Posted on 06/21/2002 9:24:18 AM PDT by One_American
It is this reporter's opinion that we will eventually face the decision to either close our porous borders with Canada and Mexico and sort out our illegal alien situation or throw up our hands and become another Third World nation.
Strong words, I know! But thousands arrive illegally each year and, as an example, the state of California has become home to fully 40 percent of America's immigrants – legal and illegal. They come in such overwhelming numbers because a tacit alliance of Right and Left has created an open borders policy aimed at keeping wage labor cheap and social problems fresh.
Recently I interviewed Victor Davis Hanson, Professor of Classics, California State University,* who asked the question, "Do we want 'Mexifornia'?" He refers to unlawful immigration as the third rail of California politics.
Hanson knows the problem firsthand. He is a college professor who lives in the sleepy town of Selma, Calif., which has grown from a community of 7,000 to 20,000 in only two decades – as a result of mostly illegal immigration from Mexico.
Selma is 60 percent to 90 percent Hispanic. No one knows how many of these people are citizens. Hanson rarely hears English spoken and almost every car displays a Mexican flag or decal.
Professor Hanson points out that he loves the Mexican people, but that tensions abound even within families when the subject of our sovereignty and citizenship is discussed. One of his siblings is married to a Mexican-American; another has two stepchildren whose father was an illegal from Mexico; he has a prospective son-in-law whose parents crossed the border, yet they all disagree at different times whether open borders are California's hope or its vane.
And why not? California cannot even obtain accurate numbers as to how many of the state's more than 10-12 million Hispanic residents have arrived from Mexico unlawfully.
Our Hispanic population – 70 percent of which are from Mexico – grew 53 percent during the 1980s and rose another 27 percent, to a total of 30 million between 1990 and 1996; and at present rates of births and immigration, by 2050 there will be 97 million Hispanics in the U.S. – one quarter of our American population!
Hanson points to the fact that the liberals swear that these newcomers bring in $25 billion net revenue annually; but realistic statisticians conclude that they cost the United States over $40 billion a year and that in California, each illegal immigrant will take $50,000 in services from the state beyond what he will contribute in taxes during his entire lifetime. One study suggests that the average California household must contribute at least $1,200 each year to subsidize the deficit between what these immigrants cost in services and what they pay in taxes.
Here are statistics just released:
The uninvited who have flooded into California have all but filled our newly built prisons; nearly one quarter of the inmates are from Mexico.
Nearly a third of all drug trafficking arrests involve illegal aliens.
The Labor Department attributes 50 percent of real wage declines to the influx of cheap immigrant labor.
The going wage is $8.00 per hour in California, $8.00 a week in Mexico. But that's only the beginning. These "guests" use their counterfeit documentation to get workers' compensation, unemployment insurance and state assistance, meanwhile romanticizing Mother Mexico while chastising Lady Bountiful America.
Surprise! The second generation has learned how to live, spend and consume as Americans – but not, like their fathers, to work and save as Mexicans. If rising crime rates, gang activity and illegitimacy are any indication, they resent rather than sacrifice to escape poverty.
Tragically, 37 percent of all births to Hispanic immigrants are illegitimate. The illegitimacy rate among American-born Mexican mothers is now 48 percent. Census data show median household income for the nation's Hispanics dropped 5.1 percent, yet recent immigrants from Mexico and their U.S.-born children under 18 make up only 4.2 percent of America's population and represent 10.2 percent of our poor. Hispanics account for 24 percent of America's impoverished – that's up 8 percentage points since 1985.
... and yet they keep coming, refusing to be assimilated, with romanticized Mexico ever close to their hearts, many dying in California never having sought to become U.S. citizens.
Professor Hanson points to the heart of our immigration problem: While it has always been easier for people who emigrate to keep their own culture rather than join the majority, for the first time in our state and nation's history, we have made it easier for them to do it.
Unfortunately, the future is dismal. Out of every 100 Hispanics who enter California high schools, 40 drop out and of the remaining 60, fewer than four will go on to college. Only 7 percent of all Mexican-Americans currently hold a BA. This is a national tragedy!
I praise professor Hanson. If he did not really like his Mexican-American students, who make up the majority of his classics classes, if he wanted them to fail, he would not continue to try to teach them Latin, much less Greek, English Composition or Western History and Culture – nor would he insist on essays free of grammatical error, or demand oral reports that employ classical, rhetorical tropes.
No ... if he did not like them or did not wish to live among thousands of illegal as well as legal immigrants and wish them married into his own family, he would keep them distant, teaching them therapy, letting them speak poor English or no English at all and insisting on the superiority of the "Mexican culture" – that they or their parents had fled.
