Mexifornia and the Prophetic Voice of Victor Davis Hanson
By: Jonathan B Coe
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson’s extended essay and memoir, Mexifornia: A State of Becoming , has aged well since it’s publication in 2003, when it was met with significant criticism from both the Left and the economic-libertarian Right, who, according to Hanson, accused him of being a racist, nativist, and isolationist. Its grave concerns, related to immigration policy in the United States, have proven to be prescient, and its prescriptions are as salutary now as the day the book was published.
Fifteen years ago, the book emerged as a cautionary tale in which the reader was warned that, if current immigration policy doesn’t change in the U.S., what will emerge is something that looks like many towns in central California: half Mexico, half America, and hurtling toward significant cultural and economic decline.
The essay’s prescriptions of, among other things, increased border security and a strong emphasis on assimilation for the non-citizen, now seem self-evident, especially in the light of recent data . Hans A. von Spakovsky and Grant Strobl summarize two unsettling reports from the Government Accountability Office released in 2005 and an updated report in 2011:
The first report (GAO-05-337R) found [in 2005] that criminal aliens (both legal and illegal) make up 27 percent of all federal prisoners. Yet according to the Center for Immigration Studies, non-citizens are only about nine percent of the nation’s adult population. Thus, judging by the numbers in federal prisons alone, non-citizens commit federal crimes at three times the rate of citizens.
The findings [also in 2005] in the second report (GAO-05-646R) are even more disturbing. This report looked at the criminal histories of 55,322 aliens that “entered the country illegally and were still illegally in the country at the time of their incarceration in federal or state prison or local jail during fiscal year 2003.” Those 55,322 illegal aliens had been arrested 459,614 times, an average of 8.3 arrests per illegal alien, and had committed almost 700,000 criminal offenses, an average of roughly 12.7 offenses per illegal alien.
Out of all of the arrests, 12 percent were for violent crimes such as murder, robbery, assault and sex-related crimes; 15 percent were for burglary, larceny, theft and property damage; 24 percent were for drug offenses; and the remaining offenses were for DUI, fraud, forgery, counterfeiting, weapons, immigration, and obstruction of justice.
The data in the updated 2011 report confirmed the two reports from 2005. Spakovsky and Strobl readily admit that these reports don’t give us an accurate number of crimes committed by illegal aliens but add, “If there were a way to include all crimes committed by criminal aliens, the numbers would likely be higher because prosecutors often will agree to drop criminal charges against an illegal alien if they are assured that immigration authorities will deport the alien.”
However one parses these statistics, the evidence supports Hanson’s original thesis, and what he has written elsewhere , about the need for border enforcement, reliable identification cards, employer sanctions and the general vision of measured, legal immigration that is followed by an intentional program of assimilation.
Because Hanson’s book is equal parts extended essay and memoir, it doesn’t fit in the category of data-driven, academic literature. However, it is not untethered subjectivism: enough statistics are furnished to buttress his thesis and give the reader a sense of “the facts on the ground.”
Statistics usually give us a window of insight into a particular issue but they don’t tell us the whole story. In your local newspaper, you can read the most recent statistics of the National Basketball Association (per game totals of the leading players: points, rebounds, assists, blocked shots, and steals) but you’re not getting the complete picture until you watch the actual game.
For example, you may have a player whose contributions don’t really show up on the stat sheet, but he greatly helps his team by diving for loose balls, setting picks, and playing tough defense. You wouldn’t notice this unless you watched the actual game.
With Hanson’s memoir, you feel like you’re watching the actual game. Yes, he is a renowned classicist and military historian, but he is also a fifth-generation farmer from a hardscrabble Swedish lineage, who has lived in California’s Central Valley, the epicenter of the immigration upheaval, for over sixty years.
For the first six grades of his schooling, he found himself part of a tiny white minority amidst a Mexican and Mexican-American majority. Because of inter-marriage in his immediate and extended families, Hispanics are well-represented in his family tree.
After all these years of living near Selma, California, and working side-by-side with Mexicans and Mexican-Americans on his small farm, he confesses that he feels he knows them better than so-called whites and adds that, because of habit and custom, he “…feel[s] more comfortable with the people I grew up with, a population of mostly Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and whites who were raised with non-whites.” All in all, it would not be an exaggeration to assert that Hanson understands the current Mexican immigrant experience better than a fêted essayist like Richard Rodriguez , a critic of Hanson, who lives in a tony “restored Victorian” neighborhood in San Francisco.
