MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

42

MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

43

apparent freedom to follow Middle Eastern oil price hikes at will.
Feigned concern over its poor abroad in the United States also
provides the bureaucrats in Mexico City with some camouflage of
compassion and commiseration in dealing with its skeptical and
neglected underclass at home. I often see the Mexican consular
official in Fresno on television, for example, lecturing Americans
on how inconsiderate they are to Mexicans here illegally. To my
knowledge, not one interviewer has ever asked the official why they
are here and not there. A Mexican government official is rightly
irate when an alien has been roughed up by a California sheriff,
but wrongly silent when dozens of campesinos on the wrong side of
the border are gunned down by the Mexican police.

So there has indeed been complicity on the part of Mexico

in the great migration north. And there has been a shameful and
unforgivable absence of honesty on the part of our own politi-
cal and academic establishment in legitimizing Mexico’s venality.
The Mexican government looks on the exportation of its poorest
Indians as an economic issue: remittances from illegal aliens reach
the billions of dollars and so prop up the Mexican government
and help feed the starving who otherwise would look in vain to a
nonexistent safety net at home.

There is also an element of racism involved—one oddly

ignored in the race-charged debates in contemporary America. For
the most part it is not light-skinned Mexicans of Spanish heri-
tage who are coming to the United States, but rather the poorest
and brownest, largely Indian—and this apparently suits an elite in
Mexico City that does not wish to explain why the whiter people
of Mexico are better off than those who are browner. Indeed, if
one were studiously to watch any of the Spanish-language televi-
sion stations—whether owned and operated by Mexican nationals
or by Mexican-Americans—one would surmise that surely the Ku
Klux Klan had a hand in the programming. Most are either white
or coated with white pancake makeup; nearly every prominent
woman is a dyed blonde; every privileged host and hostess is about
as Anglo-looking as can be. Yet all the characters who are subser-