Instead, the professor struggles on at what sometimes seems to be a losing battle. But he leaves for us the choice. Will we continue down this endless path facing the great question: Will California remain multi-racial or become America's first truly multi-cultural state? Will there be assimilation or will we stay with the deceitful multiculturalist present that is failing? For unchecked illegal immigration and multiculturalism are a lethal mix. California, if it is to stay as California, might cope with one or even the other – but surely not both at once.
Professor Victor David Hanson, our heroes are found not only on violent battlefields. We salute you!
******* * Victor Davis Hanson, a professor of Classics at California State University, Fresno, received his B.A. at the University of California at Santa Cruz and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He was given the Award for Teaching Excellence by the American Philological Association – an annual citation given to the top undergraduate teachers of Classics.
He is the author or editor of several books on military and ancient history. He has also written about traditional agrarian and rural life and contemporary culture wars. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Times, American Heritage, The Weekly Standard and The Wilson Quarterly, and has been featured on NPR and the Jim Lehrer News Hour. He currently writes a biweekly column on the war against terrorism for National Review Online.
The legendary George Putnam is 87 years young and a veteran of 67 years as a reporter, broadcaster, and commentator ... and is still going strong. George is part of the all-star line-up of Southern California's KPLS Radio – Hot Talk AM 830.
I keep saying this as often as I can, but nobody will listen to/believe me. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates the number to be $55,200, but even $50K is bad enough.
Despite all the false rhetoric of lower wages, and doing jobs that nobody else will do, every illegal costs us $50K more than they will contribute every time they step across the border.
I am tired of paying for it!
Nah, they'll repair to spacious mansions behind locked gates & live out their lives in the splendor that their crazy immigration policies have made possible. Meanwhile while the rest of us, and our children, will be forced to live in the sewer they leave behind.
We have made it easier for them to do it?? We? Who's we? Oh the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS MADE IT EASIER FOR THEM!
The people of the great state of California held a free election and voted 3 to 1 in favor of proposition 187 which would have put a stop to tax paid support of illegal aliens. We won the election!! And then federal government stepped in and burned our ballots and declared our election unconstitutional.
Wake up people. Let this serve as a warning to all.
Our borders and immigration policies have become a national disgrace, and now a complete national security nightmare.
I doubt Putnam actually knows any illegal Mexicans. No, they do not romanticize Mexico, they know very well what they left behind. They know very well the legal abuses that working class or poverty-class Mexicans are subjected to back home.
The hostile rhetoric you hear directed toward the United States does not come from field workers. It comes from leftist Mexican academics, leftist American academics, and people of their ilk. Leftists are leftists. They live to create enmity where there isn't any.
All you have to do to stop it, is prosecute the companies and large farms that employ them. The way it works now, is that only the labor contractor is fined. He goes bankrupt, and re-opens the next day under another name. The farmer, who is the real employer of the illegals, is immune from prosecution.
Of course, the big farmers were Pete Wilson's biggest supporters, so he was never going to prosecute them.
But, if you're serious, thats what it will take. That, and some National Guardsmen patrolling the rural areas along the border, to keep people from dying in the desert. But people will not cross if there are no jobs waiting for them.
And don't tell me that Americans will not do the work that illegals do. They will do it; just not at the price and conditions offered. But farm labor costs are only a tiny percentage of the cost of produce at the supermarket. You could double the wages offered, and the price of produce would only go up by a few cents.
Farmers like illegals because, if injured, they can't sue. If you have a dispute about wages, they can't go get a lawyer. That is why nothing will be done to stop it.
And, in the present climate, where both parties are jockeying for hispanic support, they will both pander to this issue. The ironic thing is, that hispanics supported Prop 187, too; 60% to 40%, roughly the same percentage as Anglos. Oh, did the news media forget to mention that?
Putnam is definitely not describing Illinois, where there are many immigrants, Mexican and otherwise. Two-thirds of new HOMEONWERS in my suburb have Hispanic surnames. If they have such bad values, why did 100% vote for Bush in my area? Why did they vote for conservative O'Malley in the primary in my area?
The problem is not with the Mexican immigrants, it is with the welfare programs pushed by the white liberals.
Thank you. I am all for sealing the border, and I am all for tightening up immigration. The rate of immigration could be cut to near zero, and that would be fine with me.
But, as I have said elsewhere, I would gladly trade a million Democrats for the next million Mexicans to wade the river, chosen at random. Their values are much more in line with our own. I say that, even knowing full well that most of them will eventually vote Democrat.
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