
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By John Fonte
Hudson Institute

August 21, 2003

When Victor Davis Hanson talks, Washington's conservative elite listens. A
brilliant classical scholar, a prolific military historian, and a hands-on,
tractor-driving, fifth-generation California farmer, Professor Hanson has
lectured the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dined at the Vice President's home, and
advised the President of the United States.

In his latest book, Mexifornia: A State Of Becoming,
http://www.target.com/gp/detail.html/602-2293089-1109413?asin=1893554732
Hanson dissects America's mass immigration/anti-assimilation status quo and
details how it undermines our national interests.

He bluntly lays out the problem:
"The really perilous course lies in preserving the status quo and
institutionalizing our past failed policies: open borders, unlimited
immigration, dependence on cheap and illegal labor, obsequious deference to
Mexico City, erosion of legal statutes, multiculturalism in our schools,
and a general breakdown in the old assimilationist model."

And he presents a clear solution:

If we are serious people, we will "adopt sweeping restrictions on
immigration;" end "separatist ideology;" promote a "stronger mandate for
assimilation;" (meaning real civic education in our schools, emphasizing
American culture and values); and end "the two-tier legal system for
illegal aliens." By this he means ending practices such as allowing illegal
aliens in California to get into state universities for reduced tuition
rates while American citizens from neighboring Arizona and Nevada pay the
full price.

As a leading military historian, Hanson is undoubtedly familiar with the
crucial insight of Karl von Clausewitz, that the best way to defeat an
adversary is to strike at what the great Prussian strategist called the
opponent's "center of gravity," a "hub of movement and power on which
everything depends." This "center of gravity" could be an enemy's main
military forces, capital city, national morale, or alliance system. In any
case, Clausewitz states, that if the enemy's "center of gravity" collapses,
the enemy will be defeated.

Left-Right Alliance

Hanson targets the "center of gravity" of the mass immigration/weak
assimilation regime as the product of a de facto alliance of the
Corporate/Libertarian Right and the Multicultural Left that protects and
promotes this system. He states, "Both parties, after all, did their part
to get us into this predicament and have so far escaped accountability for
the harm they have done." Illegal immigration "continues on unabated"
because "it unites the power and influence of employers with the rhetoric
and threats of the race industry." Who, after all, "wants to be called an
isolationist or a nativist by the corporate Right and a racist or bigot by
the multicultural Left?"

But Hanson, a man with Mexican-American nieces, nephews, sisters-in-law,
and prospective sons-in-law, who has labored in the fields alongside his
workers, faced down illegal alien intruders on his property, and been the
target of academic smear campaigns, is not a man to be intimidated. In
Mexifornia he charges ahead and details the damage that the Right-Left
open-borders coalition has wrought.

One of the major premises on which the pro-mass immigration Right's
worldview rests is the assertion that the assimilation of immigrants into
the American mainstream is proceeding today successfully much as it has in
the past. Thus, Michael Barone, a leading spokesman for this view, insists
that "we have been here before." There is nothing to be concerned about
because the history of American immigration will essentially repeat
itself-Ellis Island redux-with today's Latinos playing the role of
yesterday's Italians, assimilating, joining the middle class, and-as a
bonus for political conservatives-even voting Republican.

After the publication of his influential book The New Americans, in 2001,
the affable and well-connected Barone, was everywhere in the pre-9/11 world
of the establishment center-right: the K Street business luncheons, the
think-tanks, the Republican side of the Hill, spreading the word-let mass
immigration continue; throw in an amnesty for good measure; and it will all
work out fine, just like in did in the past. Hanson never mentions Barone,
but Mexifornia is a root and branch repudiation of the vision of The New
Americans and of the entire business/libertarian pro-mass immigration
worldview.

Hanson begins by explaining that Mexican immigration is different. In
contrast to immigrants from "the Philippines, China, Japan, Basque Spain,
Armenia, and the Punjab," for the Mexican arrival in California there is
little physical separation from the homeland; after all, "the Rio Grande is
no ocean." This makes assimilation more difficult. Add to this the
"enormous numbers" (Mexicans are the largest single immigrant group) and
"the constant stream of new arrivals" which "means for each assimilated
Mexican, there are several more who are not."

Also, Hanson notes, in the past, Italian, Jewish, and Polish immigrants
knew that if they did not learn English they would be failures in America.
Today, "A Mexican in California senses that if he fails to integrate into
mainstream American society, there will always be thousands of more
newcomers like himself who will . . . join him in a viable expatriate
culture." Moreover, American leaders "lack confidence in the melting pot"
and make little, if any, attempt to assimilate immigrants into their
language or their culture.

