California, Here they Come : E Pluribus unum is losing to La Raza

National Review, August 11, 2003 by VIctor Davis Hanson

Objective data cannot tell us whether a front-line state like California is saved or lost because of illegal immigration. Left- leaning economists swear that immigrants to America bring in $25 billion in net revenue per annum. Yet more skeptical statisticians employ different models to reach the radically different conclusion that aliens cost the U.S. over $40 billion a year-and that in California each illegal immigrant will take from the state $50,000 more in services than he will contribute in taxes during his lifetime. Who can sort out all the wild-card effects of cash income, undocumented residents, fraudulent Social Security numbers, and politicized research?

A far greater moral problem looms a mere decade from now, when the aging white and Asian population of the baby-boom 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 remain funded at promised levels. But in places like California these benefits will remain possible only with a complacent majority population of mostly younger Hispanics with larger families, often working for less in wages than will go to aged whites in retirement with no dependents. It will be a strange sight: the 1960s generation of California elites in their seventies, on the golf course or in their Winnebagos, 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 groundskeepers and waitresses keep working to pay hundreds of dollars per month in deductions that might otherwise have gone to support their five or six dependents.

While Republican and Democratic leaders cringe at this prospect, they avoid an honest discussion of cross-border traffic. They are unsure of the volatile public's mood on any given day-whether Californians of all heritages will finally say no more, or those who are even part Mexican or married to Mexican-Americans will vent their wrath at the polls against advocates of closed borders. The two parties ignore the social chaos of millions of illegal aliens for other reasons too: Employers count on profits from plentiful, cheap workers, and activists think they can find in these laborers future liberal voters who, as an unassimilated constituency, will vote en masse for representatives like themselves.

Political ironies abound. The pro-labor Left is salivating over a larger bloc vote. But it also is slowly discovering that the wages of its own impoverished constituency are eroded by less expensive and more industrious alien workers: The Labor Department recently attributed 50 percent of labor's losses in real wages to the influx of cheap immigrant workers. It can't be easy 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.