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Preface to Second Edition
Mexifornia is an extended essay akin to a memoir, not a scholarly, footnoted study of the economics and demography of illegal immigration. Yet nothing I have seen or experienced or read in the academic literature since the book’s first publication has made me regret a single argument. On the contrary, much that has transpired in that time has bolstered what I learned firsthand growing up and living in central California.
Mexifornia came out during California’s gubernatorial recall campaign of autumn 2003. The public was furious about massive debts, but also angry that the embattled Governor Gray Davis had appeased both employers and the more radical Hispanic politicians of the California legislature on the issue of illegal immigration. His legislation allowing driver’s licenses for illegal aliens had already passed both houses of the state government. So it was no wonder that the book sometimes found its way into political debate, in both its high and low forms. For example, circulating on the Internet was a close facsimile of a California driver’s license with a picture of a Mexican bandit (the gifted actor Alfonso Bedoya in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). The mock license had a demeaning height (5’4”), weight (“too much”), and sex (“mucho”). “Mexifornia” was emblazoned across the top where “California” usually is stamped on the license.
Since the publication of Mexifornia, I have discussed the book’s merits in hundreds of radio appearances, and in formal debates with reasonable critics such as Bernardo Mendez, the Mexican trade and press consul in San Francisco, and the essayist Richard Rodriguez. At lectures on university campuses, I been shouted down by disruptive hecklers. There was an especially unpleasant experience at the University of Oregon on February 11, 2004, when protestors took over the first row of seats, waving placards during my speech and blocking the audience’s view—without any remonstration from university officials.
In heated debates, I was often asked, “Why did you have to write this book?” We now forget that just a few years earlier—in the age of rolling amnesty, bilingual education and NAFTA exuberance—the status of millions of Mexican nationals in our midst was mostly a taboo subject. Anyone who wrote a book with a title like Mexifornia would have been considered an unhinged zealot, or at best a nagging Cassandra. “Mexifornia,” in fact, was originally a term of approbation used by activists who were enthusiastic about California’s changing demography; yet the left considered the book’s title, as well as its arguments, to be unduly harsh to newcomers from Mexico. The right, on the other hand, welcomed the book as giving long-overdue attention to a scandal ignored by the mainstream Republican Party.
Fast-forward four years, and the climate has radically changed. Today the arguments of Mexifornia—close the borders, return to the melting pot, offer earned citizenship to most aliens in exchange for acceptance of English and American culture—seem almost tame. In 2002, when I began writing the book, no one thought that the U.S. Congress would vote to erect a wall along the border with Mexico. Now there is grumbling that the signed legislation entails only 700 miles of fencing instead of covering the entire 1,950-mile border. Deportation was once an unimaginable response to the problem of millions here illegally. Now its practicality, rather than its morality, appears to be the main point of contention in congressional debates. The attempt by Chicano activists in California to banish the descriptive term “illegal alien” in favor of the politically correct “undocumented worker” has failed, along with state-mandated bilingual education and racial preferences. Efforts to demonize opponents of open borders as “anti-immigrant” or “nativist” have had only a marginal effect in stifling debate. The old utopian talk of a new borderless zone of dual cultures, spreading out on both sides of a disappearing boundary, has given way to reexamination of NAFTA and its facilitation of the cross-border flow of goods and services—along with illegal aliens and drugs.
Why have the terms of the debate over illegal immigration moved so markedly to the right since Mexifornia first appeared?
We return always to the question of numbers. While it is true that no one knows exactly how many are here illegally from Mexico and Latin America, estimates of eleven or twelve million illegal aliens—with half a million to one million arriving per year—are often accepted as reasonable by both sides in the debate. It is plausible that an additional three or four million illegal aliens have entered the country since Mexifornia was first published. The result of such staggering numbers is that aliens now are not just a presence in California or the American Southwest, but frequently appear at Home Depot parking lots in the Midwest, emergency rooms in New England, and construction sites in the Carolinas. This proliferation makes the issue an American rather than merely a Californian or Arizonian concern—and reifies the warnings at the end of the book. What was once true of California specifically is now a national problem.