While American elites of the both the left and right tend to pander to the
Mexican governing class, Hanson is highly critical of this group, "which
both deliberately exports its unwanted and, once they safely reach American
soil, suddenly becomes their champion and absent parent, as much out of
resentment toward the United States, as in real concern for people whom
they apparently are so gladly free of."

Massive immigration to and financial bailouts from their northern neighbor
are, in fact, what allows the Mexican elite to avoid real reform. Hanson
insists that "Market capitalism, constitutional democracy, the creation of
a middle-class ethic . . .will never fully come to Mexico as long its
potential critics go north" instead of marching on Mexico City.

Assimilation Then and Now

With empathy Hanson describes the world of the illegal alien. It is mostly
a young man's world that starts in hope, but soon turns to resignation and
is pretty much over by age forty, as knees, backs, and shoulders give way.
Although the illegal aliens earn much more than they ever could in Mexico,
they begin to compare their circumstances of backbreaking work, not to life
in Mexico but to the seemingly easy life of their American employers
sitting at poolside, sipping drinks, gossiping on cell phones. Human nature
being what it is, they become resentful of these affluent "gringos." At the
same time, their children, who know little of Mexico, become even more
resentful.

The world of the illegal alien contains the pathologies as well as the
strengths of young men. As Hanson puts it, "in the history of civilization
it is single transient young men who build bridges and roads, but also
bring societies their crime and violence." Not surprisingly, almost a
fourth of all inmates in California prisons are from Mexico. The author
describes a series of personal confrontations with young illegal aliens who
vandalize, steal, and deal drugs on his property. Parroting Chicano Studies
ideology, one gang member told him, "Hey, it's our land anyway, not yours."

Hanson looks askance at upper- and middle-class Americans (both liberals
and conservatives) who have winked at the development of a two-tiered
peonage-style economic system based on cheap illegal labor that has created
a new segregation in which the "helots" even live in their own towns that
resemble, in many respects, some of the negative aspects of rural Mexico.

In contrast to today's failed immigration and assimilation policies,
Mexican immigration to America before 1970 was a great success story. The
old assimilationist model worked. Hanson describes civic education in his
predominately Mexican-American school in the small town of Selma in the
heart of California's Central Valley in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
They learned a "tough Americanism" with "biographies of Teddy Roosevelt,
stories about Lou Gehrig, recitations from Longfellow, demonstrations of
how to fold the flag, a repertoire of patriot songs to master." He "can
still remember" his fellow students singing "God Bless America" with the
"Spanish accented refrains" of "Stand bêsid her."

Nor did they simply learn a one-sided "triumphalist" history as
contemporary academics tell us. They learned about America's failings,
about slavery, segregation, discrimination and prejudice. But Hanson
remembers that discussions of the negative aspects of America's past did
not "teach the cheap lesson that America was racist and oppressive."
Instead, there was a sense of balance "achieved through the comparison with
contemporary societies elsewhere, and confidence in our values, measured
against a recognition of innate human weakness."

The end result of this type of civic education was a Selma, California,
composed of and run by assimilated, patriotic Mexican-Americans, Hanson's
friends, neighbors, and in-laws. He writes, "If the purpose of such an
education system as the one that formed us was to turn out true Americans
of every hue, and to instill in them a love of their country and a sense of
personal possibility, then the evidence forty years later would say that is
was an unquestionable success." His former classmates, overwhelmingly
Mexican-Americans, have become teachers, principals, business executives,
army officers, skilled mechanics, insurance agents, and lawyers. They are
the true heroes of this book, and they prove that successful assimilation
is not based on race or ethnicity, but on embracing our common culture and
the American Way of Life.

Race Industry vs. Pop Culture

The civic education of Hanson's youth that achieved what may be called
"patriotic assimilation" has been undermined for the past three decades by
the other half of the Right-Left open-borders coalition, the Multicultural
Left. If the Corporate/Libertarian Right marches under the banner of the
Dollar, the Multicultural Left marches under the banner of Racial
Separatism. In our colleges and universities there are separate admissions
criteria, separate curricula, separate dorms, separate rules, and finally
even separate graduation ceremonies for different races and ethnic groups.

In a chapter that examines the damage done both to Latinos in the United
States and to the nation itself in the name of multiculturalism, Hanson
strips the moral authority from those he calls "race manipulators." In
blunt language he explains how a "new race industry" committed to an
"agenda of separatism and racial spoils" in the schools, universities,
bureaucracies, unions, and politics subverts our common culture,
dis-integrates our nation, and harms the life-chances of the very "clients"
it claims to speak for.

Mastery of the English language and of an academic curriculum that could
help Latino students compete in California's tough labor market is
discouraged in the state's public schools and colleges in favor of the
separatist ideology of Chicano Studies and a bilingual education in which
Mexican-American children become competent in neither English nor Spanish.

