MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

9

ter of everyone’s concern right now, both in and out of California.
In a nation beset with new enemies who wish to destroy us, do
we have common values and ideas that unite more than divide us?
If our fundamentalist adversaries see us Americans of all colors,
ethnicities and religions, without exception, as infidels deserving
of death simply by virtue of being Americans, do we likewise see
ourselves as a united people?

Is America, as our medieval foes assert, a single culture? Or

are we, as many of our sophisticated, homegrown social critics
allege, many cultures of many races? If snipers, suicide bombers
and poisoners wish to kill indiscriminately black, brown, yellow
and white Americans because they are alike, why do many profes-
sors, journalists and politicians claim that we are, and should be,
different and separate? And in a world of sectarian killing—in
Bosnia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, India—is it wisdom or folly to
emphasize our differences over our similarities, to champion sepa-
ratism as preferable to assimilation, and toy with the principle that
the law matters only according to the ephemeral circumstances and
particular interests involved?

Our immigration dilemma is a simple but apparently unsolv-

able calculus: Americans want the work they won’t do to be done
cheaply by foreigners who, they wrongly assume, will inevitably
transform themselves into Americans. In turn, the downtrodden
Mexicans who come here and their elite advocates in America
romanticize Mexico, a nation that brought them the misery they
fled, while too often deprecating the place that alone gave them
sanctuary. Everyone sees this—at least in the abstract—and can
probably agree on the appropriate remedy: far less illegal immigra-
tion and a more measured policy of legal immigration, along with
a stronger mandate for assimilation. But caught in a paralysis of
timidity and dishonesty, we still cannot enact the necessary plans
for a workable solution. To do so, after all, entails confronting
a truth that is painful and might displease thousands who have
grown comfortable with the present chaos. Who wants to be called