Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (4 page)

Yet the actual aggregate Mexican-American vote that the Democrats so eagerly court remains just a fraction of the eligible pool. For example, a few miles away from me in the small upscale town of Hanford, of the 14,173 residents who identified themselves as Latino (34 percent of the town's entire population), only 110 are registered to vote. And we have no idea how many of that 770 actually voted on
election day
last November. The Mexican-American liberal electorate may be a chimera that will never materialize because immigrants assimilate and grow more conservative - or it may be a huge bottled genie that promises unending political power to any who can one day release it.

Illustrating the law of unintended consequences, the present immigration crisis is not quite what any of the stakeholders anticipated. For in addition to some cheap labor, the tax-conscious Right also got thousands of unassimilated others who eventually plugged into the state's nearly bankrupt entitlement industry and filled its newly built prisons. (Almost one-quarter of
California
's inmates are from Mexico, and almost a third of recent drug-trafficking arrests involved illegal aliens.) In contrast, the pro-labor

Left, salivating over a larger bloc vote, slowly discovered that the wages of its own impoverished domestic constituencies were eroded by less expensive and more industrious alien workers (50 percent of real wage labor losses was recently attributed by the Labor Department to the influx of cheap immigrant labor) - and that puts a strain on the coalition that the Left wants to build.

It is hard for progressive unions to be eager for imported labor from Mexico when millions of second-generation Mexican-American and African-American laborers are making not much above the minimum wage. Indeed, one of the unforeseen results of the infamous "Operation Wetback" that sought to deport illegal immigrants during the 1950s was a rapid increase in wage labor for legal farm workers throughout the Southwest. Conversely, some studies indicate that the presence of plentiful foreign laborers in the 1990s reduced the wages of unskilled workers by 5 percent. So does tough border control unfairly exclude Mexican nationals from the American dream, or does it assure Mexican-American citizens that their labor will be fairly rewarded?

Perplexed liberals of northern
California
are in a special dilemma. Committed to a multicultural agenda that does not "privilege" any particular heritage and in theory favors granting the world's poor nearly unlimited access to America, they nevertheless are also keen environmentalists who adamantly support population control. A San Francisco Bay Area Sierra Club member with one or two children who drives a fuel-efficient Volvo or a small four-wheel-drive Toyota, loves to backpack and fights for the state's shrinking open spaces cannot help but be worried over news that California's population is destined to grow to 50 or 60 million souls in the next twenty years - almost all of that increase the result of either illegal immigration or the large families of first-and second-generation Hispanic newcomers. For example, in the two-year period between the 2000 Census and the end of 2002, California's population growth by 872,000 was almost entirely due to immigration, mostly from Mexico and much of it illegal. To go from trying to stay alive while crossing the border, to enjoying the bounty of Kmart and Burger King, to joining the Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club is a complex task requiring more than a single generation.

What happens when all that assiduous effort to recycle trash, block power-plant construction and try to ban internal combustion engines butts up against the real needs of millions of the desperate who first want the warmth of four walls, a flush toilet and basic appliances? Tearing out vineyards in the Central Valley to build HUD-supported housing tracts ensures such immigrants a decent home. Erecting more freeways accommodates millions more of the second-hand, often severely polluting cars that poor immigrants drive. Building schools, hospitals and clinics meets the rising demands of millions of young Hispanics without birth control or insurance. And all these services are somewhat antithetical to preserving untamed whitewater rivers (which could be dammed to provide water and power for a thirsty, energy-hungry state), green belts (which cause the remaining usable land to become too expensive for affordable new tract houses), and stringent restrictions on dumping, hunting, fishing, camping and use of public lands (which mostly hurt the poor, who rarely are acquainted with complex laws or have easy access to proper public facilities).