Hanson contemptuously denounces racial ideologists in the universities: "If
there is truly a lingering racism in California, then one need go no
further than the state universities, where so much money and power has been
handed over to an elite class of racialists who in return have created a
curriculum designed to guarantee failure for the children of migrants."

Hanson points out that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans have dismal high
school and college graduation rates and are over-represented in "our jails,
prisons, and welfare programs," yet the grip of the racial ideologues
remains. He suggests, only partially tongue-in-cheek, that it is as if " a
white supremacist and a crackpot racist got together" and "brewed the germs
of our present school curriculum, concocted the virus of the La Raza
separatist and racist mythology, and then released these pathogens . . .
[on] unsuspecting Californians, who then proceeded unknowingly to destroy
the aspirations of millions of desperately poor aliens."

After excoriating the Multicultural Left, Hanson suggests that the "wholly
amoral power of a new popular and global culture" offers a countervailing
force to their consciously anti-assimilation actions, in a chapter that has
caused some consternation among conservatives.

Global popular culture-the new music, fast food, videos, MTV, boorish
entertainment, crass magazines, slang speech, unisex clothes, defiant youth
attitudes-is a revolutionary egalitarian development smashing old
hierarchies, authorities, and standards-trumping family, ethnicity, race,
gender, class, religion, and government. It indiscriminately levels both
outmoded snobbery and good taste. It undermines the multicultural race
agitator as well as the earnest teacher.

It is "schlock" Hanson tell us, "perhaps deleterious to the long-term moral
health of the United States" but in "the short term it is about the only
tool we possess to prevent racial separation and ethnic tribalism."

But obviously, Hanson notes, "superficial immersion" in American popular
culture is "no substitute for real civic education about American history,
culture, and values." In the end, the "leveling effect of popular culture
does buy us a little time. It gives America a few years respite before we
must deal with the catastrophe that we are not educating millions, not
teaching them a common and elevated culture, and not addressing the dilemma
of open borders." (And perhaps as the emergence of Arnold Schwartzenegger
has revealed, popular culture might "buy a little time" a "few years
respite" for the California Republican Party as well.)

Four Choices for America

In the concluding chapter, Hanson declares that Californians (and, thus,
Americans) have essentially four choices in dealing with immigration. First
we could "continue de facto open-borders" but insist upon assimilation.
Second we could vastly reduce immigration and assume that assimilation will
take care of itself. Third-Hanson's choice-we could combine greatly reduced
immigration (both legal and illegal) with vigorous patriotic assimilation.

The fourth path¾our present policy-would lead to "a true Mexifornia," an
"apartheid state" that "even the universal solvent of popular culture could
not unite." California would then combine the "worst attributes of both
nations," an "American individualism shorn of both Anglo-Saxon-inspired
allegiance to the letter of the law and traditional Mexican familial and
religious bedrock values."

In this case, Hanson tells us, poverty becomes endemic; schools erode;
crime soars; taxes increase; budget deficits explode; legal or illegal
status becomes "irrelevant" for college tuition, driver's licenses,
welfare, and "perhaps soon even voting privileges." The assimilated upper
and upper-middle classes of all races practice a "self-interested
apartheid" while professing "selfless liberality." A new argot of
Spanglish, the "dumbing-down of both languages," emerges among a large,
unassimilated, constantly growing Latino underclass that dwarfs both the
upper class and an assimilated and intermarried middle and working class.

Advancing Party of the Flag?

Victor Davis Hanson's Mexifornia is creating quite a stir among mainstream
conservatives. It is the summer sensation, with a cover story in National
Review and overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic reviews in the
center-right press. Even the Wall Street Journal had some favorable comments.

One reason for this enthusiasm is that the book has arrived at just the
right time. Conservatives are having "second thoughts" on immigration and
assimilation policies. During the 1970s and 1980s, when there was broad
support for relatively open immigration among conservatives, it was assumed
that assimilation into the American mainstream would take care itself. With
the publication of a seminal article ("Time to Rethink Immigration") in
National Review in June 1992, by a free-market journalist and Forbes
contributor named Peter Brimelow, opposition to mass immigration started to
build on the right. Under the editorship of John O'Sullivan, National
Review was at the center of this first-wave debate that faded in the late
'90s.

During the same period, however, at the dawn of the twenty-first century,
it was becoming increasingly clear to many thoughtful conservatives that
traditional assimilation was not working. Slowly and almost imperceptibly,
leading conservative intellectuals and activists began having "second
thoughts" about our de facto mass immigration policy. The events of 9/11
further strengthened the rethinking.

