Mexifornia – A State of Becoming, A Book Report

Victor Hansen’s book on this subject is one we should all pay attention to as a harbinger for our country’s future. Hanson is in a unique position to provide an authoritative opinion on this subject because he went to school with mostly children of Mexican descent, many perhaps with parents who were illegal aliens. Part of his credentials for writing on this subject comes from his intimate contact with Mexicans and Mexican Americans throughout his life. Another part comes from his academic work teaching and observing Mexicans and Mexican Americans at the college level. He also points out that his two daughters are dating Mexican-Americans. A revealing quote from his book is, “The people who jumped me as an eight-year-old from the blind side were often Mexican. Those who threatened to knife me at fourteen for no reason other than because I was white were Mexican. The three youths who tried to break into my home and assault my family when I was forty were all Mexicans. But then so were all the friends who helped me fight back in grade school; who have lived on our farm for forty years; and who as sheriffs and police come out to protect us today when there is a problem.”

Hansen makes little distinction between Mexicans and Mexican Americans because there is no way to do so and because they are part of the same community, sharing a common cultural heritage. Some folks take umbrage at the lumping together of Mexican nationals and U.S. citizens of Mexican extraction. And indeed many of the latter are indistinguishable in behavior from other mainstream Americans. Others, of course, have not made that transition and, if Hansen is correct, may never do so.

Hansen makes no attempt to make his book a scholarly thesis with extensive footnotes, bibliography and other documentation. In some sense, his work relies on his first hand experience in the context of today’s California and its burgeoning population of Mexican illegal aliens, their children, as well some of the older generations who may be somewhat ambivalent about the whole situation. He neither believes that California must become a de facto colony of Mexico nor that the future course of events in California is inevitable. Instead, his main argument is that the future of the state and the nation, as regards the immigration conundrum, is in the hands of its current residents. Hansen believes that both the business community and the “…academic elite whose capital remains largely separatist identities and self-interest have escaped accountability for the harm they have already done.” In the end, Hansen is hopeful that our traditions of assimilation, integration and intermarriage may yet remedy a predicament that politicians and ideologues have allowed to get out of hand. This will not be easy. We will have to do almost everything right from this point on to succeed and to preserve the America that has served us so well for more than 200 years through all forms of internal strife and international wars.

Foreign Governments & Illegal Aliens

The quarrel about immigration has always been with the irresponsible governments, of both legal immigrants and illegal aliens, that are not doing enough to improve conditions in their own countries so that their people will want to remain in their homelands. We can demonstrate friendship with the foreign-born if they make some effort to understand and comply with our immigration laws and larger concerns about illegal aliens and unfettered population growth.

Hopefully, we will have an opportunity to prove our friendship in our daily attitude and actions toward those among the millions of men and women of foreign-birth and legal entry, who live among us and share our life, and we shall be proud to prove that to all who are in fact loyal to: this country, their fellow citizens, and this government in this period when our loyalties are being tested. They are, most of them, as true and loyal Americans as if they have never known any other allegiance. We expect they will be prompt to stand with us in rebuking and restraining those who may be of a different mind and purpose. If there should be disloyalty, it must be dealt with a firm hand; but if it lifts its ugly head, we all hope that it will be lifted only here and there, not in any organized way or in any organization with racist or separatist agendas or tendencies to illustrate in stark detail their disloyalty and perfidy.

---paraphrased, modified and supplemented from a speech by Prsident Woodrow Wilson

Deeply Divided America -- De-ja Vu

In 1918, our country was deeply divided along ethnic lines because of the large population of German-Americans and German immigrants at a time when we were engaged in a war with their relatives in the Fatherland. Once again we find ourselves in an America that is deeply divided, often along ethnic lines, due to massive legal immigration in excess of a million annually and illegal aliens who flood across the borders in numbers ranging up to 600,000 per year. The latter number has resulted in as many as 12 - 20 million illegals currently present in the United States.

In 1918, President Wilson campaigned on a platform that was sympathetic to those who viewed the number of immigrants flowing into the country as dangerous. He often lectured Americans about old-country allegiances. This a natural phenomenon given the number of German -Americans and our involvement in a war with Germany. Racial profiling and persecution was not uncommon and most German-Americans and immigrants went out of their way to demonstrate their loyalty and patriotism. Incredibly, Governor William Harding of Iowa issued what was known as the Babel Proclamation, which banned the use of any language but English in any public gathering of two or more people. The ban even covered telephone conversations, as several grandmothers discovered when they were jailed for speaking German on the phone. A Swedish minister also ran afoul of the law for conducting a funeral for two soldiers in Swedish so that the fallen men's grandmothers could understand.

The current concern about the English language has never included such Draconian measures. The proposal has always been limited to the concept of Official English. This merely means all activity and publications at all levels of government should be conducted or printed only in English. It would have no effect on foreign language instruction or on languages used in any public or private gatherings. One would hope, of course, that as a matter of common courtesy, that most public gatherings and public conversation would be conducted in English so that all could feel included. Obviously, there will be some, mostly private, meetings where the mother tongue could be spoken without fear of interference from language police or other restrictions. Some proposals provide for billable interpreter services at emergency locations such as fire departments, police stations, and hospitals. At the same time, public interpreters would be offered free of charge to those who could not afford one.

