as well.

In spring 2003, during the editing of the present book, all

the mailboxes on our rural road were vandalized; our shed twenty
yards from the house was broken into and ransacked a few hours
after four Mexican youths stopped to inquire about “buying gas”;
and twenty-four hours later our garage had all the spare furniture
looted in the middle of the night. Roberto, who lives half a mile
away, said he spotted three young Mexicans rifling through his
mailbox, but could not catch them on his tractor as they sped away
with all his just-paid bills. I reminded him that putting his mail in
his own mailbox in rural Selma was like writing a blank check to a
gang-banger.

Worse are the meth labs that seem to spring up through-

out rural California—the nation’s drug capital for do-it-yourself
chemists. Workers in these operations can make thousands of
dollars in a summer. Such potential profits explain why the drug
is ubiquitous on our streets and why aliens who use and sell it are
cramming our prisons. Unlike the heroin or cocaine trade, meth
is particularly attractive to the rural immigrant. It is usually con-
cocted among familiar trees and vines, in a rented barn or shed
miles from town, where the immigration authorities and sheriffs
rarely intrude. It is a natural outdoor activity ancillary to farm
work, likewise conducted in solitude and with the same network
of smugglers and contractors known from the illegal trek into the
United States. On two occasions, tough-looking men have shown
up in my yard inquiring about renting my barn as a future “dormi-
tory” for workers—code for a drug-making lab. If a man is here
illegally and living in a stealthy world to begin with, having come
from a culture where drug dealing and manufacturing are endemic
among the bureaucrats and the police, then the occasional straying
from the vineyard to the lab need not be so radically defined in
Manichean terms of good versus evil. One year of drug chemistry
might earn an illegal alien $40,000 in cash, and give him the much-
sought-after victorious return to Mexico in a way farm wages never

MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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