Numbers are at the crux of the quandary over illegal immigration. In the 1970s, when there were perhaps a few million illegal immigrants residing in the United States, their unassimilated presence was hardly noticed. Most Americans assumed that the formidable powers of integration and popular culture would continue to incorporate any distinctive ethnic enclave, as had been done so successfully with past generations who arrived in large numbers from Europe, Asia or Latin America. But when over ten million came north from Mexico in little more than a decade—the great majority without English, a high school education or legality—entire apartheid communities began springing up in the American Southwest.
As I warned in Mexifornia, the debate will no longer split across liberal/conservative, Republican/Democrat, or even “white/brown” fault lines. Instead, class considerations increasingly divide Americans on the issue—as does the public recognition of cynicism on the part of the employer and Chicano lobbies. The majority of middle-class and poor whites, Asians, African-Americans and Hispanics wish to close the borders. They see few advantages in cheap service labor since they are not so likely to employ it to mow their lawns, watch their kids or clean their houses. Because the less well off eat out less often, use hotels infrequently and don’t periodically remodel their homes, the advantages to the economy of inexpensive, off-the-books illegal alien labor are not readily apparent.
But the downside surely is. Truck drivers, carpenters, janitors and gardeners—unlike lawyers, doctors, actors, writers and professors—feel their jobs are threatened, or at least their wages lowered, by cheaper rival workers from Oaxaca or Jalisco. Americans who live in communities where thousands of illegal aliens have settled are likely to lack the money to move when Spanish-speaking students flood the schools and gangs proliferate. Poorer Americans of all ethnic backgrounds acknowledge that poverty provides no exemption from mastering English, so they wonder why the same is not true for incoming Mexican nationals.
The class division explains the anomaly of the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages echoing the arguments of the elite Chicano Studies professors. Both tend to caricature and scorn the far less affluent Minutemen and English-only activists, in part because they do not experience firsthand the problems associated with illegal immigration, but instead find the presence of millions of aliens to be conducive to their own contrasting agendas. Indeed, anytime an alien crosses the border legally, fluent in English, and with a high school diploma, the La Raza industry and the corporate farm or construction company alike lose a constituent.
The question of fairness about who is allowed into the United States is another source of public discontent—especially when almost 70 percent of all immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive from Mexico alone. Asians, for example, are puzzled as to why their relatives wait years for official approval to entire the country, while Mexican nationals come across the border illegally, counting on rolling amnesties to obtain citizenship. One of the unforeseen consequences of publishing Mexifornia was the great number of Southeast Asians and Punjabis who contacted me, asking for help with relatives caught in immigration limbo and red tape—as if pointing out what was wrong with the present corrupt and broken system meant that I had any expertise or influence in navigating anyone through it.
Meanwhile, the ripples of September 11—whether seen in the arrests of dozens of potential saboteurs here in America, or in the terrorist bombings in Madrid and London—remind Americans that their enemies can only do harm by stealthily entering the United States. It makes little sense to screen tourists, inspect cargo containers, and check the passenger lists of incoming flights when our border with an untrustworthy Mexico remains relatively porous. While it may be true that the opponents of illegal immigration have used the post-9/11 fear of terrorism to further their own agenda of closing the border with Mexico, they are absolutely correct that presently the easiest way for jihadist cells to cross into the United States is overland from the south.
Other recent events have also helped steer the debate rightward. In the last decade, the United States has had bitter experiences with sectarianism and ethnic chauvinism abroad. There was the Hutu-Tutsi bloodbath in Rwanda, followed by the unraveling of Yugoslavia into Croatian, Serbian and Albanian camps. Now almost daily we hear of Pashtun-Tajik-Uzbek hatred among the multifarious warring clans in Afghanistan, and the ongoing mayhem between Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq. When we are spending blood and treasure abroad to encourage the melting pot and national unity, why would anyone wish to foster tribalism or ethnic separatism here in the United States?
