Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (22 page)

In our eleventh hour of
California
's immigration woes, what gives us hope that we may all yet live as one harmonious people? It surely is not the federal government, which has lost control of its borders and placed immigration policy at the service of special interests, both here and abroad. It cannot be our
California
educational system, which has produced classrooms plagued by partisans and at the mercy of the teacher unions and the race industry, both so often hostile to a common culture. Another generation must pass before we can assess all the damage done by years of state-mandated bilingual education.

There is not a great deal of hope for assimilationist policies to be found in the professional Mexican-American leadership that thrives in government, journalism and the universities. Such elites more often seek preferences based not on their own claimed injuries, but on past bias against their fathers and hostility presently expressed toward illegals. Nor are there many state leaders who speak honestly about race, culture, immigration and the need for assimilation - not when
California
may soon find itself with half its population claiming Mexican heritage.

In our devil's bargain with the American-inspired globalism, we have exchanged standards and taste for raw inclusiveness - the age-old complaint, from Aristophanes to de Tocqueville, against democratic civilization. Yet racism, separatism and natural apartheid are not the dividends of the new music, videos and clothes. So until our attitudes about immigration, schooling and a common culture improve, for now the youth culture is proving to be virtually our only salvation - and so in a strange way we are lucky to have it.

EPILOGUE

Forks in the Road

THE POOR OF THE WORLD are voting with their feet. Europe is awash with immigrants from northern Africa and the Middle East who now make up vast enclaves in England, Scandinavia and France. African blacks flock into a once racist South Africa still replete with tough and hateful Afrikaners. Refugees from a torrid Arabian landscape wait on lists to get into frosty Toronto. Hundreds of thousands of times more workers leave Palestine to find work in a despised Israel than Israelis - or Palestinians - venture into Syria or Lebanon. The freedom and material dynamism of the West are drawing millions to its shores - in the manner that Athens once attracted metics from Asia, and Rome drew Africans, Jews and Armenians. And just as in that distant past, today's new arrivals are unsure to what degree they wish to shed their old culture, language and customs. Most are confused over why they have abandoned countries they are unhappy with and yet find themselves uneasy with those they have chosen to embrace.

If Califormans complain that the children of aliens claim they are Mexicans, not Americans, and cheer visiting Mexican soccer players while booing their American athletes, they should remember that Algerians do the same thing to their hosts in France, as Pakistanis often do in Great Britain, and as Turks in Germany. The freedom and affluence of the West affect both the poor Third World immigrant and the well-heeled Western host in a variety of strange ways. Americans and Europeans can develop a cynicism, boredom and smugness about their own soft society that suggests to perceptive aliens either a sense of outright self-loathing or at least an uneasy acceptance that patriotism, pride in one's culture and national solidarity have no place in a postmodern, postheroic West.

The immigrant, baffled by the strange new world with its unlimited freedom of expression, gender equality and competitive economy, is not baffled by this remorse on the part of his host. In fact, he is ready to exploit it. The result is that he often makes little effort to assimilate, and then blames the ensuing failure on precisely those whose sense of shame is assuaged by such hostility. The relationship for both is parasitic. The sophisticated white professor allays his fears and anxieties about race on the cheap by championing ethnic studies and bilingualism. (Yet he rarely wishes to live beside, marry among or spend the day with Mexican aliens and their offspring.) In turn, the opportunistic immigrant taps the host's guilt to explain his own easier choice of ethnic separatism and pride. "We owe these people/
You
people owe us" is now the new symbiosis, replacing the old honesty: "Join us if you wish to be like us/We wish to be like you, so let us join you." When students have identified themselves to me in ethnic terms as "Chicanos" (e.g., "As a Chicano, I say" or "We Chicanos believe"), I have replied with the corresponding, silly racial nomenclature, otherwise never employed in this way ("Yes, as a white person, can I help you?" or "We white people think"). In every case, the student immediately drops the self-identification, upset that anyone else should be so crude as to employ such a racial identity badge.

It is within this larger, global context of population movement - of people trying to leave the misery of poverty in Africa, Asia and South America to find hope in Western countries - that we too in the American Southwest find ourselves dealing with immigrants from Mexico. Let us also be honest about the nature of human traffic. It is not climate, natural resources or race that entices or repels immigrants to new shores. Rather the answer lies with the capacity of Western culture to create capital, provide security, offer freedom and emphasize the individual rather than the tribe. Wealthy Westerners, who prefer low birthrates so as to satisfy their appetites for leisure, freedom and wealth, invite in the poor from Africa, Asia and South America to join them, on the condition that they are willing to work immediately at menial jobs in exchange for some future chance to partake in a free and affluent society. But what starts out as a mutually beneficial relationship soon deteriorates into one of mutual recrimination and theater: the host hectors the immigrant that he is lucky to have escaped his nightmarish home; the new arrival barks back that he now wants near-instant parity with his employer and the right to romanticize his once hated homeland as salve for his wounded pride.

Truth alone is the beginning of remedy, and so we must begin with acceptance of the universal law that determines the direction of immigration. If we do not know why immigrants come, or for reasons of pride or chauvinism are too timid to discuss it, then we live in a doublespeak world and deserve the consequences.

America
- and the Southwest particularly - is now unsure about the future. A choice of radically different potential fates awaits us, each predicated on choices we make in the here and now. Things can go very wrong for us if we continue to make poor decisions. The present immigration fiasco is not the result of any one past baneful idea, but arose solely because of the multiplier effects of several developments - many of them errors of omission and laxity rather than of deliberate intent. So let us conclude by reviewing the wide range of alternatives that might await us.