Even the libertarians of
California
have their own dilemma. In theory, they advocate open borders - the Chicano dream of sin fronteras - and the idea that capital flow, not centralized government, adjudicates who comes and who goes. In principle, they support the right of a small businessman to choose who works for him - preferably for low pay and with little hassle. But in reality, the free-market and corporate establishment sighs when thousands of
California
residents root for Mexico to beat the United States in the World Cup. A contractor or a farmer going to his favorite restaurant is piqued to witness two dozen men, exhausted from work, stripped to their boxer shorts while their work clothes are in the wash at the laundry next door. And the motel owner who relies on just such immigrants as housekeepers does not like to keep seeing gang shootings on the nightly news, wrecked cars on the roadside, or her taxes going into new prisons. So like their Sierra Club counterparts, the politically independent mogul, the agribusinessman and the small entrepreneur are all rethinking the political orthodoxy that once committed them to open borders. With no consistent ideology, they are sometimes stunningly hypocritical in simultaneously hiring illegal aliens and advocating immigration reform.

Californians of all political shades are now carefully weighing the pros and cons of illegal immigration at current rates - the business establishment most of all. Wages to illegals are often paid in cash, which is a bargain for everyone involved. For instance, at $10 an hour without state, federal and payroll taxes deducted, the worker really earns the equivalent of a gross $13 an hour or more, while the employer saves over 30 percent in payroll contributions and expensive paperwork. Meanwhile, however, such cash payments force other Americans and legal immigrants to pay steeper taxes in part to cover those who pay none. So the farmer cheering over access to solid, dependable, cheap labor is now learning that he pays more than he thinks for illegal aliens in the form of rising taxes as well as a fraying social fabric.

Polls taken even before September II, 2001, showed that over 70 percent of Americans wanted immigration reduced. Nearly 90 percent reported that they would insist on English as the official language of the United States. Recently this conversation has shifted markedly to the right, as topics that only two or three years ago would have resided outside mainstream discussion - sending American troops to the border or summarily deporting illegal residents - have become the stuff of evening news debates.

My once sleepy hometown of Selma,
California
, in the center of the
San Joaquin
Valley
, is again in the middle of all this. The formerly rural community has grown from a few thousand to over twenty thousand in a mere three decades - as a result of immigration from Mexico, mostly illegal. On our streets I have no idea whether the mostly young male illegal aliens I meet are economic refugees or fugitives from crime in Mexico, perhaps serious felons - and no one else does either, because there is no legal record of their existence, and what documents they and our local authorities possess are almost always fraudulent, forged to mask the conditions of their arrival. In the 1950s Mexicans flocked to do agricultural labor in the surrounding orchards and vineyards, usually in manageable numbers and under legal auspices. But since 1970 the community has simply become a good place to find safe refuge from Mexico as well as all sorts of work - construction, hotels and restaurants, fabrication - in the bedroom communities that surround Fresno. Our social problems are hardly white on Mexican, but often Mexican-American on Mexican - or rather, the struggle by second- and third-generation Americans of Mexican ancestry who run our schools, police our streets and manage our city government to cope with thousands of break-ins yearly, vandalism, hit-and-run accidents, drug manufacture and distribution, and public schools and hospitals that are overflowing with clients who speak little English and have little capital, but expect instantaneous American-style service.

Selma
is now somewhere between 60 and 90 percent Hispanic. But then how does the government count those who do not wish to be counted? Even legal immigrants from Mexico rarely become citizens: of all those admitted legally to the United States since 1982, only 20 percent had become citizens by 1997. Some local schools, like my former elementary campus two miles from our farm, are 95 percent first-generation Mexican immigrants. How many are U.S. citizens is either not known or not publicly disclosed.

At the gas station a mile away from our farm, I rarely hear English spoken. Almost every car of immigrants that pulls in displays a Mexican flag decal somewhere. In our local cemetery I try to put flowers on the graves of our dead, even as I tiptoe around pinwheels, streamers, tiny wooden crosses and the litter left from eating and drinking. The graveyard where everyone from my great-great-grandmother to my parents and sister and fifteen other kin are buried is no longer a staid and sometimes grim European-inspired field of memory, but a more raucous picnic ground to commemorate the days of the dead with talking and snacks. Yet as I pass families laughing and chatting, sitting on blankets around the headstones, they hassle me as little as I them. I think that we both silently pray that their children will prove as industrious as they have been. Periodic visits to the final resting place remind me that we are all united in
California
, at least in that we generally will not get out of here alive.

