MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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of autocracy, a corrupt legal system, tribalism, statism, endemic
racism, poor education, an absence of family planning, the lack
of religious diversity and a nationalism of bad faith are rarely
mentioned in Mexicans’ inventory of the causes for the massive
pell-mell flight of its citizens northward.

No wonder the Mexican government so often slanders us,

alleging unprovoked hostility in our rather pathetic attempts to
plug the border with wire, steel and concrete as well as overworked
and much-maligned border guards. Some pundits in Mexico City
like to compare our feckless efforts at keeping Mexicans out to
the 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 Pal-
estinians, 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 stag-
gering 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 relation-
ship with the United States, which involves billion-dollar loan
guarantees and the creation of free-trade leagues—along with the