All during the 1990s, blue-state America offered up the European Union as the proper postmodern antidote to the United States. But the EU’s statist and undemocratic tendencies, sluggish economic growth, high unemployment, falling demography and unsustainable entitlement commitments have resulted in much popular discontent, while its unassimilated Muslim minorities have added more tinder to the fire. The riots in France, the support for jihadism among Pakistanis in London, and the demands of Islamists in Scandinavia, Germany and the Netherlands do not encourage Americans to let in greater numbers of largely poor illegal immigrants who will advance the loud agendas of their sponsors, or to embrace the multicultural salad bowl over the distinctive American melting pot.
Then there were the demonstrations here in the United States in April–May 2006, when nearly half a million protestors took to the streets of our largest cities, from Chicago to Los Angeles. Previously naïve Americans had assumed that the debate over border security and immigration was in their own hands. And while Chicano rights organizations and employer lobbyists were often vehement in their efforts to keep the border open, illegal aliens themselves used to be mostly quiet about matters of immigration law. But in the spring of 2006, Americans witnessed millions of illegal aliens who not only were unapologetic about their unlawful status, but were demanding that their hosts accommodate their own political desiderata, from driver’s licenses to full amnesty. Holding the largest demonstration on May Day, with thousands of protestors waving Mexican flags and bearing placards of the communist insurrectionist Che Guevara, only confirmed to most Americans that illegal immigration was out of control and becoming politicized along the lines of Latin American radicalism. In Mexifornia, I pointed to the incongruity of angry protestors waving the flag of the country they emphatically did not wish to return to, but now these images were beamed to millions on the evening news. The radical socialism of Latin America—reflected in the angry millions who flocked to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Andrés López Obrador of Mexico—had now seemingly been imported into our largest cities.
Turmoil in areas of Mexico where many illegal aliens come from is especially worrisome. Recently, for example, nearly the entire state of Oaxaca was close to open revolt over efforts to force the resignation of the provincial governor Ulises Ruiz—with teacher rebellion, widespread lawlessness, vigilantism, and a complete breakdown of order. This turbulence in Mexico adds to the perception that illegal aliens increasingly arrive not merely as economic refugees, but as political dissidents who take to the streets to demand social justice, as was their custom back home. More importantly, Oaxaca’s troubles cast doubt on the old conventional wisdom that illegal immigration is a safety valve that allows Mexico City critical time to get its house in order. Perhaps the opposite is true: some of the areas that send the most illegal aliens to the United States still experience the greatest social tensions—in part because of familial disruption and social chaos when adult males flee and depopulated communities in consequence become dependent on foreign cash.
Worker remittances sent back to Mexico from the United States now bring in about $15 billion annually in precious American dollars—equivalent to the revenue from 500,000 barrels a day of exported oil. Mexico cannot afford to lose its second-largest source of hard currency, and will do almost anything to ensure its continuance. The attitude of the Mexican government is another factor that has convinced many Americans that the border must be closed. When Mexico City publishes cartoons advising its own citizens how best to cross the Rio Grande, Americans are appalled. Not only does Mexico brazenly undermine American law in order to subsidize its own failures, but it also assumes that those who flee northward are among its least educated citizens, without much ability to read beyond the comic book level.
We are also learning that Mexico—beyond wanting its expatriates’ cash or their lobbying efforts for Mexican interests once they are safely across the border—has little concern about the welfare of its citizens abroad in America, who live in crowded apartments, drive dangerous vehicles, and count on generous American health care and food subsidies while they send nearly half their modest wages back to the motherland. Thus Mexico exports its own citizens in the expectation that they will remain like serfs, surrendering much of the fruit of their toil to their distant masters.