If Hanson’s essay is an edifice, one of its pillars is differentiating between Mexican immigration and other past immigrations to America. Defenders of the status quo often say, “Sure there’s some negative statistics related to first-generation Mexican immigrants, but remember the first-generation of Italian immigrants, who were demeaned as little more than criminals.”
The problem with this assertion, Hanson avers, are the alarming trends among second-generation Mexicans he cites vis-à-vis poverty, welfare dependency, illegitimacy, high school drop-out rates, and criminal activity. For example, illegitimacy rates are higher in Mexico than in the United States, but second-generation Mexican-Americans have higher rates than those found in either country.
One in three Mexican-American males aged 18-24 in California has reported being arrested with one in five actually being jailed. The Los Angeles Unified School District is 73 percent Hispanic with a graduation rate of 60 percent; and, among those who have graduated, only one in five will have completed a curriculum that qualifies for college enrollment. Many enter college having to take remedial courses.
Hanson claims that one of the major factors is proximity: a campesino (peasant farmer), who is often of Indian extraction from rural Mexico, can leave Los Angeles and be in Mexico in three hours. Other immigrants, for example, from places like the Philippines, China, Japan, Basque Spain, the Punjab, are completely cut off from the Old Country and are forced to learn the language, assimilate, and join the melting pot rather than have their assimilation stunted in some ethnic enclave.
The Rio Grande is easily crossed, and Hanson writes that the semi-regular back and forth journey between the two countries can “nourish enough nostalgia for Mexico to war with the creation of a truly American identity.” Mexifornia becomes a permanent state of mind with the campesino having one foot, emotionally and intellectually, in each country: as a result, even after twenty years, 8 out of 10 Mexican migrants never become naturalized citizens , and remain in enclaves separated from the economic, social, and educational bounties that other immigrants have come to enjoy.
Professors of ethnic studies often advance the idea that, like African-Americans, Mexicans were not able to make the transition that the Irish and Italians did because of racism against the darker-colored immigrant. Hanson, the historian, agrees that there has been a significant history of racism against Hispanics in the American Southwest, but believes that this is only a partial explanation of their disappointments.
How else, he asks, can we explain the relative success of jet-black Punjabis, who have become prominent in professions in central California (medicine, law, agribusiness, and academia) or that Asians have a per capita income higher than California whites? Indian-Americans are as “unwhite” as Mexicans and yet are the richest ethnic group in the United States, earning a median income of $100,547 in 2013, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Another factor that makes Mexican immigration different, Hanson cites, is the role of the Mexican government and its complex relationship to both the immigrant and the U.S. First, there’s the elephant in the room that goes against the major tenet of multiculturalism that all cultures are equal: since things are so bad there (Mexico), they, the legal and illegal alien, want to come here (America).
Hanson accurately points out “that Mexico has never really had a history of sustained legitimate government, and only recently has taken the first steps in creating a multi-party system with free elections, an independent judiciary, and an open media.” He adds that “Market capitalism, constitutional government, and the creation of a middle-class ethic will never fully come to Mexico as long as its potential critics [the immigrants coming to America] go north instead of marching for redress of grievances on the suited bureaucrats in Mexico City.”
The economics of the situation are simple: an unskilled laborer from a place like the Sierra Madre is fortunate to make $25 a week. In California he can make the equivalent of over $13 an hour (if he doesn’t pay taxes), often with ample overtime. In 2015, Mexico received 23.4 billion in oil revenues and 24.8 billion in remittances from their migrants working mostly in the U.S.: what motivation is there, pray tell, to make major structural changes in your own economy when you benefit so greatly from the status quo?
In looking at the project of building a wall, the relationship of the co-dependent wife and her alcoholic husband comes to mind. The act of building and finishing a wall along our southern border is the equivalent of the wife telling her husband: “No, I’m not calling your boss anymore and telling him that you have the flu when the truth is that you’re extremely hung-over.”
Building a wall means that the US stops enabling Mexico and forces them to live with the consequences of their choices. It’s interesting that Mexico City can go to great lengths to turn Baja California into coveted, beach-front real estate for well-heeled Americans seeking a second home, but it can’t make the needed changes to create better economic opportunities for it’s poor rural Indians.
