Illegal Immigration Threatens U.S. Future

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 30, 2003 | by Woody West

Byline: Woody West, INSIGHT

A guest on a C-SPAN call-in program was discussing his latest book. A woman on the telephone said that, though she had tuned in late, what the writer was saying sounded "racist" to her. Was the topic affirmative action? Racial profiling? School vouchers? No, the topic was more contentious, more politically flammable than those: immigration, particularly illegal immigration.

The C-SPAN guest who so casually was charged with racism was Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist, military historian and astute and frequent commentator on the American scene. His new book, Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, bluntly addresses the turbulent transformation of which illegal aliens are the agents; "undocumented immigrants" is the deflecting euphemism that the media use for this. The illegals could not be the agents of so disruptive a social shaking, of course, were it not for the liberal horror of asserting traditional principles of citizenship, civic order and ideals.

Hanson, a fifth-generation Californian who still operates the family fruit farm in Central California, has said that he was reluctant to write the book, knowing he'd be hammered from both left and right. "It's a no-win situation," he told the Washington Times. "I'm not bashing immigrants, but the taxpayers of California cannot continue to fund entitlements at the present level because the state is broke."

The tidal flow of illegal immigration is not restricted to California. No one knows with any confidence how many illegals there are in the United States; guesstimates range from 7 million to 12 million. Because California is so economically, politically and culturally influential, however, and with the gubernatorial recall election rattling messily the length and breadth of the Golden State, the matter is vividly illuminated. In 1994, 59 percent of California voters approved a ballot initiative that limited social-welfare benefits for illegals but has roiled politics there ever since. And Democratic Gov. Gray

Davis, desperate to keep getting his mail at the Statehouse in Sacramento, has decided he now favors legislation he earlier vetoed to permit those illegally in California to obtain driver's licenses.

In his book, Hanson soberly and eloquently anatomizes the issue which in greater or lesser degree affects every part of the country. Illegal immigration involves, he says, a "simple but apparently unsolvable calculus: Americans want the work they won't do to be done cheaply by foreigners who, they wrongly assume, inevitably will transform themselves into Americans. In turn, the downtrodden Mexicans who come here and their elite advocates in America romanticize Mexico, the nation that brought them the misery they fled, while too often deprecating the place that alone gave them sanctuary."

The appropriate remedy, in the abstract, probably is generally agreeable, he writes not just for California but for the nation, of course. That is, "far less illegal immigration and a more measured policy of legal immigration, along with a stronger mandate for assimilation. But caught in a paralysis of timidity and dishonesty, we still cannot enact the necessary plans for a workable solution. Who wants to be called an isolationist or a nativist by the corporate Right, and a racist or a bigot by the multicultural Left?"

That's pretty much the noxious content of the stew left cooking on the stove, threatening to catch fire and not inconceivably engulf the entire house in time.

Beyond our reluctance to confront illegal immigration, even to discuss it honestly, there is a subversive aspect that should not be dismissed as fantasy: the radical movement that flies the banner of reconquista to reclaim for Hispanics that great swath of land once ruled by Spain and Mexico.

The government of Mexico subtly abets this movement by encouraging dual citizenship and undermines U.S. law by issuing matricula consular cards through Mexican consulates in this country to those who claim Mexican citizenship whether in this country legally or not. The cards are accepted widely as ID cards by hundreds of police departments and municipal governments. Frequently they are accepted to obtain a driver's license. The FBI cites the criminal and terrorist threat from such cards (a hot item on the false-document market). They also are a "back door" to amnesty for illegals by allowing them to open bank accounts and obtain local services in some states.

In Mexifornia, Hanson anatomizes the scope of this country's reluctance to deal with illegal immigration from every country on the globe. Every report of the chaos of immigration becomes more notorious deportations stalled in court or lost in the bureaucracy, tens of thousands of illegals here on expired student or visitor visas for years and borders as porous as a Little League infield.

The most that our best and brightest have come up with is the formal "amnesty" technique. President George W. Bush had proposed yet another just before

Sept. 11, 2001, and, understandably, instantly shelved it. Hanson emphasizes that the California in which he grew up was multiracial, as America historically has been. Assimilation, the "melting pot," was an efficacious part of creating a dynamic society. But the aggressive ideologues of multiculturalism largely have been successful in discrediting that tradition.