Even more grotesquely, the real estate market in Baja California has been booming in the last five years. Once Mexico grasped that its own unspoiled coast was highly desirable to wealthy Americans as a continuation of the prized but crowded Santa Barbara–San Diego seaside corridor, it began to reform its property and title law, and to welcome cash-laden expatriates with open arms. All this is sound economics, but with a dubious ethical message: Mexico City sends the United States millions of its own illiterate poor, whom it will neither feed nor provide with even modest housing, but at the same time invites in thousands of Americans with cash to build expansive second homes on choice seaside property.
Of course, the ultimate solution to the illegal immigration predicament is to bring Mexican society up to near the level of affluence found in the United States by embracing market reforms of the sort we have seen implemented in South Korea, Taiwan and China. But opponents of globalization do not see the proliferation of Wal-Mart superstores and Starbucks cafes down south in such terms. Rather, they wonder why Americans should get mad about Mexican illegals coming north when our own crass culture with its glaring English neon spreads southward. Such an argument neglects to mention that Americanization in Mexico occurs legally and brings capital, while Mexicanization in America occurs through illegal means and is driven by poverty.
The consequences of illegal immigration also reach the second generation, in which illegitimacy, high-school dropout rates and criminal activity have risen to such levels that no longer can we simply dismiss the situation as a replay of the problematic but eventually successful Italian immigration of the late nineteenth century. Since 1990, the number of poor Mexican-Americans has climbed 52 percent, a figure that has skewed overall U.S. poverty rates. Billions of dollars spent on our own poor are less likely to show up as encouraging social statistics when a million of the world’s poor enter the country each year. While the number of impoverished black children has dropped 17 percent in the last sixteen years, the number of Hispanic poor has gone up 43 percent.
Illegitimacy rates are higher in Mexico than in the United States, but the force multiplier of illegal status, a language barrier and a lack of higher education means that second-generation Mexican-Americans suffer from illegitimacy rates higher than those found either in Mexico or in the Untied States generally. Currently, half of all births to Hispanics of all statuses are illegitimate—which is 42 percent higher than the illegitimacy rate for the American population as a whole.
Education levels reveal the same dismal pattern: nearly half of all Hispanics are not graduating from high school in four years. And the more Hispanic a school district becomes, the greater the rate of failure for Hispanic students. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is 73 percent Hispanic, 60 percent of all students are not graduating. But the real tragedy is that among those Hispanics who do graduate, only about one in five will have completed a curriculum that qualifies for college enrollment. That is why at many campuses of the California State University system, almost half the incoming class each year must take remedial courses. I found that teaching Latin to first-generation Mexican-Americans and illegal aliens was valuable not so much as an introduction to the ancient world, but as the student’s first experience with remedial English grammar.
Less than 10 percent of those who identify themselves as Hispanic nationwide have graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree. Meanwhile, almost one in three Mexican-American males age 18–24 in California, in response to a recent poll, reported having been arrested, and one in five has been jailed. Currently there are 15,000 illegal aliens in the California penal system.
Statistics like these have changed the debate radically. While politicians and academics assured the public that illegal aliens came only to work and would quickly assume an American identity, the public was seeing vast problems with crime, illiteracy and illegitimacy; and these observations have been borne out by hard data. In Mexifornia I related incidents of break-ins at my home, and of drivers crashing into our vineyards without licenses, registration or insurance; such incidents have continue in my own experience since the book appeared. But more importantly, anecdotal stories like these are now commonplace in the American Southwest. They continue to be ignored by elites or ridiculed as prejudicial, but the anecdotes are now supported by statistical studies.
The growing national furor over illegal immigration is apparent not only in the rightward shift of the debate, but also in the absence of any new arguments for open borders. In this climate of opinion, I welcome a new paperback edition of Mexifornia, with its theme that reasonable people must act forcefully and lawfully now before the present tragedy evolves into a catastrophe. Such a warning that time and reason are growing scarce seems more critical now than when it was first offered four years ago.