And, as Charles Krauthammer notes, there’s a reason that people have been building walls for 5,000 years: they work and their effectiveness exposes the fatuous social justice bromide, “Build bridges not walls.” Exhibit A: the wall in San Diego has reduced apprehensions by 92 percent; the fence in Israel has effectively neutralized terrorist infiltration.
A forthcoming essay will explore how Hanson puts a human face on the immigration issue in chapters two and three of the book (“The Universe of the Illegal Alien” and “The Mind of the Host”) and surveys what policies and programs have succeeded and which ones have failed. Such chapters reveal the compassion of someone who knows the campesino like a brother and is grappling with what it means to “love the alien as yourself” (Leviticus 19:34).
Jonathan B. Coe writes from the Pacific Northwest. Before being received into the Catholic Church in 2004, he served in pastoral ministry in rural Alaska and in campus ministry at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
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It's time to give credit where credit is due.
The book was published in 2003. The above review was written in 2018.
I read this book when it came out. Hanson hits the nail on the head, explains California and immigration on the macro level as well in his local community.
I like listening to him talk about California and how it changed. It's unbelievable!
California has changed more than once, hasnt it ?
That's like saying the Titanic changed a few times, so don't feel too badly about how it changed after hitting the iceberg.
The land of California was taken from the non European indigenous there hundreds of years ago, and from the point of view of the political activists among them all they are doing is taking it back.
If you were a Martian , which conquest would seem more justified?
My point is that the spread of the United States across the entire continent was done without the consent of those who were here already.
I was once on a forum with a guy who supported La Raza , which was an activist hispanic group that supported reconquista
Mexican Reconquista | Open Borders: The Case
Mexican Reconquista “Reconquista” is a term used for the belief , held by some Mexicans or people of Mexican origin (and/or attributed to them), that the southwestern United States should legitimately belong to Mexico, and the movement of Mexicans across the southern U.S. border is a step toward the reconquest of this area .
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So, in your argument, Mexicans are entitled to California, even if their ancestors never lived there, because the US occupied an almost entirely empty territory?
You would agree then that Americans have the right to "reconquer" Canada and Mexico as well, right?
Mexicans are as entitled to California as white Americans were when they acquired it.
Its not right or wrong, it's might makes right. Crossing the border illegally can be seen as a form of "might".
It's wrong, it's still illegal, and it's creating more problems, while solving none
They never owned it so how can they take it back? Because one belongs to a certain group, ancestry, or a race doesn't mean they are entitled to property.
Shall I go to Germany and say I own it and I am taking it back because my family lived on that property 300 hundred years ago and was forced to leave?
History is full of conquers and injustice.
I understand you think it is wrong. But it is not objectively wrong, it is subjectively wrong.
Was it "wrong" for the white people to take the indigenous lands ?
That's one thing that makes me laugh about people [usually white supremist] tell people to go back to where they came from... those people spewing those things wouldn't be here either... and really, how far back [how many years, decades, etc.] do we go?
I mean... I can trace my ancestry back to France and Canada as early as the late 1500s. My indigenous ancestors were in Canada and my French ancestors were scattered across France, a few in modern day Belgium, a handful from the UK [Ireland, England, and Scotland] and a couple from Sweden. Ultimately, my family was in the US [Michigan and northern Wisconsin to be precise] before the US was the US (1701 mom's side and 1716 dad's side).
Like you've stated, history is full of conflict. Just because it once was, doesn't mean it should be once again.
People are so offended because non European people want to come here. By what right are we offended?
As far as Germany goes, people have been fighting to take or retake land in Europe for a few millennia now.
No one is offended because of their heritage. People have the right to protect their nation.
I suppose you think that is right.
They were doing it here as well we just don't have several thousand years of written American history but they were fighting when Europeans got here. Maybe it's human nature or maybe it's just inevitable that groups, tribes, countries will fight with one another. The way I always looked at the European conquest of America is if they hadn't done it Russia would have or Japan or China. The fact is the lack of modern technology made America ripe for the picking. It was just luck that gave Europe the technology to build ships capable of bringing enough people to America to take over before the others. If Native Americans had been the people with the technical advantage they would have done the same thing to Europe. Technology has always gone hand in hand with conquest whether it's the recurved composite bow used by Mongols, the English long bow or Spanish Galleons every advancement gave an advantage and power shifted accordingly.
Sure were, the Lakota slaughtered their way west from the great lakes to the Plains, annihilating or enslaving any tribe that stood in their way.