The really perilous course lies in preserving the status quo and institutionalizing our past failed policies: open borders, unlimited immigration, dependence on cheap and illegal labor, obsequious deference to Mexico City, erosion of legal statutes, multiculturalism in our schools, and a general breakdown in the old assimilationist model. True, the power of popular culture can superficially unite us and prevent the dangerous balkanization of the type we have seen in Eastern Europe, at least for a time. But we will still face a slow erosion in our general quality of life, and uncertainty that our group commitment to intermarriage, common popular icons and harmony in the youth culture will translate into a shared or elevated sense of national purpose.

Because too many unskilled Mexicans will come in numbers too great to be easily assimilated, and since their children will no longer be taught the need to accept the common protocols and heritage of American culture, the present pathology will only worsen.
The United States will face - is in fact now facing - a terrible choice.
Either we lower standards in our schools, businesses and government to ensure full participation by tens of millions who were never given proper education and training, or we maintain de facto a permanent class of modern helots who do the dirty jobs for their Spartan overlords, without ever joining fully in the management of the world that their hard work has helped to create.

If many of the current generation of illegal
immigrants
remains mired in stoop labor, their offspring will not be content with the solace that life is at least far better than it was in Mexico. Indeed, few sons and daughters of illegal aliens will know anything of Mexico. Millions will simply become jaded that their mothers and fathers work at jobs others won't take and yet make so much less - as they too enter the work force without education, at the bottom of the labor pool. We are all sitting on a demographic time bomb in which a shrinking, mainly white elite is nearing retirement and ready to be subsidized by more numerous, poorly compensated and younger Mexicans.

One solution would be to continue with de facto open borders, but insist on rapid cultural immersion, an absolute and immediate end to all ethnic chauvinism, bilingualism and separatism. There would have to be a domestic Marshall Plan to inculcate the norms and values of traditional education - a core curriculum that emphasizes the American heritage and unifies us through civic responsibility rather than divides us through an obsession with race. In this scenario, the inclusiveness of daily habit and custom, married with active support of a higher sort by our schools and government, might make near-instant citizens of thousands of illegal aliens. Even with the current of Mexican newcomers as it is, we could hope that their children had equal opportunity to enter the middle class. We might allow business cynically to maintain its access to inexpensive pools of unskilled labor. Thus in fifty years
California
would be a state of more than 60 or 70 million citizens, perhaps two-thirds of them of Mexican heritage. But such
an identification
would be of no particular importance precisely because the effects of total assimilation, intermarriage and ending government-sponsored separatism would have obliterated perceptible differences in income and education among Mexicans, whites, blacks and Asians.

This possible fate leaves the borders as they
are,
profits from the continued use of cheap labor and ignores illegality. It mitigates the social effects of a demographic free-for-all by returning to the old, proven assimilationist model of the nineteenth century, which Americanized millions of Poles, Irish, Jews and Italians, who also came to America without money and en masse.

Alternatively, we could patrol our border - to be sure, requiring fortification and a militarization of sorts - to ensure only legal and vastly reduced immigration, perhaps at a national rate of no more than 150,000 or so legal entries per year from Mexico. Business would have to accept a permanent scarcity of unskilled workers. Californians in turn would pay more for their hotel rooms, lawn care and fresh fruit - and have to do more of their dirty work themselves. In theory, American citizens without specialized skills would find themselves in far greater demand and would acquire greater leverage in negotiating more than minimum wages. Under conditions of such strict legality, illegal immigrants would have to be deported immediately. Controversy arising from offering tuition discounts and issuing driver's licenses to those who arrived illegally would disappear. Respect for the law would strengthen. Population growth would reach a natural equilibrium in
California
, perhaps forty million by the end of the new century. As a trade-off for such vastly reduced immigration from Mexico, we would not worry so much about the multiculturalism taught in our schools. The fighting for inclusive standards and worry over a watered-down, feel-good curriculum would go on, but lose some of its intensity without the presence of millions of illegal newcomers. The La Raza dinosaurs, along with other separatists and ethnic chauvinists, might lumber on in theory, but in fact would gradually die off as their habitat became depleted of new clients and their landscape altered through the effects of intermarriage and the assimilative youth culture.

Within twenty or thirty years, Mexican ancestry would be comparable to Italian descent today. Cinco de Mayo would be no different from Columbus Day. Chicano studies professors, hobbling with canes and walkers, would scour the campus for a handful of Mexican immigrants they could imbue with distrust of America and its racist past - but for the most part encounter a completely assimilated third-generation student body who paid them little heed.

In short, we the hosts can either change our strategies about assimilating the immigrant flood or, alternatively, remain unchanged but dam the source of the deluge and do so under legal auspices. Either choice would radically alleviate the present problem within a few years. A third, more radical and holistic - and, I think, wiser - solution would be to adopt sweeping restrictions on immigration and put an end to separatist ideology along with the two-tier legal system for illegal aliens. In such a scenario, our present problems would vanish almost immediately, while prices for wage labor would steadily escalate.

There is, of course, a fourth approach - the logical culmination of the present policy - which leads to a true Mexifornia. If we do not change by either adopting an assimilationist program or insisting on metered and legal immigration, or both, we shall soon see a culture in southern and central California that really is a hybrid civilization, a zona libre not unlike what already exists in parts of inner Los Angeles and many rural California towns such as Orange Cove, Mendota, Malaga and Parlier. We know the warning signs of that rendezvous with tragedy for aliens when entire communities are Hispanicized. At present, 70 percent of the Los Angeles public school enrollment is reportedly Latino; only 10 percent is "white" - in large part because an entire middle and upper class has simply fled to private schools or more upscale public districts in the suburbs, practicing a self-interested apartheid even as it professes ideals of selfless liberality.