Tidal Wave

National Review, Sept 1, 2003 by William A. Rusher

Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, by Victor Davis Hanson (Encounter, 150 pp., $21.95)

Victor Davis Hanson is a man of many parts. For five grim years he and his brothers did their best to make a profit growing grapes to dry and sell to Sun-Maid. When the California raisin industry went belly-up in 1983, Hanson returned to an old interest of his: the classics. In 1984 he founded a classics program at California State University in Fresno, where he taught the subject for nearly 20 years. He also began turning out books-among them The Western Way of War (1989), on ancient Greek infantrymen.

Then in 1998 Hanson stunned the small field of classical scholars with Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (co-authored with John Heath). The book suggested that the culprits were the people teaching the subject, most of whom, the authors charged, were awash in such modern academic aberrations as multiculturalism. The field of classics is still reeling from that one.

But it wasn't until 9/11 that Hanson swam into the consciousness of most literate Americans. Immediately thereafter he became ubiquitous, proclaiming America's military and moral strength in exhilarating articles (some for National Review). He quickly became the favorite military commentator and historian of America's conservatives.

But this author of a dozen books is far from ready to accept categorization as a military specialist. The latest book to issue from his smoking PC is Mexifornia: A State of Becoming. It is a deeply informed study of the impact of Mexican immigration on the U.S., and it will make you reflect wisely and soberly on the problems this influx is causing.

Hanson is a fifth-generation Californian from Selma, a small town not far from Fresno in the state's great Central Valley. He has watched Selma change from "a sleepy little town of seven thousand or so mostly hardscrabble agrarians" into "an edge city on the freeway of somewhere near twenty thousand anonymous souls, almost entirely because of massive and mostly illegal immigration." The sociological impact has been enormous.

Hanson begins by asking, "What is so different about Mexican immigration?" America is, after all, a nation of immigrants. Part of the answer is simple proximity. Unlike immigrants from nations far away, Mexicans feel relatively little pressure to assimilate to the older American culture. They "migrate by simply walking across a porous border, steadily replenishing the Hispanic community in the United States with fresh aliens who strengthen ties with the world south of the border. Consequently, even after twenty years, 8 out of 10 never become naturalized American citizens."

At the same time, "very few wish to live as they did in Mexico to be a Mexican in Mexico rather than a Mexican in California." And who can blame them? Mexico's rapacious elites have done next to nothing for its impoverished masses, preferring to export them to the U.S. Small wonder that "at present rates of birth and immigration, by 2050 there will be 97 million Hispanics who will constitute one-quarter of all Americans."

Hanson's second chapter is a fascinating look at "the universe of the illegal alien." In the southwestern U.S., "almost any physical labor that requires little skill or education but a great deal of physical strength and stamina and some courage, and that pays only a little over the minimum wage is now done by people born in Mexico." Such people suffer from grim conditions far less familiar to relatively affluent American whites: Mexican gangsters, alcohol, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, drugs. And yet, "an unskilled laborer from the Sierra Madre is lucky to make $25 a week; in California he can easily earn nearly $10 an hour and often more." So he labors on, dreaming of returning to Mexico a rich man.

But somehow he almost never permanently returns. American medicine, education, and much else are placed, free of charge, at his feet by our bountiful society. Soon "the immigrant senses that-whether out of altruism, guilt, or coercion-the crazy gringos in America treat him better than his beloved amigos in Mexico." Ultimately, to be sure, envy of the even greater wealth and status of white Americans will sour his outlook. And Americans, in return, will think less of him, as age robs him of his youthful strength and vigor.

Subsequent chapters analyze the problem from other perspectives. The old assimilationist model, under which Mexican immigrants were quickly forced to learn English and given a civic education that insisted on the traditional values of American society, worked remarkably well as long as the number of immigrants being absorbed was manageable-and, even more important, as long as America itself retained faith in those values. But today our schools are in thrall to multiculturalism, and apologize abjectly for America's supposed historical failures. The immigrant student is assured that the culture from which he sprang is at least the equal, if not the superior, of that to which he has immigrated.