MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

43

vient—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
Indians and Mestizos, their unwanted, into the United States.
Their smile disappears when I reply that we instead figure what
they suppose to be riffraff are the real cream of Mexican society:
frontiersmen and women whose endurance and courage are good
prerequisites for Americanization, and who in fact are superior
people to those who oppress them at home. So while the pow-
ers in Mexico City regard departure as good politics—a valve of
sorts that releases dangerous pressures rather than allow explosions
of the type that occurred in the country’s earlier checkered his-
tory—in an odd way the joke ultimately is on them. Within twenty
years the poor, brown Indian alien could enjoy a material existence
in America superior to that of the upper-class white Mexican in
Mexico City.

Reverse Chauvinism

There are also other themes that explain the Mexican government’s
peculiar rationale for sending millions of its own citizens out
of the country. Surely an element of pique is involved. Mexico,
whose vast natural resources of fertile land, oil and minerals have
not resulted in the bounty of a similarly endowed California, real-
izes that it is not its land or people, but its culture that holds the
country back. Out of envy or spite, there are many in Mexico
who experience schadenfreude at the problems that arise when the
continent’s poorest and mostly illiterate head north to perplex the
richest and most sophisticated. If America once invaded Mexico
and hurt its pride, Mexico has now invaded America—but with
millions rather than thousands, and as an occupying force that
plans to stay. Anytime great wealth is juxtaposed to abject fail-
ure—the former Berlin, Hong Kong and communist China, the
Koreas, Israel and the West Bank, southern Europe and northern