Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (3 page)

Instead, in recent years they and their offspring have ended up in ethnic enclaves of the mind and barrios of the flesh. In these locations they often soon become dependent on subsidies - and too many of their children will join an underclass to be led by ethnic shepherds who often do more harm than good, however much they wish to help.

Since roughly 1970, the evolving concept of multicultural-ism - which holds that Western civilization merits no special consideration inasmuch as all cultures are of equal merit - has proved to be the force-multiplier of illegal immigration from Mexico. It turns a stubborn problem of assimilation into a social tragedy stretching across generations. Almost every well-intended and enlightened gesture designed to help immigrants in the last three decades - de facto open borders, bilingual education, new state welfare programs, the affirmation of a hyphenated identity, a sweeping revisionism in southwestern American history - has either failed to ensure economic parity or thwarted the processes of assimilation. Almost everything stern and uncompromising that for two centuries has helped other immigrants to the United States - language immersion, autonomy from government assistance, rapid assumption of an American identity, and eager acceptance of mainstream American culture - has either been discounted as passé or embraced only halfheartedly.

The backward-looking new ideology about Mexican immigration is obsessed with the racial prejudice and economic exploitation of the past - a wound repeatedly scrutinized by comfortable elites, but clearly not much of a hindrance to the millions of impoverished Mexicans and Indians who still risk their lives daily to reach the promised land of America, apparently glad to escape the wretchedness of their native land.

When ethnic chauvinism is preached by our elites (who often do not really practice it themselves), it creates situations with real consequences. Brothers with Mexican surnames get scholarships, while their half-siblings with equivalent records but non-Latino names do not. Friends of four decades suddenly drift apart because one is made to feel that his commitment to assimilation is somehow retrograde or proof of false consciousness. Our sense of history, both national and familial, is stolen from us - a longsuffering grandmother born in 1890 who worked hard is no longer remembered as a unique individual, but is categorized along with millions of anonymous others as simply an agent of past oppression.

Most Califormans of all backgrounds understand these growing social and cultural costs that ultimately originate from their dependence on seemingly limitless cheap labor - the Devil's bargain we have made to avoid cutting our own lawns, watching our own kids, picking our peaches, laying our tile and cleaning our toilets. But despite the benefits that flow from the bargain, they are still ill at ease for having made it, although, because of fears that they will be disparaged as illiberal, they seldom voice openly what they feel. This situation led to successful ballot initiatives that cut off aid to illegals, ended affirmative action and curtailed bilingual education. And in the depressing circularity of the immigration dilemma, these referenda made sure that the subject was even more repressed - the third rail of
California
politics. It is often a war between street protest and simmering anger in the voting booth. Mexicans march to demand that Fresno's century-old and historic

Kings Canyon Avenue

- with a direct view of the majestic peaks - instantaneously become "

Caesar Chavez Avenue

." In response, furious Anglo voters make anonymous calls to talk shows and promise revenge in November. The Mexican-American caucus in the legislature demands that state universities, by fiat, graduate Hispanics at rates commensurate with the surrounding community's racial makeup - even as the electorate usually turns out in droves when such hot-button issues can be addressed behind a curtain with a faceless voting stylus.

Even timorous attempts to initiate an honest public discussion of the issue can earn one the cheap slander of "racist." Given the demagoguery of our elected state representatives and the general hostility to frank talk, it's no wonder that ballot propositions, led by unelected partisans and enacted through popular vote, are the preferred mechanism for ventilating the growing discontent. Embittered Califormans decline to challenge the therapeutic bromides offered to Hispanics in their schools and state
agencies
 
-
but then go quietly to the polls to vent their rage by ending what they see as special concessions to those who broke the law in coming here. It is not a very healthy state of affairs to have a voting population of millions thinking privately what they would never express publicly.

Confusion and disagreement abound even within families. I ask my brother whether he knows the true social costs generated by his plum-picking crew; he barks back, "Go to the mall, then, and get me some of those hardworking American teenagers." At our family Christmas dinner, a teenager 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
California
State
University
. 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
Marin
County
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 be impossible to sustain with more than one or two dependent children. In places like Menlo Park, Santa Rosa and Monterey there is an entire generation of childless married couples, thousands of gay households and many affluent professional singles who no longer see child-raising as either their social duty or integral to their own personal happiness.

Yet at the very time the new creed took hold across class lines that small families were economically wise, culturally desirable,
socially
progressive and the only way to ensure a choice few children full opportunity - everything from piano lessons at three years of age to SAT preparation at ten -
California
's population was exploding. It grew mostly from immigration, both legal and not, and involved the slow assimilation of first- and second-generation immigrants who, at least initially, shared few of the liberal assumptions about the necessity or the desirability of reducing family size. One of my liberal friends recently summed up his "dilemma" when he explained to me that he had sired one child to guarantee her the maximum of parental attention and financial support, yet he now was slowly realizing that she would live in a state where millions of her peers got neither much attention nor adequate support - a development as depressing to him as he felt it might someday be dangerous to his daughter.

A far greater moral problem looms a mere decade from now, when the aging white population of the Baby Boomer generation finally - and nearly all at once - reaches retirement. Influential, affluent, informed (and not shy about self-interest or self-promotion), it will demand that Social Security and state retirement programs continue to be funded at promised levels. But these benefits will remain possible only with a complacent majority population of younger Hispanics who have large families and often work for wages lower than what retired whites with no dependents will receive. It will be a strange thing to see the 1960s generation of California elites in their seventies on the golf course or at the coffeehouse, drawing Social Security in aggregate amounts greater than what they contributed, and using that annuity as pocket money to supplement their private retirements and savings - as long as the darker-skinned groundskeepers and waitresses nearby keep working to pay hundreds of dollars per month in deductions that might otherwise have gone to support their six or seven dependents, (The Social Security tax bite is mostly fixed across class lines, not calibrated by income levels to the same degree as the income tax.)

Cringing at the thought of these and similar contradictions, neither Republican nor Democratic leaders officially wish to discuss cross-border traffic honestly. Both are unsure of the volatile public mood on any given day - unsure whether Californians of all races will finally say no mas, or whether those who are part Mexican or married to Mexican-Americans will vent their wrath at the polls or slander them on the evening news. The two parties, for reasons of money and power, ignore the social chaos brought by millions of illegal aliens: capitalists count on profits from plentiful, cheap workers, while activists expect these laborers to become liberal voters. And no wonder: in the 1996 election, over 70 percent of all Hispanic voters opted for the Clinton-Gore ticket.