I was born in California. I've lived in Cali's central valley for most of my life. Mexican people are as much a part of California as I am.
I thought they were Americans.
The Richard Rodriguez article linked to was a far better read.
You are quite right.
We cant go back, dont want to go back, going back denies progress. But we should want justice and a better policy related to migration back and forth across the southern border.
It was remarkable that James T Polk was not impeached for starting a fake war.
There was nothing fake about it. Mexico sent troops across the Rio Grande (the border agreed to by Mexico and the US in 1836) and attacked US troops.
Texas was not part of the US in 1836. Did you learn history from a Texas history book?
They attacked the Republic of Texas, not the United States.
If it wasn't for Mexican labor there would be no ''farming in the central valley of CA''. I've read the book and it's filled with antidotal stories which as a resident of CA for 45 years with a fair amount of time spent in the Central Valley I could also use a multitude of personal stories. If I remember correctly he references "Aztlan" as a concern. It's a fringe movement at best and I've never heard any Mexican espouse this.
Least we forget that Mexico and Mexicans have been part of CA far longer than whites.
Arrieros somos y en el camino andamos.
The people living here before the Europeans arrived have no special claim to the land.
The rights of conquest has gone on since the dawn of history.
The Dems have foolishly created a problem they can't control
So if Mexicans peacefully conquer California through immigration , they will have been "right", correct ?
Of course John, but you know that ain't gonna happen
Why would they want to overthrow what they came for?
Hanson could write a trilogy, his next books could be,
Mexizona
Mexitejas
I agree this is the real issue, but trying to vent any anger for it on the migrants themselves solves nothing, it just dehumanizes people who are desperate to make a better living for their families. It's why I believe our resources are better spent helping the Mexican government truly succeed in embracing market capitalism, protecting free and fair elections supporting a constitutional government and creating space for that middle-class ethic. Rising tides raise all boats. Simply addressing the illegal border crossings is like trying to hold back the tides with your bare hands.
Walls can work when the walls can be fully monitored and are in a relatively small area. The total wall length in Israel is 440 miles and is fully monitored, we have over 2100 miles along our southern border so a continuous wall is simply unfeasible and an unmonitored wall is easily defeated with a $20 ladder from Home Depot. The money to build a full border wall would be far better spent helping Mexico become a stable democracy with protections for its people and market capitalism driving their economy instead of relying on migrants sending their paychecks home. This could be achieved better if we had immigration reform with legal status for some migrant workers which will benefit both American agriculture as well as reduce the incentive for illegal border crossings.
Personally I see no problem with what he's calling "Mexican enclaves" where an area is culturally maintaining their Mexican heritage as long as the "economic, social, and educational bounties" are as available to them as they are to any German, Italian, Polish, Jewish or any other ethnicity enclaves that have popped up around America over the last 240 years of our welcoming immigrants to our shores. Trying to say they have to be "assimilated" in order to be law abiding, tax paying American citizens is ridiculous.
So he knows the racism against Mexican Americans is "significant" but thinks it's only partially to blame for the hesitancy to assimilate. Well how about we address it even though it's only part of the problem as it's still a tangible problem that needs to be addressed if we're going to make any significant progress towards welcoming them and their wanting to be assimilated as it's tough to even want to be a part of something if you feel like the group you're trying to join discriminate against you and often show extreme hate toward the culture you're coming from.
The two sides in America debating this, the conservatives on one side and liberals/progressives on the other, are suggesting two different approaches which can be likened to the difference between the carrot and the stick. Conservatives generally want to attack it with the stick and beat it into submission, using derogatory dehumanizing terms like "illegal aliens", push for more walls and harsher sentences for offenders coupled with angry hate speech toward Mexican culture while liberals/progressives want to use the carrot of making the choice of crossing the border less attractive by creating more incentives for Mexican citizens to stay in Mexico, helping them create more opportunities and a thriving middle class not controlled by drug cartels. Both sides want the same thing, less illegal immigration, but only liberals/progressives are actually caring about those people caught in the middle and want a better outcome for all, conservatives seem to not give a shit about them as long as they don't have to see them here in their cities. What conservatives seem incapable of understanding is that those immigrants welfare directly effects their desire to come here and if we worked together to help their country prosper it also helps our own. The stick has been shown to be ineffective and inhumane, it's time to give it up and work together on immigration reform and supporting Mexico in its attempt to emulate American prosperity.