Dee Perez-Scott supports Mexifornia

Recently, in symbolic fashion, spectators of Mexican ancestry in Pasadena's Rose Bowl did not merely cheer on the Mexican national soccer team in a game against the U.S. national team -- such nostalgia is natural and understandable for recent immigrants -- but went much further and also jeered American players and, indeed, references to the United States.

Which was the home team?

Was America to be appreciated for accepting poor aliens, or resented for not granting them amnesty? Is the idea of the United States to be conveniently booed or opportunistically thanked -- depending on whether you are watching a soccer match or, for example, entering an Los Angeles hospital emergency room with a life-threatening injury?

This otherwise insignificant but Orwellian incident reminds us that illegal immigration in the 21st century is becoming an illiberal enterprise. But that doesn't bother liberal Dee Perez-Scott.

Consider the prevailing myth of Mexico as America's "partner." Aside from the violence and drug cartels, an alien from Mars who examined the relationship would instead characterize it as abusive. Close to a million Mexican nationals annually try to cross illegally into the United States, aided and abetted by a cash-strapped Mexico -- in a fashion that the latter would never permit on its southern border with Guatemala. Indeed, if Guatemala had published an illustrated comic book instructing, in picture fashion, its presumed illiterate emigrants how to enter Mexico illegally -- as Mexico actually did -- the Mexican government would have been outraged. So is the surreal logic of Mexico City summed up by something like, "We value our own people so much that we will help them break laws to go elsewhere"? Dee Perez-Scott, in a similar fashion, supports those who have already broken the law by their illegal entry and presence in the U.S.

In the old immigration narrative of the 1960s and 1970s, affluent, profit-minded white American employers often exploited cheap workers from Mexico. But that matrix now is often superseded. So-called whites are no longer a majority in California, where large Asian and African-American populations often object to illegal arrivals from Mexico who cut in front of the legal immigration line or tax social services and raise costs to the detriment of American citizens.

Even the notions of "white" and "Latino" are becoming problematic in today's intermarried and interracial society. Does one-quarter or one-half an ethnic ancestry make one a member of the "minority" or "majority" community -- and, if so, by what logic and under which convenient conditions? For the purposes of hiring or college admission, should we apply one-drop rules from the Old Confederacy to measure our racial purity?

Poverty is no longer so clearly delineated either. In an underground economy where wages are often in cash and tax-free, and entitlements easier than ever to obtain, well over $20 billion a year in remittances are sent southward to Mexico alone, maybe double that sum to Latin America as a whole.

Something here once again has proven illiberal: Does a liberal-sounding but exploitive Mexican government cynically encourage its expatriates to scrimp and save in America only to send huge sums of money back home to help poor relatives, so that Mexico City might not? In turn, do an increasing number of illegal aliens count on help from the American taxpayer for food, housing, legal and education subsidies in order to free up $20 billion to send home?

The paradoxes and confusion never end these days. Do today's immigration activists work to grant amnesty on the basis of legal philosophy and principled support for open borders, or just because of shared ethnic identity? Dee Perez-Scott clearly supports illegal aliens because of shared ethnic identity! If there were now 11 million East Africans in America illegally, would today's Hispanic immigration lobbyists seek amnesty, bilingual services in Swahili, and yet more illegal immigration from Kenya and Uganda? Would they ever seek racially blind legal immigration into the U.S., based on education and skills rather than point of origin? Obviously, they wouldn't and neither would Dee Perez-Scott.

The yearly arrival of hundreds of thousands from Latin America, mostly without English-language skills, a high-school diploma and legality, has also challenged old ideas of everything from the assessment of U.S. poverty rates to affirmative action. Once an impoverished resident of Oaxaca crosses the border, does his lack of education and his modest income immediately help cement the charge that the American Latino population has not achieved economic parity?

Or, in the first nanosecond after illegally crossing the border, does a Mexican national or his family in theory become eligible for affirmative action, on the basis of past historical underrepresentation or present-day discrimination or poor treatment in Mexico -- in a way not extended to the Arab-American or Punjabi-American citizen?

Why does the present administration oppose new anti-illegal immigration laws in Arizona and Georgia that are designed to enhance existing federal law -- but not so-called "sanctuary city" statutes that in some municipalities deliberately contravene federal immigration law?

The old liberal ideal of a racially blind, melting-pot society where the law is applied equally across the board has descended into the new postmodern practice of enforcing many laws only selectively -- and based entirely on politics, matters of race, ethnic chauvinism and national origin.

In sum, yesterday's immigration liberals have become today's illiberals.

