MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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can investment in Mexico—postpones an evolution in Mexican
society that could finally force a rapacious aristocracy to the table
for needed concessions.

Reform and transparency in Mexico are stalled—understand-

ably, since every day’s delay means more flight by the oppressed, not
progress for the beleaguered who remain behind. One can imagine
the state of politics in America should the nation’s unemployed,
uninsured and insecure decide to walk across the border to Canada
by the millions each year: our reactionaries would have little to
fear from the less affluent who stay, and our reformers would have
little constituency. (Liberal Canadians, who now preen about their
generally open immigration policies, would quickly fortify their
border if thousands of starving and illiterate Americans began to
pour into Toronto or Montreal every month to receive Canadian
entitlements.)

To restructure the economy of Mexico, democratize the

political system and legalize the courts would be to empower the
Indians of the rural and mountainous hinterland, and thereby keep
millions of them home as a vocal force for further change, rather
than push millions and their problems northward. “Safety valve” is
an inadequate term to indicate how useful a mass outflow of the
poorest is for the Mexican status quo. This, after all, is a society
sitting on a demographic time bomb of almost 100 million with a
population growth rate of 2 percent per annum—and no feasible
way of providing jobs, health care, social justice or personal safety
to a nation half of which will soon be under the age of twenty-five.
Without the promised land to the north, there might well loom
either political revolution or African-style famine and plague.

The Mexican government’s rationale—can we not detect its

pernicious legacy also here in California?—is that the Yanquis and
gringos once invaded the country, stole the land and rigged the
border to harm permanently the Mexican people, who, through no
fault of their own, are now crowded into too little space and find
themselves oppressed by el Norte and the evil Anglos. The legacy