Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Hanson (books for 7th graders txt) 📗

who doesn't speak Spanish but gets government largess for being half "Hispanic" challenges me: "How do you know I won't experience prejudice later on because I have a Mexican name?" At various times we all contend over whether porous borders are California's hope, its certain bane, or again something in between.

And why should such uncertainty not arise, when even supposedly objective data cannot supplant private anecdote and personal bias? Liberal economists, for example, swear that legal immigrants to America bring in $25 billion in net revenue per annum. Yet more skeptical statisticians employing different models reach the radically different conclusion that aliens cost the United States over $40 billion a year, and that here in California each illegal immigrant will take from the state $50,000 more in services than he will contribute in taxes during his lifetime.

Some studies suggest that the average California household must contribute at least $1,200 each year to subsidize the deficit between what immigrants cost in services and pay in taxes -  almost the price of a year's tuition at the CaliforniaStateUniversity. More frequently, salaried taxpayers hector their legislators about how they are paying in a myriad of insidious ways for the illegality practiced by contractors, farmers and factory owners. No wonder that we are simply confused and awash in a sea of contradiction: statisticians claim that we as a people find prices marked down by less than I percent as a result of illegal alien labor; but when it is proposed that we close or tighten our borders, thousands of employers nevertheless forecast catastrophe and skyrocketing prices. We are told that blanket amnesty and legal status will ensure assimilation and prosperity; but statistics reveal that after twenty years, Mexican immigrants who have obtained lawful papers still have double the welfare rate of American citizens.

Meanwhile, illegal immigration from Mexico just continues on unabated. I think it always will because it unites the power and influence of employers with the rhetoric and threats of the race industry - a potent alliance that exercises its clout well beyond the actual numbers of the state's businessmen, social welfare bureaucrats, Chicano studies professors and La Raza activists. Right and Left, working in an uneasy partnership that trumps traditional political affinities, lobby for open borders to allow millions to come north. The Wall Street Journal and Chicano studies departments often agree on open borders, even as reactionary Pat Buchanan and ultraliberal MarinCounty yuppies conclude that enough is enough.

Unlike the Poles, Germans, Chinese, Greeks, Italians, Jews and Japanese, who usually came en masse and then stopped abruptly, Mexican immigration, at least since 1970, has proven to be a steady surf rather than a single tidal wave. Half of all legal immigrants to the United States come from Mexico. Three million were admitted legally into the country in the decade between 1986 and 1996. But no one has an accurate idea of how many arrived illegally. So sensitive is the issue that Californians cannot obtain reliable data on how many of its more than 10 million Hispanic residents have arrived here from Mexico unlawfully in the last two decades. Is it 2 million, 4 million, 6 million? Whatever the figure, the total number of residents of Mexican heritage has increased tenfold in the last thirty years. But even that figure is problematic because of the invisibility caused by intermarriage, the inability to count illegal alien populations, and the tendency of many Hispanics to list themselves as "white" on surveys rather than check the box that makes them officially a "person of color."

No one believes any longer the government's old insistence on a mere 6 million illegal residents nationwide. The figure may in fact be closer to somewhere between 8 and 12 million. Each year over 1.5 million aliens are apprehended attempting to enter the United States illegally, the vast majority on the southern border of the United States. Perhaps ten times that number are never caught. The U.S. Hispanic population - of which over 70 percent are from Mexico - grew 53 percent during the 1980s, and then between 1990 and 1996 rose another 27 percent. At present rates of birth and immigration, by 2050 there will be 97 million His-panics who will constitute one-quarter of all Americans - and well over half the population of California!

Liberal Californians bristle at the suggestion that Hispanic families are larger than others, claiming that such a statement is racist or irrelevant since the children of assimilated upscale immigrants in time will surely show about the same fertility rates as non-Mexicans. That may be generally correct, yet as long as hundreds of thousands of illegals arrive unchecked every year, the state must continue to deal with a succession of first-generation immigrant families with three to six children at or below the poverty line. Moreover, no advocate in the university promotes family planning as a means of economic self-sufficiency; there is no campaign in Chicano studies departments encouraging immigrant families to have only one or two children so as to ensure financial solvency.

In contrast, most statisticians believe that population growth for non-Hispanics in California is flat or perhaps in decline, due to shrinking family size and emigration to other states. Without the yearly influx of large families by illegal immigration, the state population would reach a relative stasis in about ten or fifteen years. For decades, Californians were shrilly warned by liberals of a coming "population bomb" if they continued to have three and four children per family. Finally, the badgering took effect. Many of the affluent embraced the strange cultural ethic that large families were not only somehow undemocratic, but also took precious resources away from those who more wisely - or less egotistically - chose to limit their own progeny. In addition, the prosperity of the last three decades - unlike the good times of our agrarian past - did not encourage large families. Instead, affluence hooked both suburban parents on full-time employment to maintain an increasingly bountiful, but also tenuous consumer lifestyle, one felt to