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the emphasis on English and the resistance to the encroachment of foreign languages is not a new phenomenon. The concern about Germans in our midst has long since disappeared. They are no longer thought of as hyphenated Americans and the use of the German language is now just a footnote to history as is the persecution of Germans that occurred during two wars and the similar treatment meted out to Japanese internees.

Mexican Hypocrisy

The publisher of the Eastern Arizona Courier was moved enough about the immigration debate to write his own op/ed in the pages of his newspaper. The piece, titled "Mexico's hypocrisy cause of growing hostility", makes the following case:

Mexican bureaucrats criticize our efforts to restrict issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants with no proof of citizenship, so why does Mexico require an American to have a valid visa in order to get a Mexican driver’s license? In Mexico you cannot receive free social services and an education unless you are a Mexican citizen. Why does Mexico feel illegals should get these benefits free in the United States?

Illegal immigrants caught on Mexico’s southern border are often beaten, robbed and thrown in hellhole prisons. Why is Mexico concerned with how illegals are treated in our country?

Mexico claims to be working to stem the flow of illegals into our country, but it issues maps showing them how to enter the United States illegally. Mexican air carriers are doing a booming business booking flight to get illegals near our border, and police officials ignore all the smugglers and businesses that have sprung up along the border that exist solely to help illegals sneak into our country.

Public Opinion in Action

A piece on the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research website by Michael Barone, a fellow at AEI, says that Bush and the Democrats are "out of line with public opinion" on immigration issues.

A key excerpt:

The reason is that the Democrats--and Bush--are out of line with public opinion on the issue. That became clear as the Senate debated a comprehensive immigration bill in May and June. Most Republicans and many Democrats, in the Senate and among the public, turned against the bill. Supporters of the bill tended to ascribe that to something like racism: they just do not like having so many Mexicans around.

But if you listened to the opponents, you heard something else. They want the current law to be enforced. It bothers them that we have something like twelve million illegal immigrants in our country. It bothers them that most of the southern border is unfenced and unpatrolled. It bothers them that illegal immigrants routinely use forged documents to get jobs--or are given jobs with no documents at all.

You do not have to be a racist to be bothered by such things. You just have to be a citizen who thinks that massive failure to enforce the law is corrosive to society.

Quoted from Daniella Perdomo's post on MATT

Obama's Mask

"Barack Obama's rise in the top tier of the Democrat presidential race has been fueled by the voter's belief that he is a candid, forthright politician. 'Hard truths could be the slogan for the restarted Obama campaign,' says the current New Yorker magazine, in a laudatory article. In The Washington Post's poll last week of Iowa caucus voters, Obama's biggest lead came when voters were rating candidates as honest and trustworthy.

And now comes Shelby Steele, the Hoover Institution scholar, with an essay arguing that Obama's public stance is essentially synthetic. In 'A Bound Man,' Steele makes the case that Obama has adopted a mask familiar to many other African-Americans, designed to appease white America's fear of being thought racist by offering them the opportunity to embrace a nonthreatening Black.

Steele writes that 'the Sixties stigmatized white Americans with the racial sins of the past -- with the bigotry and hypocrisy that countenanced slavery, segregation and white supremacy. Now, to win back moral authority, whites -- especially American institutions -- must prove the negative: that they are not racist. In other words, white America has become a keen market for racial innocence.'

Steele likens Obama's success to the fame and fortune won by Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. But Obama is the first to carry the 'masking' technique of the 'Iconic Negro' into the realm of politics."

David Broder, The Washington Post.

Obama vs. Hillary

"Most of the time, Barack Obama seems like he's boxing in the wrong weight class. But last week in Fort Dodge, Iowa, he delivered an unscripted jab that was a beaut. The Illinois senator was asked about Hillary Clinton's attack on his qualifications. Making an economic speech in Knoxville, Iowa, earlier that day, the New York senator has touted her own know-how, saying that 'there is one job we can't afford on-the job-training for -- that's the job of our next president.' Her aides confirmed that she had been referring to Obama.

Pressed to respond, Obama offered a zinger feathered with amused disdain: 'My understanding was that she wasn't Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, so I don't know exactly what experiences she 's claiming.'

It took him nine months, but he finally found a perfect pitch to make a trenchant point. She was not elected or appointed to a position that needed Senate confirmation. Neither did she show good judgment in her areas of influence -- the legal fiefdom, health care and running oppo-campaigns against Bill's galpals.

Obama's one-liner evoked something that rubs some people the wrong way about Hillary. 'She hasn't accomplished anything on her own since getting admitted to Yale Law,' wrote Joan Di Cola, a Boston Lawyer, in a letter to the Wall Street Journal. All Hillary is, is Mrs. Clinton."

----Maureen Dowd, The New York Times