Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson Read Free Book Online Page B

Berlin Wall and other old communist partitions designed to keep citizens in. Yet walls historically bring a painful honesty to problems. They brutally define the nature and the direction of human traffic. Communist fortifications were an admission that people wanted out. A fenced Hong Kong, on the other hand, was proof that nobody was dying to reach Peking. The wall currently proposed by the Israelis is anathema rather than a godsend to Palestinians, who, it turns out, want the freedom to enter hated Israel for work, commerce and profit - and perhaps even to secure safe transit to Brooklyn - rather than cross into a kindred Lebanon or Jordan. Closer to home, our border barricades are a painful reminder that no American wants out, but millions of Mexicans most assuredly want in to the United States - a stark truth that cuts through almost all the nonsense about immigration and race that emanates from both sides of the border.
    Other advantages surely accrue to the Mexican status quo from its leaders' deliberate export of their own citizenry in staggering numbers. Most obviously, billions of much-needed foreign dollars are sent back into Mexico from its quasi citizens up north, legal and otherwise. An enormous expatriate community in America (Los Angeles is one of the largest urban concentrations of Mexicans in the world) gives Mexico leverage in its relationship with the United States, which involves billion-dollar loan guarantees and the creation of free-trade leagues - along with the apparent freedom to follow Middle Eastern oil price hikes at will. Feigned concern over its poor abroad in the United States also provides the bureaucrats in Mexico City with some camouflage of compassion and commiseration in dealing with its skeptical and neglected underclass at home. I often see the Mexican consular official in Fresno on television, for example, lecturing Americans on how inconsiderate they are to Mexicans here illegally. To my knowledge, not one interviewer has ever asked the official why they are here and not there. A Mexican government official is rightly irate when an alien has been roughed up by a
California
sheriff, but wrongly silent when dozens of campesinos on the wrong side of the border are gunned down by the Mexican police.
    So there has indeed been complicity on the part of Mexico in the great migration north. And there has been a shameful and unforgivable absence of honesty on the part of our own political and academic establishment in legitimizing Mexico's venality. The Mexican government looks on the exportation of its poorest Indians as an economic issue: remittances from illegal aliens reach the billions of dollars and so prop up the Mexican government and help feed the starving who otherwise would look in vain to a nonexistent safety net at home.
    There is also an element of racism involved - one oddly ignored in the race-charged debates in contemporary America. For the most part it is not light-skinned Mexicans of Spanish heritage who are coming to the United States, but rather the poorest and brownest, largely Indian - and this apparently suits an elite in Mexico City that does not wish to explain why the whiter people of Mexico are better off than those who are browner. Indeed, if one were studiously to watch any of the Spanish-language television stations - whether owned and operated by Mexican nationals or by Mexican-Americans - one would surmise that surely the Ku Klux Klan had a hand in the programming. Most are either white or coated with white pancake makeup; nearly every prominent woman is a dyed blonde; every privileged host and hostess is about as Anglo-looking as can be. Yet all the characters who are subservient - taxi drivers, maids, gardeners, "the help" - resemble the hundreds of thousands of darker-skinned people who risk their lives to enter the United States illegally.
    I have met wealthy elites, academics and journalists from Mexico City who privately laugh that they are exporting their