The coming nightmare of Balkanization

This wasn't supposed to happen here

[Reprinted from Issues & Views November 17, 2003]

Professor and writer Victor Davis Hanson offers his knowledge and insights on the subject of Mexican immigration and its impact on our society. In October, he spoke to students and faculty of Hillsdale College. Following are excerpts from what he had to say.

What we see going on with Mexican immigration today is a tragedy, and it is not simply a result of the federal government abdicating its responsibility to control our borders (although the federal government has certainly done precisely that). The citizens of my state of California and others are also complicit in this tragedy. For instance, millions of us who used to cut our own lawns and clean our own houses now consider such tasks beneath us, as if America's middle class has embraced as its birthright the culture and leisure once confined to an aristocratic elite. Suddenly our young people, our poor and our unskilled find jobs picking apples or laying tiles somehow demeaning. So-called dead-end jobs are no longer a rite of passage for our youth, but are deemed proper only for unskilled laborers from Mexico, whose toil, we are assured, keeps our produce, restaurants and hotels inexpensive.

Related to this trafficking in human capital, a serious social and moral dilemma looms a mere decade away, when the Baby Boomers of California finally--and nearly all at once--reach retirement. Influential, affluent, informed--and not shy about self-interested self-promotion--these retirees will demand that Social Security and state retirement programs remain funded at promised levels. But these benefits will remain possible only with a complacent majority population of younger Hispanic immigrants with larger families, working for wages that are less, on average, than what is being paid out to these aging white retirees with no dependents.

Data alone cannot decide for us whether California is saved or ruined by illegal immigration. Liberal economists, for example, offer models that demonstrate that illegal immigrants bring in $25 billion to America in net revenue per annum. Other statisticians employ quite different models showing that these same immigrants cost the United States over $40 billion a year--indeed, that the average California household must contribute at least $1,200 each year to subsidize the deficit between what illegal immigrants cost in services and what they pay in taxes. Who can sort out all the wildcard effects of cash income, fraudulent Social Security numbers and politicized research?

Tragically, political correctness makes it nearly impossible to discuss illegal immigration in any kind of rational way without being labeled racist or nativist. Indeed, even the legal term "illegal alien" is now politically incorrect, and is being replaced by "undocumented worker." But most know that not all illegal immigrants are workers, and that the problem of illegal immigration involves more than a lack of proper documentation.

We are told that blanket amnesty and a grant of legal status will ensure assimilation and prosperity. But statistics suggest that after 20 years, even legal Mexican immigrants have double the welfare rates of American citizens. And in one study, students surveyed at 13 years of age and then again at 17 were 50 percent more likely at 17 to identify themselves as "Mexicans" as opposed to "Mexican-Americans"--this despite, or perhaps even because of, having spent four years in American high schools.

We now ponder honoring identification documents from Mexico (alone of foreign countries) as legal American identification, even as we read of endemic corruption among police and bureaucrats across the border. In response, aliens from myriad other countries now demand that their own foreign IDs be honored, and the other 49 states of the Union are not so sure they should accept California driver's licenses, given how promiscuously they are granted, at intrastate security check points. Thousands of immigrants from the Punjab, Korea and the Philippines wait patiently for five years or more to become naturalized citizens in the proper and legal fashion, only to watch hundreds of thousands cross illegally from Mexico in the expectation of a periodic and privileged amnesty designed only for them.

Almost everything stern and uncompromising that for two centuries has helped other immigrants to the United States--entry under legal auspices, language immersion, autonomy from government assistance, rapid assumption of an American identity and eager acceptance of mainstream American culture--has either been dismissed as passé or carried on halfheartedly.

Most Californians of all backgrounds understand the growing social and cultural costs that flow from this situation. Yet the Orwellian alliance of many libertarian-leaning conservatives--who embrace the idea of a perpetual supply of hard-working, unskilled and inexpensive workers--with the race industry of the Left--which envisions an endless influx of unassimilated potential voters who can be appealed to on the basis of group rather than individual identity--tends to demonize any discussion of the issue. Opposition to massive illegal immigration is customarily and cleverly equated with disdain for immigration per se, hence characterized as un-American.

Meanwhile Mexico, a richly endowed but nearly failed state, continues to refuse to do the political, cultural and economic restructuring that is needed to turn itself around. Indeed, why should it bother making these reforms when it can export potential dissidents from its hinterland to the U.S., gaining in the process $12 billion in remittances from expatriates? (These remittances constitute the second largest source of foreign exchange to the Mexican economy.)

A full 50 percent of real wage labor losses was recently attributed by the Labor Department to the influx of cheap immigrant labor. While we continue to import this labor, millions of second-generation Hispanic and other legal laborers are making not much more than the minimum wage. Of course, few of the professors and politicians who support illegal immigration--whether for continuance of cheap labor or for the sake of the entitlement industries--live in California's new apartheid communities like Orange Cove, Mendota or Parlier, communities where Mexican immigrants make up the vast majority of the population and struggle with dismal schools, high crime, little revenue and other social problems akin to those in Mexico.

In a country where there may be anywhere from eight to fifteen million illegal immigrants, is there any hope for avoiding the nightmare of Balkanization? Perhaps. After all, we got into our present mess only during the last 30 years, and then only by doing almost everything wrong. Thus we need not do everything right, but simply return to what we used to do so well: insist that immigration be measured and legal, do more of our own unpleasant work, enforce all of our laws equally, emphasize assimilation and return to thinking and speaking of Americans as individuals rather than in terms of their racial or group identities.

-- Victor Davis Hanson is Professor of Classics at California State University, Fresno. He has authored and co-authored many books, including Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power and Mexifornia: A State of Becoming.

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