What are we to make of it all - illegal aliens' baffling failures and clear successes, immigration's explicit costs and implicit benefits? I think it best to imagine present-day
California
as a wild frontier, every bit as exciting, dangerous and feral as the Mother Lode gold towns circa 1849. Then prospectors also came for the promise of El Dorado - and likewise in numbers beyond the powers of the law and government to absorb. Just as it was not clear then whether early
California
would sink into chaos or emerge energized by its hardworking new arrivals, so too our own future is again in doubt.

California
, after all, best summarizes the entire paradox of illegal immigration into the United States. It is the most liberal and affluent area of the Southwest, as well as America's largest and most forward-looking state. Our upscale lifestyle is famous for being easy, laid-back and nonjudgmental. In contrast, our newcomers are not the elite or even the middle class from a poorer country, but the most uneducated and destitute of the entire North American subcontinent - usually not those of Spanish heritage, but Indians fleeing discrimination and hatred.

What a potentially explosive mix this experiment has become, not only mingling races, cultures and classes, but also testing very concretely
California
's often abstract commitment to progressive ideas. Standing athwart Californians' path to their envisioned Utopia of pristine redwoods, dot.coms and air-conditioned malls are millions of the
world's
poorest. And the state simply cannot quite figure out whether it has become a promised land based on cheap immigrant labor or a looming nightmare of unassimilated Third-Worldism.

ONE

What Is So Different about Mexican Immigration?

Despite its Statue of Liberty, recitations of Emma Lazarus's poetry, and melting-pot imagery, America has always struggled with issues of immigration - mostly when it was a matter of the poor, dispossessed non-Anglos or non-Protestants coming in by the millions. Boatloads of refugees were denied entrance to the United States during the Holocaust. Starving Irish were compared to lower primates and denied employment; Italians were demeaned as little more than criminals; Poles were dismissed as stupid menials fit only for unskilled labor. As for "Oriental" immigration, there is no need to talk of it, since whole university departments now exist to explore the racism of the "Yellow Peril."

North America
was originally settled largely by northern Europeans - English, Germans, Scandinavians, French and Dutch - who came as farmers and settlers in the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries and set the cultural protocols, so in effect they enjoyed a head start in adaptation, which later arrivals have not had. But even then, there was prejudice from an entrenched Anglo-Saxon elite; my grandfather's Swedish family came en masse to California to help found the town of Kingsburg (near Selma), the idea being that only within a colony of similar "stupid square-heads" could Swedes be left alone to prosper.

The second wave of immigrants - southern Europeans, Asians, Irish and Latinos - encountered an entrenched dominant culture of mostly Anglo- and northern-European Protestants, and suffered accordingly. Entire libraries document the plight of these aggrieved arrivals and their strange century-long metamorphosis from the despised "other" into the accepted majority of "whites" - as their growing incomes slowly washed away their racial and religious differences.

In a narrow sense, the mass arrival of millions of poor Mexicans is not all that different from the great influx of other groups who were poor and not northern European. We see now some of the same evolutionary signs that appeared in the nineteenth century: one to two generations of poverty and frequent degradation, followed by a generation of middle-class Mexican-Americans intermarrying with other groups and moving into traditional suburbs. Between 1995 and 2000, Hispanic income on average grew 27 percent - a rate of growth faster than that of any other minority group - as a virtually new class of assimilated and affluent Mexican-Americans arose. Their culture was now indistinguishable from the majority culture, and thus their ethnicity was quickly redefined as more or less "white," as had happened to Greeks, Italians, Armenians and Punjabis before them.