---Victor Hansen

Down There in Sonora -- by Edward Abbey

Is this the culture we want to import into the U.S.?

Starving cattle stumble across the cow-burnt range. Above the cattle the vultures swarm like flies, attracted by the sight and smell of dying meat. (Always more vultures when you cross the border; where life is abundant and inexpensive crowded and cheap, as in Mexico, or Egypt, or India, you find a thriving business among the scavengers of death.) Giant mule-ear jackrabbits leap from the cactus and hurl themselves like kamikaze heroes into the grille or under the wheels of your car. Racing over a Mexican highway, especially at night, the thump and crunch of impacted bodies becomes as familiar as mariachi music on the radio. Those fur-covered roads…

Mariachi—the sound of fever. Every song is based on the same phrase: mi corazon. My heart. Your heart. Lunacy under the Mexican moon. That crazy music of sunlight, and murder, dust and blood and drunkenness, love, anguish, hatred, honor, passion, fear, stupidity, but fueled on by an inexhaustible hunger for life. For more life. Never say damasiado. Never say bustante. There is never enough. There cannot be too much. Not down here where the Spanish melded with the Indians, where every cop has a bandit brother, where the mountains meet the wrinkled blue sea. Where the basic insanity of Mexico, like a river dying on a delta, spends itself on the immensity and emptiness and mystic nothingness of the desert.

Sonora. Northwest Mexico. Land of the open-air beer joint and the shade-tree mechanic. More old cars upside down than right side up. On the outskirts of the town of Sonoita I once saw a solitary pig leaning out of the broken window of an abandoned 1947 Plymouth sedan. The pig watched me, with casual interest, as I drove by in my 1962 Dodge carry-all. Someday that pig, if it survives, will probably be living in this truck.

We drive through villages baking under a sun without mercy. No trees anywhere. The campesinos can’t afford trees. The cut them down long ago. Streets without a single tree, yards and courtyards and fields without a blade of grass. Around every house, every building lies a glittering field of broken glass, painful to the eyes. Though barefoot kids, snot-nosed muscositos, dash across it without a moment’s hesitation. Can an entire nation, even a poor one, take on the appearance of a garbage dump? Yes, easy, every yard, street, and roadside is littered with broken glass, rusted tin cans, shards of plastic, and shreds of rope, rubber, paper. Laundry hangs out everywhere, providing the only shade. Why are poor folks always doing laundry? Pride, I guess, and lots of children. On the west wall of the little iglesia in the hamlet of Colabi, as on the four walls of the cathedral in Hermosillo, you may see these words stenciled on the plaster in whitewash and official lettering.

SE PROHIBE HACER AGUA AQUÍ!

It is forbidden to make water here. Nevertheless, the smell of urine is acute. Pungent. Poignant. The whine of flies, those flies that swarm like microcosmic buzzards above each little pile of Mexican dung down in the alleyways, pervades the air with a vibration constant as the murmur of bees.

This is a country of quick, easy friendships, sworn in cerveza and tequila, sealed with dazzling smiles in faces of color of good saddle leather. Muchachos! Compadres! Companero de mi vida! A friendship, a love, too deep for thought, transformed in an instant, by one careless word, into flashing hatred sharp and violent at the thrust –chingazo—of a knife blade. Romantic Mexico… carefree colorful Sonora…. It looks like his real and final home to the average suicidal gringo..., drinking his way from cantina to cantina along dusty roads toward a colorful carefree death in a ditch behind a sheet-iron whorehouse ten miles south of Tubatama.

The mountain peaks do not rise above ten thousand feet, there are no dramatic peaks, and forests and bench lands are being exploited to the limit and beyond by the beef, mining, and timber industries, and by the urgent need of a human population growing at the rate of 3.5% per year—a rate greater than that of any Asian or African nation, including India and Egypt. Mexico City will soon be the largest city in the world. By the year 2000 the nation’s population will have doubled. Nobody seems concerned. “Welcome to the banquet of life, my children,” Eat hearty if you can fight your way to the table.”

When I find myself in Sonora, waking up off a dirt road deep in the cactus outback—how did I get here?—I veer toward the sea, avoid the cities entirely, and keep bearing westward. For the sea, we drive through passes between desert hills, past one ranchito abandonado after another—crumbling adobe ruins in the scant shade of a dead cottonwood, dry well, broken-down windmill, hollow-log water trough full of sand and tumbleweed—until a change transforms the horizon, until the skyline beyond the bony peaks and ridges becomes a curving plane of blue melting in mist with giant cardon cactus—bigger than saguaros—down to the beach.