Today, this "second thoughts" group would include, in varying degrees,
Californians such as Ward Connerly, Thomas Sowell, and former leftists
David Horowitz and Peter Collier (Collier urged Hanson to write this
manuscript in the first place for Encounter Books, his publishing house);
City Journal writers such as Myron Magnet and Heather MacDonald; First
Things editor Fr. Richard John Neuhaus; American Enterprise editor Karl
Zinsmeister; Hudson Institute President Herb London; Nixon Center President
Dimitri Simes and center scholar Robert Leiken; academics including Walter
McDougall, James Kurth, Fred Lynch, and Samuel Huntington; National
Association of Scholars stalwarts such as Carol Iannone, Glynn Custred,
Thomas Wood, Gilbert T. Sewall, and Eugene Genovese; journalist Michele
Malkin (whose new book on immigration and national security, Invasion, is a
best seller); the National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru; Claremont Institute
scholars Ken Masugi and Tom West; neoconservative professor Fred Siegal;
and, since 9/11, the prominent scholar of Islam and presidential appointee,
Daniel Pipes. Even the venerable libertarian thinker Milton Friedman has
noted that mass immigration and the welfare state don't mix.

With the strong and positive reception given Mexifornia, conservatives have
now entered the second stage of their internal debate over immigration and
assimilation. In one sense, conservatives are divided between those who
seriously believe in democratic self-government, that is to say, that a
people that wants to limit immigration has the moral right and the ability
to do so, versus those who believe in economic or demographic determinism,
who tells us that the market requires and demands continuous mass
immigration regardless of what the American people want and that there is
nothing we can do to stop illegal immigration anyway. Hanson, who insists
that the future is ours to shape, is clearly in the democratic camp as
opposed to the determinist one.

In another sense, conservatives are divided between those who emphasize the
long-term national interests in strengthening American unity and our common
civic culture and those who emphasize the short-term economic interests of
the benefits of cheap labor. The irony facing the "economy über alles"
conservatives is that their open-borders policies create the types of
social costs, high taxes, and left-wing politics that ultimately undermine
both the free market and the nation.

Moral Arguments

In the name of national cohesion and self-government, Mexifornia strikes a
major blow for The Party of the Flag against the Right-Left coalition that
allies The Party of the Dollar with The Party of Racial Separatism.
Hanson's main weapons are moral arguments. He tells us that the current
policies protected by this Left-Right alliance have undermined our common
culture in the post 9/11 world; harmed the very Latinos they are designed
to help; weakened the standard of living for working-class whites,
African-Americans, native-born Mexican-Americans, and legal immigrants; and
created new forms of segregation and a virulent race industry. Logically it
follows that these policies are amoral, if not immoral.

Hanson's emphasis on moral factors in Mexifornia is reminiscent of one of
his books on military history. In The Soul of Battle (1999) Hanson narrates
the campaigns of three extraordinary generals-ancient Greece's Epaminondas,
the Civil War's Sherman, and World War II's Patton-who led democratic
armies against authoritarian, race-based regimes (Sparta, the Old South,
National Socialist Germany). Common to all three generals was their moral
vision of fighting against injustice-Spartan helotage, Southern slave
society, Nazi race superiority. They were moralists as well as realists.
They were "better warmakers," Hanson tells us, because they were ultimately
fueled by democratic ideas and an ethical agenda.

Hanson's Mexifornia is also compelled by a moral vision. He is a better
policymaker because his writing is fueled by an ethical agenda. He strikes
at the center of gravity of an amoral Left-Right alliance that, while
obviously not authoritarian, is clearly cynical and opportunistic with its
own, twenty-first century variants of race manipulators and
helotage-creating systems that ultimately subvert the cohesion of the
United States as a nation.

Like his hero William Tecumseh Sherman, who promised to "make Georgia
howl," Victor Davis Hanson surely makes his opponents-these modern-day
anti-unionists-"howl." But the larger question is this: As summer turns to
fall, will the intellectual war over the relationship of immigration to
American unity and our common culture accelerate? Is Mexifornia the
beginning of a new ideological offensive by The Party of the Flag that
outlines a moral vision in the name of a united American people? And if
Hanson is Sherman, who will play Grant? My guess is that John O'Sullivan, a
bloodied and savvy veteran of the immigration/multicultural wars of the
'90s who takes the helm of The National Interest in September, is ready to
fill this role-ready like Grant to wage a war of attrition, issue by issue,
trench by trench, against the forces of Separatism that make up the
Corporate Right-Multicultural Left nexus: the business lobbyists, the
libertarian editorialists, the pandering politicians, the immigration
rights lawyers, the international law specialists, the group preference
advocates, the race industry, the multicultural educators, the promoters of
transnational and subnational arrangements that degrade our democratic
sovereignty, and all those who directly or indirectly undermine the unity
of the American nation.John Fonte is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.